Earning from blogging isn`t illegal and you won`t be sued for running ads on your blog. However, when is the right time to put ads on your blog...? ...NOW is if you haven`t done so!

Why now?

If you started a blog to make a living, why did you just started the blog without start living from it? Start having some ads placed from the day your blog hits the blogosphere and you will have more time to learn what kinds advertising work for your blog, which one looks pretty and which doesn`t.

Since there are more visitors will be when your blog gets older and you need to figure things out, the early phase of blogging is the right time to do design revisions and layout to discover the best composition and position between ads and content. You won`t feel quilty for changing the theme so often and there`s not much readers would mind the frequent layout change.

How can you get the ads to put on?

There are a lot of advertisers out there always looking for prospectus media to spread their words. But how to find them? Basically you can go through two doors. You can approach and offer your ad space to advertisers by yourself or using a third party like Google Adsense, Bidvertiser, Pepperjam Network, etc. Direct advertising is better done when your blog has a considerable amount of traffic (new and returning visitors), rank (Alexa or PageRank) and a better layout which mostly owned by established blogs.

With that being said, that leaves third party advertising more suitable for new blogs. They don`t need your blog to be high ranked and subscribed by 10,000. All you have to do is register your account, setting up ads that will show up on your blog and install some codes. You can experiment with various sizes, colors, placements, etc. Most of the time during the first months, the ads won`t generate very much revenue (it`s great if it does). But you can learn which ad looks best with your blog or which section of your blog you need to modify to get a better looking with the ads.

When traffic starts coming in and you know which ad design looks unattractive for your blog, it`s time to start examining your ads` income. Do various tests on ad appearances to see which design attracts people and generates the most income. Since you know which ones look ugly, you don`t need to try them (unless you`re willing to sacrifice design over cash :) ) and this saves you a lot of time.

Time to go direct advertising?

When you decide to switch to direct advertising, make sure that your blog`s stats is convincing enough for your advertisers. You can observe this from your third party ads revenue. How much do you earn in a month? More less that`s the amount suitable for your advertising fee. If you charge way more than that, most likely advertisers will decline your offer.

You can also tell your blog`s condition by your readers` activity. How is their behavior? Do they only stop by and leave? Or spend some time through the articles and pages and actively comment on your posts? If they`re not so active, perhaps you need to fix navigation issues or blog the other way around to invite your readers stay longer on your blog. If your blog readers` participation is minimal, then most likely your advertisers won`t get anything in return for advertising on your blog.

The decision is yours

The best way is to try both methods to a certain extent to compare which yields the highest revenue with your blog. Some blogs within a certain niche earn well with third party advertisements and the rest runs by direct advertising. One thing that you need to keep in mind is when there are ads on your blog, you serve both readers and advertisers` interest. Your ads placement will have to be unintrusive for your readers while in the same time clearly visible to shout the advertisers` message. Do your best to balance to fulfill your readers` needs who visit your blog for information and advertisers` who look for a good return from hiring adspots on your blog.

In your opinion, do you agree that we better put ads in the beginning rather than when we already have an established blog? Why? Do you have any other thoughts of putting ads on your blog?