I have a personal blog where I write about a wide variety of topics: alcohol/cocktails, single/dating life, tech and dogs/pet care. So I get quite nicely targetted ads especially in single post view. 2/3 of my daily visitors are regulars who'd land on the front page. The rest stumble in via search engines or external links to the single posts. My question is: how do the rest of you personal bloggers treat your regular visitors with regards to ads? The way that I've placed the ads is to keep it out of the way of the regular visitors and those who'd comment, but made it highly visible for others who land onto a single post view. Any thoughts or ideas on this? (My blog is at http://mooiness.com for reference)
I don't use any ads on my personal blog. I use it as a place to help people and get my name out there.
Good post question. I have three blogs which tailor to different markets and therefore have different advertising opportunities. I have just restructured one of my blogs after some feedback from a regular reader. She told me that while she enjoyed reading my posts she found it hard to keep focused because there were so many adverts. I still have advertising on my blogs and I still make a good amount of money from them but I have made it more friendly to people. There are ways to get in people's face and there are ways to help them - I went with the "help them" mindset and in doing so it pays well.
Tyler/Crash-test dummy: good to hear different opinions on this matter. It's a tricky one - on one hand you would like to be able to at least earn back your hosting fees, but you also don't want to piss off the readers who are the reason that your blog exists in the first place.
You can always try alternative forms of advertising, such as selling text links or integrating affiliate programs.
Find sites that you like that are advertising well. Interstitials and pop-ups are a big no-no because they annoy everybody.