Looking to increase your ad revenue as a blogger on Mediavine? These 7 hacks will help you make more money each month, even if your traffic doesn’t grow.
As bloggers, we have many different ways to make income, and one really great and totally passive way to make money is ad revenue. There are many different ad networks out there, but when your traffic gets high enough to apply to one of the premium ad networks, I highly recommend it.
You’ll make so much more from an ad network like Mediavine or AdThrive versus something simple like Google Adsense. However, if you’re traffic isn’t high enough to apply to premium network, Google Adsense is a good place to start.
I personally use Mediavine for my lifestyle blog, The Fox & She. To apply to their program, you must get 50,000 sessions in the previous 30 days. You can find this information in your Google Analytics. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed to your website, this is your sign to do it immediately. The other requirements to join can be found on Mediavine’s website.
Without that information and data, you won’t be able to apply to places like this for ads. Plus, you’re missing out on seriously valuable information about your audience and which content is getting the most traffic which can help you make really strategic moves for your content moving forward.
RELATED: Grab my free Blog Launch Guide & start your blog the right way
Once you’re set up with an established ad network, you’re probably wondering, how can I make more money from my content? Again, what I love about ad revenue is that it’s totally passive, but to make a good amount of ad revenue, you need to be getting plenty of traffic.
Other than just getting more traffic to your site, I wanted to share some easy hacks to increase your income—many that are super simple to change!
7 Genius Hacks for Increasing your Ad Revenue as a Blogger on Mediavine
1. Create Long Form Content
The longer your content is, the more ads will be shown within it. The more ads that are displayed, the more you money you make. The good news about this is that Google loves long-form, in-depth quality content.
Look at your best 10-20 top-performing blog posts and see if there’s an opportunity to improve these blogs post. You can write more copy, break it down into section with headers that are easier to read and better for SEO.
For most of my blog posts, I aim to write no less than 800 words. For one, posts with less than 500 words are not likely to rank in search engines, but they just don’t go that in-depth on your topic.
2. Shorter Paragraphs
This is a follow-up to the long-form content. Write more content, and also make your paragraphs shorter. On the internet, ease of reading is essential. When you have large blocks of text, your reader gets overwhelmed and moves on.
Having shorter, easier to ready paragraphs not only allows more ads to be placed within your content, but also makes it easier for people to actually read it. That’s a win-win!
3. Check your Mediavine Settings
Go into your Mediavine account and check your Settings and make sure you’ve got all the options set to optimize your revenue. I’ve played around with this a lot over the years, and opt for the higher density ads, and turning on the ads that float at the bottom.
Most recently, I added the video player ad. Mostly just to experiment with how much it increases my ad revenue. Spoiler alert, it was almost immediately that I saw more revenue!
I know some of these things can come off as annoying and can even slow down your site, so test them out and decide what’s best for you and your audience.
4. Slightly Larger Fonts
This simple design hack is such a great and easy way to increase your ad revenue. Again, this goes back to your content being physically longer on the page. When you increase the font-size a few points, your text gets bigger and pushes things down the screen more. This can create more opportunities for more ads to be shown within your content.
You can ask your designer to do this, or change it within your CSS so that all your body text is automatically larger.
This is also great because it’s much easier to read larger text on the internet. Another win-win for you and your audience.
5. Narrower Column Width
Narrowing the width of your post column, meaning the area where your text and copy goes, means your copy instantly gets longer. As you are now aware, longer copy equals more ads being shown!
Again, this is something you can change within your CSS, or you might have to hire someone to make the change for you. I wouldn’t recommend going any smaller than 500px, but 700px is my max. I think this allows your copy and images to look really great and allows for enough white space with a sidebar.
6. Build Internal Links
Make sure that every blog post you write has at least 2-5 links to other pieces of your content. This internal linking strategy helps to keep people on your site for longer by showing them more relevant content they’ll like. It also means that each time they move to a new webpage, you’ve got a new opportunity to make more ad revenue.
You can do this by putting Related Post links throughout your copy, linking to specific posts that you’re referencing within that post, or having a “You Might Also Like” section at the bottom of your post.
7. Create Evergreen Content
This is key for blogging success in general, but will also help with ad revenue if you’re creating high-quality evergreen content on a regular basis. Evergreen content is content that’s going to be just as important today as it is 5 years from now. You may have to make some tweaks to it over the years, but the topic should be something that’s relevant for years to come.
The more piece of content you have like this, the more avenues you’re creating for yourself to get more and more traffic.
Let’s say that after a year, you’ve created 52 pieces of evergreen content—one per week! You can continue to promote and share those posts with your audience and on social media and Pinterest for years. Meaning they can continue to earn you ad revenue for a long time.
You can see how that can really start building after a few years, right?
These hacks might not instantly double your revenue, but they are sneaky ways to start increasing your income now. The more high-quality posts you have that rank and are getting traffic, this will really start to compound! If you’re in it for the long-haul, you should take these things to heart—even if you don’t currently qualify for one of these platforms!
Creating high-quality, evergreen, long-form content is one of the quickest ways to start getting more traffic to your blog. If you’re ready to level up your traffic with SEO, sign up for my free SEO training here!
BTW, the most profitable blog niches, and how to make money as a blogger.
