How to Choose Advertising for Your Site, Part 3: Don’t Stray Too Far

By Charlie on July 16th, 2008 | 0

How to Choose Advertising for Your Site

In this third part of our advertising series, we’re going to discuss something that could help you both select great advertisements and make some great cash while you do so.

In fact, if you read between the lines, you’ll see in this post some of the “secrets” on how to become an effective affiliate marketer, consultant, business-builder, etc. Based on this data alone, if you don’t make a million dollars this year, I’ll pay you back every penny you spent on this post. (Disclaimer for lawyers: This post is free. Don’t even try it.)

Guidelines for selecting advertising for your site

3. Don’t go too far off topic

“Going off-topic” is a bit slippery because it can happen via the subject matter OR design of the ads.

In regards to subject matter, it has got to fit the purpose of your site, at least somewhat.

If your site is about fishing, an advertisement for a concrete delivery company is a pointless intrusion. That’s not going to destroy your site as it’ll just go mostly ignored. The problem is that your audience in ignoring the ad will make zero dollars for the advertiser and the ad will be pulled. That’s lost revenue for you.

A site about fishing should have ads for lures, bait or a book of great fishing spots.

Now, design-wise, even an on-topic ad can be disastrous if it just isn’t right visually. If your site is super minimal, with lots of whitespace and a constrained color palette of grays and blues, sticking up a banner with all the colors of the rainbow would be an awful choice. It simply doesn’t fit. It’ll look like a wart and seem odd. Moreover, it’ll LOOK like an advertisement and people don’t click on obvious and annoying advertisements. They click on things that look helpful and useful to them.

That’s about it for Part 3. Part 4 is next, but I highly doubt I’ll get around to writing it. If I make it through all seven parts, it’ll be a miracle. Subscribe now to watch the drama unfold!