Gaining Page Views By Advertising
This is a blog about blogging and intended especially for bloggers who are already into promoting their craft. This blog will explain all about blog promotion, but if more information is needed, then you can view that, too. Unlike the typical blogs on the subject of blogging, I will not be talking here about how to make money online by blogging nor about search engine optimization that sends web searchers to one’s blog. Rather than those, I will discuss my personal experience on using the popular blog advertising outfits to gain site visits and its effect on my traffic statistics.
When I started blogging in January 2009, I had topics about the i-café business and hoped to have the always online i-café owners among my readers. I should say that I was a bit successful in having them visit my blog because most of the comments that I got then were posted by them. As someone new in the field of blogging, I was getting fair enough visits by my target audience but I want more and my next logical target readers are my co-bloggers who are also online most of the time like the i-café owners.
In order to reach my co-bloggers, I joined their communities at Entrecard, Adgitize and CMF Ads which were and up to now the top three (3) blog advertising outfits in blogosphere. All three offer incentives to members for clicking the widgets of advertised blogs in their respective network. The incentives range from getting free clicks from an ad published at a member’s blog and a few dollars per month for real active ones hopping on the networks daily.
In the beginning, I was happy with the additional 1,500 to 2,000 page views that my blog gets every month for my being an active publisher and advertiser in the three ad networks. Add a few dollars per month and some comments on my blog posts and you may think that all is well with my being a publisher and advertiser in those ad networks.
However, when I consider the very high bouncing rates (more than 90% of the visits never went beyond an ad’s landing page) that my blog gets from clicks by ad network members and the fact that those clicks are intended to get incentives and not really to read my blog, I am having second thought as to propriety of advertising blogs to gain page views. Also, there is always the risk of getting my Adsense account suspended because doing such advertising is in reality a violation of Google’s policy on the use of traffic exchange programs.
At the moment, I stopped advertising my blog except in one type where the ads receive unique clicks (the visit is recorded in statistic monitors as coming from the publisher site, not from the advertising outfit as all other blog ads do). In my thinking, having such ad feature prevents Google from concluding that the page views emanate from a traffic exchange program. What do you say about this matter?
Adsense shut me down the day I started using entrecard, actually.
Hi Curt,
I also read about similar thing that happened to other blogs. As you can see, my blog still has Adsense but I am already seriously considering cutting down my participation on blog advertising networks.
So, that is why I haven’t seen your Adgitize ad lately. Now, your post got me to seriously think about what to do regarding having Adsense ads in my blog and advertising with Adgitize at the same time. Hmmm…
Yes, I am doing some sort of experimenting on how to avoid having those glaring figures recorded as referral traffic coming from blog ad networks. There is now one kind of ad that shows clicks to be coming from the publisher’s site and this is the only paid ad I am using at the moment. It’s a bit expensive though.