A good way students can bring in some additional income is to sell space for banner advertisements on their blog. A banner advert is where the advertiser pays a set fee for a banner to appear at the top of the blog that advertises their company. This space is considered to be more effective real estate than advertisements in the sidebar so a higher fee can be commanded for the space. Again, it makes sense for students to have all of these fees noted in their media pack. Fees can increase as the size of the banner increases and, as with the link sales, a set period of time can be negotiated.

There are many companies out there who are looking for that real estate on blogs and students should be careful not to just jump in at the first offer. For example, readers of a blog all about the health benefits gained from cooking food from scratch at home are not going to be too impressed to see a multi-coloured flashing banner at the top of every page encouraging them to join the latest online casino.
Blog Banner Advert
Students can make money from a blog in this way in the short term, but as a long term strategy, banner adverts should be relevant to the blog subject and relevant for readers. If readers become annoyed by the adverts, they will stop reading, traffic will fall and the blogger can no longer command sensible fees for the advertising. The advertising offers could even disappear altogether.

Blogs that have good targeted traffic can also have a banner advert that is an affiliate link. This can be profitable for students and we will look at this in more detail in the section on affiliate links.