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Having had our Adsense account removed due to problem while transferring a site to a new owner we have been forced to look at suitable Adsense alternatives.

Monetising is you blog is a challenge but if you can’t use adsense there is a range of option open to you. We have tried a number over the last three years, some for a few months and others for days. We regularly have people contact us with their latest programme some with $250 before they pay out and others with more mortgage ads than there are houses in Ireland. In the last few years the following have come out as our personal top three options. Here is a break down.

Tradedoubler 

Tradedoubler is one of the largest affiliate networks running in the UK. It features, Apple, iTunes, Dabs, Sony, Play and many many more. Tradedoubler offers two options for running ad campaigns. 

1) Ad zones
This option allows you to select a range of ads from different companies, place them in a zone and prioritise each ad. The code can then be copied and pasted into your site (or ad system, more on this later). Tradedoubler offers a range of ad sizes from the standard to custom sizes. As well as graphical ads you can also create deep link text ads and a number of companies offer RSS feed ads. One example of the RSS ad is iTunes who offer their  etc as an RSS feed with your referral link built in.  For more on Tradedoubler Click here.

2)  Admatch
Admatch is Tradedoubler’s new context related ads that work by scanning the text on your page. There are a number of formats from standard text ads, image ads and even product ads. In our experience we have only had one negative with the system when we found an Apple Ad from 2005 in the rotation. That said a single blog post about  resulted in Amy’s banner being displayed each time we looked at the page.  

Bidvertiser 

Bidvertiser is a text ad system (that also offers ebay ads) One of the big positives with Bidvertiser is a very low payout level via Paypal, payout starts at $10 and with some text links fetching $4 per click this is an attractive option. 

Publishers have full control over the format and actual ads that appear on their site. Colours and styles can be easily changed although we would recommend you keep the ad within the same style as your site. Bidvertiser is not a contextual based system so we would recommend you do not auto approve ads and select the text that is going to appear on your site.

Filtering Ads can be time consuming if you don’t do it every couple of days but it is definitely an advantage to have related text ads on your site. We found selecting ads meant we could also remove gambling ads from a number of our blogs as it wasn’t relevant. Find out more at Bidvertiser.

Text Link Ads

We have read about some blogs making large amounts of money with text link ads and I have to say although we have not hit the big time (neither has our blog) we have had quite some success with Text Link Ads. If you run a wordpress blog that TLA has to be the easiest system to set up. Install a wordpress plugin and add the TLA widget to the sidebar and you are good to go.

It can take a few weeks for ads to start appearing but advertisers pay a monthly fee to appear on your site. Publishers can have up to 10 Ads in the widget and the more popular your site the more people will pay to be there.

As well as the text list ad TLA also offers advertisers the ability to advertise in individual posts and even your blog’s RSS feed. If your blog has been running for a few months I would definitely recommend you applying for TLA, I would say it is one of the few ad programmes that people won’t even realise you have ads on your site.  Click here for more information.

Run your own Ads
Running your own ads on site is a great way to monetise your blog. Open source software such as OpenAds makes creating ad zones, text ads very simple. It is then up to you to source your advertiser, consider a pay per click or per 1000 impressions or even per month.

System such as OpenAds allows the weekly reports to be emailed automatically to the advertiser. This is a great way to monetise your blog but it also offers the most work.  

Conclusion
This is by no means a definitive guide and if there are brilliant programmes out there we have missed we would love to hear about your experiences. Obviously the more successful your blog is the more traffic you are going to have and thus logically the more income. Remember blog because you enjoy it. We have come across a few sites who charge for blog posts, we personally don’t like it ! we believe our readers expect and deserve more. 

Let us know how you get on.

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