Could You Use Contextual Advertising For Your Blog?

By Mika Tal

Blogging is a great way to get you noticed online, but there is often a conflict of opinion as to whether blogs should be monetized or not. On the one hand people reckon that blogs are supposed to represent a personal point of view about something rather than a commercial one, and on the other it could be said that blogging can be hard work and you shouldn't be expected to do it for nothing.

Of course there is no right or wrong answer, but if you do happen to agree that blogs can and should be monetized then contextual ads are definitely a good way to go. Why? Because they will appeal to your visitors in a way that more general ads wouldn't. Online contextual advertising is certainly picking up pace as more and more people realize you can get good results from it, but not everyone thinks about putting it to good use on their blog.

But contextual advertising doesn't need to be in your face like many other forms of internet advertising are. It can be altogether more subtle than that - and as such this more understated approach can suit blogs rather nicely.

A good example of this kind of contextual advertising is the In-Text Advertising model. This doesn't provide you with ad blocks to position on your website; instead it focuses on the content of your site, and looks for keywords that are relevant to the topic your site concentrates on. From there it finds you some ads that will link in nicely with those keywords and inserts them in your site by very simply underlining the keywords and leaving it at that.

Now if you were to look at a blog which has this kind of advertising on it, you wouldn't immediately be hit by the amount of ads on the page. It wouldn't detract from the overall viewing experience. Instead, you would start reading the content. As you come across one of those underlined keywords, you might well hover over it with the intention of clicking on it to see if it's a link.

It is a link, but it's not one you need to click on. Contextual advertising via In-Text ads means you will see a pop up window containing an ad related to that keyword. It's neat, it's attractive and the user decides whether or not they want to see it.

As such it is one of the best forms of advertising you can use on your blog. It's always worth experimenting of course, but on the whole this gives you the best of both worlds - a monetized blog that doesn't flash adverts at people on every page.

Kontera is an In-Text ad network that offers contextual advertising to publishers across the web. Kontera's advanced contextual ad technology guarantees the highest degree of relevancy between content, keywords and ads.

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