We all know the story of the tortoise and the hare.  The hare, overly eager to win the race, rushes ahead, but then becomes so confident in his ability, that he decides to take a nap.  Meanwhile, the tortoise pushes ahead at a steady pace, eventually surpassing the hare and winning.

How does this relate to blogging?

I’ve come across a few blogs recently where the front page was completely monopolized by paid per click ads, paid reviews, and banner ads.  Every single post was clearly paid.  I know that many people blog for money, but I think when you’re that overloaded with advertisements, you probably won’t make as much.

These bloggers are like the hare.  They are eager to make money from blogging, and so they “rush” to take put ads on their sites (whatever it is – banner ads, PPC ads, reviews, etc – they’ll put anything and everything up).  Like the hare abandons the race to take a nap, they’ve abandoned the true purpose of blogging: to write and create original content.

To understand why flooding blogs with ads is bad, let’s take a look at three different perspectives.

The Advertiser’s Perspective

Are they going to want to advertise on your site when they have little chance of standing out? Many good (read: higher paying) advertisers look for blogs that have unique and original content, and that have a large following or high page rank.  A blog covered in ads is unappealing to an advertiser who might pay more money.

Search Engines’ Perspective

If every post on your blog has paid links in it, if your side bar is flooded with paid links and banner ads, then you might lose credibility with the search engines. When they crawl your site, the spiders will see all the links, and you might lose your page rank.  Then you’re back to the advertiser – many advertisers prefer blogs with higher page ranks, because this is a way of measuring how popular your site is.

Finally, most importantly, the Reader’s Perspective

What reader is going to stick around to read a blog covered in ads?  If every post is selling them something, they won’t keep coming back. Readers want to read rich content.  If you’re going to use ads, you also need to make sure that they’re relevant to your readers. Make sure that you have original and engaging content between paid posts, make sure that any sites you do link to are helpful resources for your readers.  Only link to companies that are relevant and that you think your readers will be interested in.

It’s very important that you make sure you write original content constantly, and do not overload your side bar with banner ads and PPC ads.  Evaluate how much money you’re really making with these things.  It’s especially important if your blog is relatively new, and you are still trying to build up a following.  This can be difficult to do if your blog is overloaded with ads.  (This is not to say you can’t have any ads at all, but rather to be careful about the quantity, quality and relevancy of the ads you are posting).

If you plod along like the turtle, and post ads sparingly, in the end you will probably find yourself making more money with higher paying ads. So in the end, we see that it’s really the patient turtle the wins the race, not the over enthusiastic hare.