Often times when a “newbie” wants to make some with a new website, he or she will be quick to throw up ads. In this day and age of affiliate programs it is very simple to quickly have access to publish all sorts of ads on your website from the start. There are a few problems that this will cause, however.

First of all, if you do not have daily traffic coming in already it will be hard to attract repeat visitors if your website is cluttered with ads. I definitely think that a few non-intrusive ads are fine, but anything ugly or annoying will almost 10 times out of 10 jinx your site from the get-go.

Once you have steady traffic I would recommend adding one ad at a time. You don’t want to ever slam your visitors with sudden advertisements. Have you ever heard how to cook a frog? Frogs are cold blooded animals, and if you set a frog in lukewarm water it will sit there just fine. If you slowly heat up the water until it is boiling, the poor frog will not ever notice the change in temperature and eventually will boil to death. Now I hope you can take the basic analogy out of that and leave the rest. We certainly don’t want to be “boiling” our visitors with ads. I think boiling would be somewhere along the lines of multiple popups, script installs, with a bit of inter-page ads as well. Even if I’ve been a member of a site for years if they decide to flood the site with ads I will find another site with less ads.

Ads can be very annoying so it is very important to be careful how many you place, and where you place them. Keep them spread out and keep them from sticking out too much. I personally avoid any ads for products or services that people are sick of hearing about such as “You are the 1,000,000th visitor!”, “Click here to claim your prize!”, “Hit the monkey and win!”, “Click the fart button, you know you wanna!” I think those ads are ridiculous and a waste of time for everybody. They look horrible on MySpace so why would they look any better on my websites.

So stick to these simple rules with ad placement. Do not overdo it up front. Get some good traffic coming in before adding more than one or two ads to your website. When you add ads make sure that they are not going to annoy your visitors and cause them to leave. Lastly, have fun with your website. If you are in it 100% for the money it will be obvious. Be genuinely interested in the content you are providing your visitors and they will be more likely to come back!