I thought I’d start playing around with some different website advertising networks again.

During 2006 when I first started to dabble with blog advertising, I signed up for Google AdSense. It was simple to sign up, fast to implement throughout my site and I liked that it was backed by someone like Google.

It didn’t take long before Google AdSense was earning small but useful amounts of money, which I was quite excited about. For reasons I can’t remember, in 2010 I stopped running Google AdSense through my blog and haven’t run any form of advertising since then.

For no particular reason, it seemed like a good time to start experimenting with a few different advertising networks to see what is about in the market and what might work best for my blog.

I’ve just signed up for Infolinks, which is an in-text advertising product. The signup process was simple and my new account was activated about 24 hours after my initial signup. Implementing Infolinks throughout my blog was really straight forward as they provide a WordPress plugin, so that made everything quite simple. The plugin as a handful of options and when you login to the management console on the Infolinks website you can also configure additional settings like the link colour, the type of underline, the maximum number of links per page and more.

The in-text advertising that Infolinks provides differs from Google AdSense in that Infolinks dynamically ads links to the content on a page, whereas Google AdSense adds an image banner or a block of text links in an area of the page that a publisher would nominate. For example in this post you’ll see a link I added above in blue and with a solid underline & you might also see some green links with a dotted underline inserted by Infolinks.

Infolinks works in a similar fashion to how Google AdSense runs, in that they both scan the content of the page to understand what the page is about. From an advertisers stand point, both products allow you to target a page based on the keywords/phrases that exist in the page – the major difference is in how the ad is delivered to the user.

Now that it is up and running, I just have to be patient and see if it works. If it doesn’t, I’ll keep trying a few different internet advertising networks and will invariably come full circle and add Google AdSense back into the mix at some point as well.