A good way to monetize your website or blog is using ad programs. These programs are free to join and will place ads on your website. Each time a visitor on your website clicks on one of these ads, you get paid.

I personally prefer to sell ad space on my own, but for those who use AdSense, Kontera, Clicksor, Text-Link-Ads and so on, here are some tips to increase your ad revenue.

1. Improve ad placement

When trying to increase your website’s revenue, a very important step is the placement of your ads. A small change can significantly increase your CTR and thus, your ad revenue. In the image below listing different ad placements, the best ad positions are colored with red, so if you opt for one of those your CTR should be quite high.

2. Write about higher paying topics

If for example you have a website or a blog about insurance, to find out the higher paying ‘insurance’ related keywords, search for ‘insurance’ in Adwords Keyword Tool and click ‘Show Estimated Avg. CPC’.

After looking at the list you will see that ‘home insurance’ costs an advertiser $7.04 CPC while ‘auto insurance’ costs the advertiser $32.76 CPC. If you have the choice of writing a page about ‘auto insurance’ or ‘home insurance’ go with ‘auto insurance’ since those ads pay more than 4x as much as ‘home insurance’ ads.

3. Don’t use more than 2 ad programs at a time

There are 2 big disadvantages if you use many ad programs on the same page.
1. some visitors will click-through the low earning programs when they could have clicked-through a higher earning one
2. each ad program will give you an external javascript file. Just imagine how drastically would 5+ separate javascript files increase the page loading time.

4. Find the programs that work the best for you

There is no guarantee that an ad program that works very good for your friend will work good for you as well. For example there are websites that earn very good with AdSense, but, on the other hand, there are websites that earn way better with Text-Link-Ads or Kontera.

You should test multiple programs to see which work better for you, but test them one or two per page. Test them for about a week or two, compare the results and stick with the best ones.

5. Target good traffic sources

Another important factor is your traffic source. The best type of traffic in terms of conversion is by far the search engine traffic.

For example, if a visitor arrives at your site after searching on Google for ‘Ways to Make Money’ and he/she sees an ad for ‘Make Money Online’ that person is quite likely to click it, but if your visitor arrived from StumbleUpon, MySpace or Facebook and sees the ad for ‘Make Money Online’ he/she will most likely ignore it. So, this is just another reason to focus on SEO.