In-Text advertising has many advantages and disadvantages. Before using In-Text advertising in your blog you can go through the below given points:
Pros (advantages) of In-Text advertising:
1) Yet another way to make money: As you can use in-text advertisements along with regular PPC ads, its yet another way to make money from your blog.
2) Does not use any real estate of your blog: In-text advertisements, as you know are the clickable text ads and they do not use any part of your blog. They are in the content and your widgets area and sidebars are still there for placing PPC and affiliate ads.
3) Increase in revenue: Although this point is related to the first point, however, we can still call it an advantage of In-text ads.
4) Higher chances of getting clicks: Many blog readers clearly distinguish between the PPC ad in the sidebar and the content. So there’s highly likely that they will never even look at your PPC ads. But, in-text ads are directly in to your content, so a reader has to go through it and that way to get the ad clicks is highly likely.
5) Contextual ads: In-text ads are contextual, i.e. they are related to the subject of your blog and they are relevant.
6) Works really well with high traffic blogs: If you have a high traffic blog then you should try using In-text advertisements as the extra 100 bucks or so per month can pay for the entire hosting fee.
Cons (disadvantages) of In-Text advertising:
1) Can be annoying to some readers: Some of your readers can find in-text ad annoying if they accidentally click on them while reading an interesting copy as many readers don’t expect so many links in the text. The fix is that you can limit the number of ads that are displayed in a page.
2) Decreases the loading speed of the blog: Well, not that much but it surely reduces the loading speed of the blog. As a matter of fact that is the disadvantage of every ad if you ask me.
3) Blog looks cluttered: If you put all the ads in there, your blog looks cluttered with ads all around which is not desirable by many serious webmasters. If you are in to brand management and stuffs like that then you would definitely have to give a second thought.
The idea to place in-text ads cannot be generalized for a particular niche of a blog. It depends on a lot of factors as discussed above. Whether to use in-text advertisements in your blog or not solely depends on your needs. You can also A/B test your blog by trying in-text ads for a month. As far as the choice of network goes my personal favorite is Infolinks. You can also give it a shot to the new Chitika Linx. However, it doesn’t have as many options as Infolinks.