If you are a small site adding ad units to your pages then the advice we give you is simple: on every page you should add a 728×90 at the very top, a 300×250 on the top right and a 300×600 in the left or right-hand column.
If you’re on a desktop computer, you may notice that is exactly what we have done on The Online Advertising Guide. These are the ad sizes for small sites we recommend because these are the most profitable ad sizes out there. By simply adding these three ad slots to every page you will make the most amount of money for the least amount of effort.
This is to say – expending more effort than this probably won’t make you any more money. It is much more worth your time to work on improving your site than it is increasing the amount of advertising on each page, as that should increase your traffic and thereby increase your ad revenue more in the long run.
And let’s face it, online advertising can be annoying so adding every type of invasive advertising to your site before you make it big will more likely drive away your few users than drive up your advertising revenue.
If you have videos on your site then it may be worth adding video advertising as well – but until you get enough inventory, video ad networks might not take you on. Our advice is, therefore, to make some enquiries if you will, but don’t get overly caught up trying to implement video ads before you are ready.
It’s also worth keeping an eye on your mobile traffic to see if you should add more ads there, as it’s possible that while your desktop site might not be very large, your mobile site gets enough visitors that mobile ad networks are interested.
Again – make an enquiry with an ad network or two to see if they are interested, but don’t spend too much time on it, as even if they are it won’t earn you that much to start with.
The key message is this – there is a limited rate of return for small sites in online advertising, so spend your time adding online ads as efficiently as possible to ensure you won’t regret it later.
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