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When you set up your blog, it’s time to monetize it. There’s no point in hanging around on this – it should be your highest priority. As soon as you have content on there, you need contextual ads and affiliate ads to ensure you are getting your blog to pay for itself. The positioning of said ads is very important, and there’s many, many books been written about it. Some contradictions are present in this field, but the general consensus is quality over quantity. Google allows you to have three Adsense blocks on your page at once, but do you really need three? If you think it may be overdoing it, then leave one out. If you are using banner ads in your sidebar, and maybe a banner in your post, then leaving out an Adsense block is not going to be a problem. Also, remember that in-line contextual text links like Chitika are also allowed at the same time as Adsense.

If you want the best positioning for your ads, the best thing to do is look how the professionals do it. Websites like Problogger.net and entrepreneurs-journey.com are prime examples of great ad positioning, as they believe in quality over quantity. You will usually find one block of Adsense at the top of the post, one at the bottom (or in the post body) and then a sidebar block displaying just the text link format. This is a great idea, because when people see text links that are related to the content, they click them (usually thinking they are navigation links), because sidebars are reserved for navigation in most cases. Any banners you have in your sidebars should not be too busy. There’s nothing worse than seeing too many flashes and swirls when you are trying to read content. If you are using image ads on Adsense, then ensure you have no large images posted near them. Google is very keen on this, and they don’t like you putting their ads too close to other content. It is a popular mistake to make, too.

It may seem impossible that a blogger would ever give you the front page of their blog to display your wares, but it is very possible indeed. There are literally thousands of people who realized the power of this method of backlinking benefiting from page one backlinks on sites with Pagerank of 6, 7 etc. It truly is quite easy too. As long as you like writing (you do not have to be the best writer in the world, and typos are allowed!) or have a great outsourcer who is worth their salt.

For a while now, many top bloggers have used a plugin called Top Commentators, which is a widget that sits in the sidebar of a site. It sits on every page, however, so this is immediately powerful for the links that are in that Top Commentators widget. The prerequisite to get into that box is you must be making valid and worthwhile comments on the blog, and you should also be in the post count of the top 10 or 15 people. So if the number 10 spot has 5 posts, you need to write 5 posts that week/month – depending on how the blog operates.

You can use different anchor texts for different blogs. You can put your name, or your website name – the blogs do not care, as long as you are adding valuable and fresh content to their blogs. This is not spam – you are collaborating with the owner of the site – and they welcome you with open arms – and even throw in an awesome backlink to boot.

To find these cool blogs that allow you to advertise on their home page, you simply need to go to Google, and type in the following:

allintext: “Top Commentators” “Powered by WordPress “

This will throw up enough blogs for you to go through, and remember – actually pick blogs you want to comment on!