Things may look a bit different soon as I start implementing advertising through the Ezoic platform. If you are a long-time reader, then you know how much I hate ugly ads. If you are new, then you probably are interested in my Ezoic experience. So to my long-time readers, sorry about the ads, I hope they don’t scare you away. To the new people researching Ezoic – scroll to the bottom for all the updates about the experience!

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Blogs and Advertising

Advertising is a great way to earn income off blog posts, but I’ve avoided it mostly because the ad programs I’ve tried (like AdWords) have had mostly hideous ads and earned me about 50 cents a month. The payoff doesn’t really equal out to putting some diabetic medication ad with a nasty bloated foot on my carefully crafted article about motherhood. I even wrote about how advertising is one of the reasons I can’t even read some peoples blogs.

Ezoic assured me their ads were a bit more tasteful and that I could tailor the display if I found it was showing ads that would make people run screaming. I can also turn ads off for pages a choose. I liked that aspect, and after a ton of Googling Ezoic reviews from other bloggers, I finally decided it was time to try and monetize the blog.

Where Will You See Ezoic Advertising

To start with, it’s probably going to be all over. At the top, on the sides, all jammed up in the blog posts like I hate to see. But after a couple weeks we should be able to fine tune it to where the ads don’t over power the content. I’m hoping to reach a nice balance between ads and content. It would be nice to earn something off all the content I post, so I plan to give it a try for a few months and see how it goes. This is me being very optimistic, because my last foray into blog advertising lasted 3 days.

So if you landed here in search of a review of the Ezoic experience, just give me some time and I will post that too 🙂

If you are interested in trying Ezoic, Click Here to Sign Up!

UPDATE: I lasted just over a week and earned an average of $2.50 a day. Installation was very easy- I changed my nameservers and they did the rest. My account manager was great at responding to questions right away and helping me with the transition. The nameserver change did cause my WordPress site to constantly warn me my website wasn’t set-up, although it was running fine the whole time. The one thing I did notice was that it took several hours before my updates and new posts appeared live on the site.

The ads were everywhere, and I did request some of them be removed above the logo, because people coming to the blog just saw nothing but ads. My site load time really dragged and it took a long time for the ads to load along with my photos. I could barely look at the site anymore. My once clean layout was too busy flashing with random ads.

My blog is very personal and I spend a lot of time getting the layout just right. I put a lot of thought into the text and how to the photos help the story. It was difficult to see it all broken up with ads, but I was really hoping it would be a good source of income.

Currently, I’ve decided to pause the Ezoic ads and change my nameservers back. It feels so much better to see my site look the way I want. I don’t think I will go back. As much as I’d love to monetize things a bit more, this is my happy place, and flashing ads all over just don’t make me happy.

UPDATE 2: It’s been almost another week and I started to miss the passive income from just having the site up. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. So I activated WordPress Ads at the top of the page and the sidebars to see how that goes. I’ve tried it before and the ads were pretty awful, but this time they don’t seem so bad. Let’s see how this goes 🙂

UPDATE 3: After trying WordPress Ads 2 months, I made a whopping $3 total! And here’s the kicker – they won’t even let you withdraw the money until you reach $100. Come on! Talk about not worth it. So today I went back with Ezoic. Hoping to take a more conservative approach rather than the max ads per page. Hoping to find a nice balance between ads and revenue.

UPDATE 4: Two days in and we are still working on getting the ad placement just right. Something keeps messing up my scrolling images on the main page. I will say this – their customer service is super responsive. If I e-mail with an issue, they get back to me very fast. Also, I already made a couple dollars on just one day of ads. I went with changing nameservers and not the WordPress plug-in, because I downgraded my WP account to “premium” rather than “business” so I can’t do plug-ins anymore. Once we get the scrolling feature images fixed, I think we should be good to go this time.

UPDATE 5: We got everything settled and ads running smoothly after a couple weeks. My traffic took a bit of a dip and I made about $5 the first month. I was doing OK this month and then something upset their system with my traffic and the ads were cut off. I had no idea why, so they said it could have been because I have been working on the website so much that it’s being counted as me clicking on the ads, when I’ve just been clicking them off to see the page. Since I’m in the middle of a redesign and updating a lot of old blog posts, I didn’t want to deal with sending an appeal every time I worked on the website. I switched my nameservers back and decided to activate WordPress Ads again in the meantime.