Using In-Text Ads to Make Money With Your Blog

For more than a year now, I have used in-text ads on this site to help it earn money. If you aren’t familiar with what these are, lots of sites have them and I’m sure you’ve seen them. They are basically links sprinkled throughout your text that, when hovered over with a mouse, will pop-up a small ad. If you click the ad, you’ll be taken to an advertiser’s page. And if you have a blog you’re using these kinds of ads on, those clicks will lead to money earned.

There are good and bad things about these kinds of ads. After using Infolinks for one year on this site, I made the decision a few weeks ago to remove it permanently. However I am still using it on one of my other sites (for now). I’ll explain why I removed my ads in a bit. But for now, here are the pros and cons of using in-text ads:

Pros

• These ads provide a way for you to monetize your property without clogging up your sidebar or header with busy images.
• There are usually options available for controlling how the ads appear (the color of the links, whether or not you want dotted or double-underlined links, how many links should appear in the text, etc.)
• When you come up with the perfect combination of colors and the number of text ads, they can perform pretty well and you may earn decent money.
• If for some reason you can’t use Adsense on your site due to having your account banned or the kind of content you create, these ads make an excellent alternative.
• In-text ads are also perfectly fine to use along with Adsense and can be a good way to supplement that income.

Cons

• These kinds of ads may seriously annoy your readers. It’s easy to click on these links accidentally, thinking they are for something else. Your readers won’t be happy if they are taken to an advertiser’s page when they did not intend to go there.
• The ads may also confuse your readers. If you do a lot of internal linking to other pages on  your website when you write (as I do), these links combined with the links you manually put in place throughout your text are going to be a bit much. Your readers may not understand immediately which links are yours and which are the ads — especially if you are continually changing the way the ad links look.
• If you are involved in affiliate marketing, the in-text ads could hurt your conversion rates. For example, if you write a post about a product or service you are recommending and you include the affiliate link, a reader may accidentally click on the in-text ad thinking it’s the link that will take them to the page for the product or service you recommend. When it doesn’t, they could get frustrated and just go find something else to read rather than continue to dig through the links in your post, trying to figure out where to go.
• Depending on the company you’re using for in-text ads, you may not have a lot of control over what kinds of ads appear. Blocking a certain advertiser will typically mean that you have to contact the company directly, asking them to remove it.

Why I Removed the In-Text Ads

I stopped using these kinds of ads for several different reasons. For one, the income I was earning from them was declining steadily and I felt that the $30 to $50 a month I was averaging wasn’t worth the inconvenience of the ads to my readers. Also, I’ve built up some of my other income streams so I decided that I really don’t have to rely on these ads for a portion of my income any longer.

Infolinks had a feature I used a lot where I could turn the ads on or off on specific posts. I liked this because there were some posts where I just did not want the ads to appear. But something went wrong and this feature stopped working for me out of nowhere. I did everything I could from removing the script and putting it back in to placing it in different areas of my site, but nothing worked. The tech team at Infolinks did their best to help, but they could not determine why the on/off feature stopped working for me. So no matter what I did, the ads appeared everywhere all the time. This was another deal-breaker for me.

Ultimately, this all led to me feeling that those ads are just no longer a good fit for this website although at one time they were.

Would you like to try in-text ads?

Just because these ads aren’t something I want to use anymore doesn’t mean that you couldn’t benefit from them. Different things work for different sites. If you want to test them out on your property, here are some options:

• Infolinks – This is the one I use and recommend. They are easy to get in with and pay monthly with Paypal, bank transfer, Payoneer, ACH, or via Infolinks prepaid Mastercard. They also have lots of options for tweaking the ads to make them look how you want. $50 minimum payout.
• Kontera – This one has been around for a long time and is a very popular option. $50 minimum payment via Paypal, check, wire transfer, or ACH.
• INTENTclick – This one is newer and is by Kontera.

Do you use in-text ads on your site? What has your experience been?