The next step in maximizing your blog as a profit center via Google Adsense is making sure the ad units work well with your blog’s design, flow, and user experience.
There are three major schools of thought when it comes to designing your Google Adsense units: Blending, Complementing, and Contrasting.
The challenge that you have is making sure to use the best one (as well asexperiment and test to find the best style) that works for your blog and only you can ultimately make the best call as you use your research and conversion patterns to make the right decision.
1. Blending the Design
Blending your Adsense units is the more common practice of making the units color and style the same as the site and/or blog on which it lives and typically is related to background color for more than anything.
But, you can, of course, do much more than that, like changing the border, text color, the font size, family and even the corner style can help make the advertisement appear natural and attractive to the end user and visitor. Doing this well can help achieve a high level of clicks for a larger CTR.
Of course, the goal is not to deceive or trick your readers into clicking them (which can get you quickly banned from Google Adsense) but rather give them an option in their reading flow of your content to check out one of the advertisements.
Most bloggers will opt for this strategy and will be able to achieve a good amount of success if they only invest a few moments designing their ad units – unfortunately most people don’t spend any time with their design and in the end they just lose potential for more earnings!
2. Complementing the Design
Complementing the design of your Google Adsense units is essentially using the color scheme of your blog and/or website but that don’t match your background or borders explicitly.
This is a nice go-between for those that don’t want to do a completely blended advertising system but those that don’t want to risk banner blindness through contrasting the advertising units.
3. Contrasting the Design of Google Adsense Units
The alternative strategy is to make your units contrast with the design either by choosing a different set of colors and/or fonts and styles. This generally means that you’re going to go way beyond your current color scheme and palette and choose colors that make it seriously stand out against your current design.
It’s been noted by more than a few bloggers and website owners that using this strategy long-term could result in banner blindness but I’m not so sure that’s always the case, especially if it’s done well.
Unfortunately there was a time where you could reduce banner blindness by rotating through different color palettes but this appears to be no longer an option – so most marketers have to create some code to randomly cycle through different palettes to achieve the same effect.
So, what will you end up doing for your blog?
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