 working there are helpful and truly invested in finding out the potential of my blog to make passive income through ads.
They also easily added a pop-up to my site that asks people if they accept cookies, which makes me GDPR-compliant.
The RPM – page revenue per thousand impressions – is fantastic as compared to other networks.
Here are my very first earnings with Mediavine:
For that, I simply installed the plugin to connect the dashboard. The rest was done by the employees of the company.
They placed the ads in the way they saw fit and are constantly optimizing them to find what performs best.
The earnings in my second month with Mediavine are significantly higher, probably because the ads are customized and thus reaching more visitors.
Mediavine is famous for having enough resources for site owners to help them increase ad revenue and make more money from their blogs.
As Let’s Reach Success has a lot of content and new posts are published every day, I’m now focused on making the most of it.
The articles must be optimized Mediavine-style, which also means a better user experience and looking great in the eyes of search engines like Google.
Mediavine also has a great feature called Site Health Check. With that, they make sure your ads are all visible and working well and contact you in case there’s something you can do to improve their performance or if there’s an error.
It also uses lazy load ads to make your site faster and improve viewability. Here’s how that works:
Here’s what I did and what I’m about to do in order to increase ad revenue by optimizing my site for Mediavine (and ads in general):
How to Increase Ad Revenue with Mediavine
1. Write longer content.
I’m not a fan of 500-word blog posts. While in some niches that’s okay, for sites like Let’s Reach Success it doesn’t make sense.
That’s because not much can be said in 500 words. I recently updated the Guest Post Guidelines and now accept articles that are a minimum of 1000 words.
Also, the blog posts that perform best and rank for certain keywords are those that contain 2000 or 3000 words.
To increase ad revenue, write more but also focus on longer content. Google loves it.
2. Use shorter paragraphs.
You might have noticed that more and more bloggers are breaking up their content into shorter and more frequent paragraphs. That’s a must for optimizing your site for ads and wanting to make money with them.
It’s also one of the things Mediavine suggests you do first once you partner with them and start making money.
While I did begin doing this a long time ago as it improves the reading experience, I focus on it much more now.
Each paragraph should have 1-3 sentences and share just one idea.
The reason why you can increase ad revenue with that technique is that the more paragraphs you have, the longer the page and the more ads can be placed in the text.
And of course, with more ad units you give people more chances to click on something that interests them and increase ad revenue.
3. Add visuals.
Another thing every blogger should be doing is including more than just text in the content.
That means adding images, embedding a video, inserting an infographic (these are long and good for ad revenue), a gif, or else.
All that makes the reader enjoy the text more.
Visitors are more likely to scroll all the way to the bottom, and this gives you the chance to see more money from ads too.
4. Have a sidebar.
Something unusual about my case is that I didn’t have a sidebar when I signed up with Mediavine, but still began making money with them with no extra efforts.
However, they strongly recommend having a sidebar as this increases ad revenue with nearly 30%.
Mediavine says The Sticky Sidebar Ad is one of their best-paying units. It’s the last thing that shows up in your sidebar and it remains even when the visitor scrolls down the page.
5. Your site must be mobile-friendly.
Now, that’s something every site owner should have taken care of, but for ad profits it’s even more important.
As quite a big number of visitors come to your site from their phones, you must ensure the text and the buttons are big enough so that they don’t need to zoom in. In addition, the menu should be optimized together with other design elements.
Here’s how my add traffic looks like based on the device people used to click on ads:
In fact, I believe Mediavine won’t publish their ads on your platform unless you’re already optimized for mobile. Which can easily happen with a WordPress plugin like WPtouch.
I’m using a premium theme from ThemeForest called Mag, and its mobile version is great too.
6. Update old blog posts.
If you’ve been blogging for a while like me, you must have thought about updating your old blog posts.
There are many reasons to do that. For a start, you have more experience and knowledge now and might need to update some paragraphs.
Adding more text is almost always a good idea. You might also update images, add a Pinnable one, break the text down into shorter paragraphs, improve the formatting, and more.
I’m doing that these weeks and it will be a long process. Posts published years ago have a lot that could be improved.
I shared what you can do when updating your old blog posts in this article.
7. Increase text size
A simple thing you can do to optimize your site for Mediavine and increase ad revenue is increasing your body copy size.
Here’s what Mediavine says about it:
“Increasing your text size and/or line height by just 1-2 pixels could make all the difference in adding more in-content ads. Consult your theme developer or a graphic designer for help on how to adjust this.”
Additional Tips to Increase Ad Revenue on Your Blog
Work with more ad networks.
While I’m not planning on doing that, it makes sense.
Signing up with one publishing network will allow you to make a certain amount of money per month. Signing up with a second one might double that.
Of course, it also means cluttering your site.
A/B Testing
Another thing you can do to increase ad revenue with Mediavine or any other network you work with is to do your own A/B testing and see what performs best.
That means learning more about split testing, your audience, the times of the day and week when there are more clicks, what banner size performs best and what placement seems to earn more revenue, and so on.
This will take time, research and a lot of experimenting, but it can help you make more money with ads.
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So, that’s how you begin earning money with ads on your blog and can increase ad revenue over time. Maybe you too want to work with Mediavine or are willing to explore other options first.
Best of luck on your journey to earning passive income from your blog. Make sure you enroll in the free course The Passive Income Boss to learn about more ways to make money through blogging.
I made a conscious decision to turn my back on “the hustle” a while ago. Since then, I’ve written about the hustle and its destructive qualities.
A couple weeks ago, I left the hustle behind again. This time it took the form of moving my co-working membership from WeWork to The Yard.
I’ve been a reluctant WeWork member for a few years. On one hand, I recognized a while ago the need to stop working at home. WeWork provided a place to do that. Yet, I always felt at odds with their “hustle harder” culture.
This culture touched everything, including and not surprisingly, many WeWork employees. The energy of the workspace was heavy with it. The scripted drive for perfection that underpinned everything felt suffocating to me.
The WeWork employees seemed to under enormous pressure to comply with this drive for everything to be great. All the time.
The corporate culture seemed to discourage independent thinking. Scripts, templates, and processes replaced free thought. I tried two different locations over the years and had the same experience.
The real estate scandal talk didn’t sit well with me, either. I started wondering if the desire to squeeze every penny of revenue out of the space and its members was related to the scandal.
Over the past few months, the number of marketing events increased too. Every day it seemed, a company was in the lobby trying to sell you a hyper-specific premium product, e.g. an organic dog treat made from cricket flour.
So I moved on to The Yard after meeting its co-founder at a neighborhood yoga class. The vibe feels much healthier there after these first two weeks. It feels lighter and more spacious.
I’ve noticed the people working with The Yard seem more at ease. They actually sit down and enjoy a coffee or lunch together rather than hunching over a spreadsheet.
I feel grateful to have made the switch. Not paying to be bombarded by the relentless pursuit of hustle perfection feels refreshing.
I do feel grateful for the few connections I made at WeWork. If you’re one of them, please drop me a line so we can keep in touch.
My stress level has felt elevated over the past couple weeks. I’ve come back to reading The Abundance of Less, in the hope it helps ground me.
It did when I started reading it a while ago. Let’s see if it does again.
Fred