Making money via advertising:
Making money on the Internet is not as simple as it has been in previous years. While the concept of starting a site and charging money for a membership fee for premium content is still a viable option, content is often times leaked to other sites that charge little to none for the same content you are putting valuable effort into. With that said, many small business owners and hobby site owners are turning to Internet advertising campaigns to boost their revenue and see a positive return on their investment. Below are the overall steps and guidelines one should observe when seeking to place advertisements on their web site:
1.) Finding your ad company:
The bulk off all Internet advertisements come from an ad company. These companies are large cooperations that team buyers of ad space (companies such as coca-cola and pepsi) with ad space sellers (small business owners). A small list of companies that you can use for a personal site is below:
https://www.google.com/adsense/ (the most well known, helps a tiny bit with your sites SEO, and offers fair rates per click).
http://www.affinityclick.com/us/ (You have control over the ads that are displayed on your site, companies such as walmart, apple, and Nintendo all market through this service).
http://adbrite.com (Text based ads that relate to the site you have created)
https://www.ignitad.com (Claims to have the highest revenue, in comparison to competitors).
2.) Understanding ad companies:
Ad companies pay a small amount of money that translates into reasonable returns over time. It is a common misconception that just by putting ads on your site, you will see monetary gain. This is not the case. Ad companies make money by driving traffic to their clients (the companies and corporations), in order to drive traffic their a user has to click the ad (presumably finding it relevant to their taste or interest). Some ads require that a user not only click their ad, but fill out information on the page they are directed to. Therefor it is important to know what kind of ad service you are allowing on your site. This can usually be found in the terms of service.
3.) Types of ads:
There are always exceptions to this rule, as a new ad type can change over night. Currently; however, there are 4 types of adds and I have listed them below:
1.) Text based ads: These are exactly what they sound like. They are text, they relate to your website. They are useful because the colors of the background and the text itself can usually be controlled to match your website and trick users into clicking the ads. For the most part, these pay the least amount of income per click.
2.) Picture advertisements: These are ads that display a bright picture or image relating to an ad, while not so common any more, some sites still offer them and they tend to pay about as much as a text-based ad would.
3.) Flash or digital media ads: These are quickly becoming the new favorite among marketeers, they will allow for an interactive image (such as a side bar displaying products), or a movie of an advertisement. Even though they are displaying content on your page, they still require a user to click them to generate income for you. Their return is usually much higher than a text based ad.
4.) Landing page ads, these are ads that require your users to navigate to another page, and fill out valid information (username, emails, etc) before you get their return. Many users will not interact with these ads by trickery or out of respect for your site (as it means they must give up an email to be spammed). These ads see the highest return, some as high as $0.50 - $1.25 an interaction.
4.) Understanding your digital real-estate: Selling space on your website is just like selling a billboard. The better it’s position, area, and location the more income you are likely to see. While this does not usually apply to text based ads, or landing page ads, it does apply to the other two. On the Internet real-estate is calculated in three ways:
1.) What type of site are you: Some sites (such as standard blogs) are a flooded market, these types of real-estate would roughly translate to a town home in the hood. Anyone can set one of these up, and they don’t tend to bring in the big traffic. Where as a high traffic adult website will always see a positive return on their advertising investment. Ad companies use keywords to determine what type of site you are, so it’s important to be a website that stands out of the crowd and find a way to change your typing language to not resemble the competition and still be something a user is going to type into a search engine.
2.) How much traffic do you get: Are you a high volume 300+ ranked website? If so your ad revenue will be through the roof. For the rest of us, we have to subtly tell our users to click our ads for us.
3.) The scope of the ad: If you are serious about running an ad campaign you will place one or more advertisements on your site that are large. The larger the area, and the higher the visibility the more money you will earn per click.
5.) Adding it up: In order to make the most revenue you have to understand what you are selling. The more members you get, and the more likely they are to click on an ad, the more income you will see.