Chapter 27
Ads Go with the Flow

If you run an affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing pro­gram (ads that gen­er­ate rev­enue for you) in your web­book, ad place­ment is impor­tant. Ad place­ment fol­lows log­ic, except that you will need plen­ty of exper­i­men­ta­tion to sup­port your log­ic. The main guide­lines to keep in mind as you exper­i­ment are rel­e­van­cy and response. The ads you pick need to be rel­e­vant to your con­tent, and they need to yield the high­est pos­si­ble revenue.

Google Ads

Let’s start with Google’s ads (Adsense) with which every­one is famil­iar. You can place them any­where you desire in a web­page. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, they’re not very lucra­tive, and they may not be as rel­e­vant as you would like. Because Google deter­mines the rel­e­van­cy with algo­rithms, the rel­e­van­cy is not always per­fect. Poten­tial­ly irrel­e­vant ads that don’t make sig­nif­i­cant mon­ey is not a win­ning prospect. Yet it may be worth­while run­ning Google ads so long as you don’t give them prime locations.

Affiliate Advertising Ads

Affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing will give you the major por­tion of your adver­tis­ing rev­enue. Accord­ing­ly, you want to take affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing very seri­ous­ly. You will want to exper­i­ment to find the best loca­tions for ads that pro­duce the most rev­enue but at the same time are rel­e­vant to the con­tent in which you place them. There are no algo­rithms here. Your judg­ment deter­mines the relevancy.

A good place to start your edu­ca­tion on ad place­ment is to look at Forbes mag­a­zine online (https://​forbes​.com) or Time mag­a­zine online (https://​time​.com). Both of these mag­a­zine web­sites are clut­tered with adver­tis­ing to the point that they present a hodge­podge of con­tent, ads, and graph­ics. It’s dif­fi­cult to find the con­tent. I con­sid­er these web­sites the ide­al mod­els of exact­ly how you should not do your adver­tis­ing. The only rea­son these web­sites can get away with it is that they are top-rate brand names (main­line mag­a­zines). I believe it’s appro­pri­ate for authors and pub­lish­ers to do some­thing much different.

Banner Ads

You don’t have to clut­ter your web­pages with ads. A few well-placed ads on a web­page can gen­er­ate ongo­ing rev­enue that adds up. The ad place­ment should go with the flow of the text and oth­er web­page components.

Ban­ner ads are sel­dom appro­pri­ate in the text because they dis­rupt the text too much. They’re OK at the begin­ning or the end of the text. Ban­ners that go in side columns with square or ver­ti­cal rec­tan­gle shapes are OK too.

Text-block Ads

Text-block adver­tis­ing (i.e., ads that are pure­ly text in a small text block), how­ev­er, can be placed between para­graphs of text con­tent. You can use one adver­tis­ing block or two or three across the web­page. Three text-block ads are about as much as you can squeeze hor­i­zon­tal­ly into a nor­mal sin­gle-col­umn web­page, less for phone (respon­sive) web­pages. But because it’s text, it fits in.

Icon Ads

You can also use icon adver­tis­ing in the text. Unlike ban­ners, an icon is small and is accom­pa­nied by a min­i­mal cap­tion that tells what the ad is about. One icon between para­graphs works well as do mul­ti­ple icons across the web­page. Don’t over­do it, though, because the more adver­tis­ing you have, the more dis­rup­tive it is.

You should place the ads where they are rel­e­vant. I hope it goes with­out say­ing that the ads need to be rel­e­vant to your top­ic in gen­er­al or they don’t belong in your web­book. For instance, if your web­page dis­cuss­es how to pre­vent home fires, an ad for Coca-Cola is not rel­e­vant. An ad for State Farm home casu­al­ty insur­ance, though, is rel­e­vant and will appeal to a cer­tain per­cent­age of your users who may be in the mar­ket to upgrade their insurance.

Rather than an icon, the graph­ic can be a small or mod­esty-sized image with a caption.

The nice thing about affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing is that you get to choose your adver­tis­ers, and of course, you will only choose the ones that are rel­e­vant to the top­ics in the webpages.

Anoth­er nice thing about most affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing is that you can make the ads. You can make the ban­ners, text blocks, icons with cap­tions, and what­ev­er makes sense. Keep it sim­ple with good copy­writ­ing, and a cer­tain per­cent­age of users will click on the ad, which will take them to the affil­i­ate advertiser’s web­page thus earn­ing you some revenue.

You can also cre­ate your own ads for your own prod­ucts. What do you have to adver­tise? Anoth­er book? A train­ing course? Goods that you hap­pen to sell at retail? Ser­vices? What­ev­er it is, so long as it’s rel­e­vant, you can include it in your text flow just as if you were an affil­i­ate adver­tis­er. This is an oppor­tu­ni­ty you should not pass up.

Advertising in Text

It’s also pos­si­ble to adver­tise right in the text rather than between para­graphs. You can make any word or phrase a link to adver­tis­ing. In that case, the ad must be very specif­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant to the content.

But be care­ful. This is a tech­nique that you can eas­i­ly over­do. If every 20 words you have a link to some sort of adver­tis­ing, it will over­whelm users. Your in-text adver­tis­ing should go with the flow and be as incon­spic­u­ous and occa­sion­al as possible.

Side-Column Ads

Ban­ners don’t have to be long, page-wide, hor­i­zon­tal rec­tan­gles. They can be squares, nar­row ver­ti­cal rec­tan­gles, or short hor­i­zon­tal rec­tan­gles. You can place them in a side col­umn where they are out of the way and do not inter­fere with the flow of the text. They are not as effec­tive as in-text adver­tis­ing, but they will earn you some rev­enue and even add some col­or to your webpages.

That is not to say you have to use ban­ner adver­tis­ing in a side col­umn. You can use text block adver­tis­ing too. Yet the side col­umn is the pri­ma­ry place for your ban­ner adver­tis­ing if you wish to make your adver­tis­ing as unclut­tered as pos­si­ble, as you should. Just because you rel­e­gate the ban­ner adver­tis­ing to the side col­umn, though, does­n’t mean that the adver­tis­ing does­n’t have to be rel­e­vant. It always has to be rel­e­vant to the top­ics in the webpages.

Nonethe­less, your own side-col­umn adver­tis­ing doesn’t always have to be rel­e­vant. Side-col­umn adver­tis­ing gives you a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to adver­tise specif­i­cal­ly what you have for sale by cre­at­ing your own col­or­ful ban­ners. Since you’re adver­tis­ing your­self (pre­sum­ably your oth­er pub­li­ca­tions), irrel­e­van­cy is excus­able, I sup­pose, and users will prob­a­bly for­give you.. But if you have some­thing rel­e­vant to adver­tise, so much the bet­ter. Thus, if you have a rel­e­vant book for sale, you might even put the book cov­er image in the side-col­umn as a ban­ner ad.

If you’re a pub­lish­er of numer­ous books or if you’re an author of numer­ous books, you should have a book cat­a­log at the back of every dig­i­tal book that you pub­lish. A side-col­umn ban­ner ad on every web­page link­ing to such a cat­a­log is a good adver­tis­ing ploy.

Responsive Websites

Respon­sive web­sites take the ele­ments of your web­pages and shuf­fle them around so that they make sense on the small screen of a smart­phone. It’s dif­fi­cult to pre­dict exact­ly where the respon­sive design will shuf­fle ele­ments of your web­page to dis­play them on a phone. There­fore, it’s up to you to exper­i­ment with the place­ment of your side-col­umn adver­tis­ing so that there’s a good chance phone read­ers will see it.

This may take a bit of tri­al and error, but pre­sum­ably, it will pay off in greater response to your ads and greater rev­enue for your web­book. It is worth men­tion­ing again that 70% of peo­ple who read dig­i­tal pub­li­ca­tions read them on their smart­phones, so pay­ing atten­tion to how a respon­sive web­site design dis­plays its web­page com­po­nents will help your adver­tis­ing effectiveness.

Individual Ads

Once you estab­lish effec­tive ad place­ment, it’s time to exper­i­ment with indi­vid­ual ads. Try var­i­ous ads in var­i­ous dif­fer­ent place­ments to see where you get the best respons­es, worst respons­es, or (Zeus for­bid) no response. For exam­ple, if ad A near the top of the web­page gets a poor response and ad B near the bot­tom of the web­pages gets a great response, switch them. Ad B will get even bet­ter response near the top of the page, and your over­all response will be greater. Some place­ments are just bet­ter than oth­ers, and you want to put your ads with the best response in the best place­ments. And it behooves you to get rid of ads that don’t bring in sig­nif­i­cant rev­enue and instead try new ads.

Of course, if you don’t need adver­tis­ing to sup­port your web­book, don’t include it. Right? Actu­al­ly, wrong! No read­er is going to fault you for adver­tis­ing your own offer­ings. If you’re an orga­ni­za­tion, adver­tise oth­er sales offer­ings, pro­mote oth­er free offer­ings, solic­it dona­tions, pro­mote your orga­ni­za­tion, or what­ev­er. If you’re a pub­lish­er or author, at the very least adver­tise your pub­lish­ing catalog.

The Last Word

What makes sense and what will keep your web­book ele­gant (com­pared to the Forbes and Time web­sites) is to use rel­e­vant adver­tis­ing and to dis­play such adver­tis­ing as unob­tru­sive­ly as pos­si­ble. Make your adver­tis­ing go with the flow of your web­book, not have it jump out and over­whelm your users.