Sell Website Advertising
How to sell website advertising and make money from your website
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Website Advertising
Make money from your site by selling website advertising
One of the easiest ways to make money from a website is to sell website advertising. You don't need to process orders, keep stock, hire staff or even keep track of anything.
All the unused space on your website is potentially available for publishing advertisements and contributing to your website income, but you will have to decide for yourself how much advertising you want your site to carry.
Some websites with good content become user-unfriendly because of the volume of advertisements, or their intrusiveness.
High traffic needed to sell website advertising
The only requirement to successfully selling advertising on your website, is a reasonable amount of traffic. That's why in the Easy Website Primer, making money from your website is the last section, after building traffic from website promotion.
The percentage of visitors to a web page who click on an advertisement is known as the Click Through Rate or CTR. CTR's typically range from about 0.3% to about 5%. The average is around 1%.
That means that for every 1000 pages viewed on your site, you might get 10 clicks on advertisements. Your earnings for one click might be anything from USD 0.01 to USD 1.50. (rarely more). So until your site is pulling in 1000's of page impressions per month, there's not much to be gained from selling website advertising.
Of course the advertiser pays considerably more to have his advertisement displayed on your website. He probably pays anything from 2 to 5 times as much, depending on the advertising network.
It is possible to find advertisers for your website directly. Then you get to keep the full advertising revenue yourself. But until your site reaches very substantial proportions, it's difficult to find advertisers. Those you might find would probably negotiate a very keen rate with you. And you would have to do all the work yourself.
No cheating allowed!
It may occur to you that you could earn a lot more by clicking on your advertisements in your own website. That would be a very short-sighted policy. Advertising networks take a very dim view of that practice and they can easily tell if the pattern of clicks on your website is unusual in any way.
In fact you are forbidden to click on your own ads for any reason, even if you want to buy the advertised product!
If you click on your own ads, even by mistake, you could have your account immediately closed by the advertising network. It's already happened to others.
PPC, CPM and monthly rental
Not all advertising works on a Pay Per Click (PPC) basis. Some advertising networks will allow you to charge per 1000 page impressions viewed (Cost per thousand, abbreviated to CPM).
In this case, you make money even if no one clicks on the advertisement. The same applies to website advertising that is sold per week or per month.
Of course, the advertiser won't keep paying for advertising unless it's working for her too.
Contextual website advertising
That is why Google has been so successful with their Adwords / Adsense business. It really works well for the advertiser and for the website owner. (Almost as well as it works for Google!)
The secret is in matching the advertisement to the web surfer (or the website he is looking at), so that he is almost sure to be interested in the product being advertised.
The matching is done by means of
- keywords that the search engines have discovered on our web pages (where we placed them!)
- search phrases used by the web surfer while finding his way to our website
- information that the search engine has collected about the web surfer's interests during previous searches.
This process of matching web surfers to advertisements is called contextual advertising.
Website advertising with Google
Google invented it and, so far, no-one does it better. So even though they don't pay the best rates in town, you might be able to earn more with Google than with another advertising network.
Opening a Google Adsense account is very easy, but make sure you have read all their guidelines for qualifying websites before you apply.
Once your account has been approved you will be able to choose the format and colours for advertisements which best suit your website. Then download the javascript code supplied and place it where you want it, in your web page HTML.
Selling website advertising through other networks
Google may not be the best choice for you. Another advertising network may provide better advertising revenue for your particular website. See our Links/Resources.
When choosing your advertising networks, here are some pointers
- Avoid networks that do not allow you to display advertisements from rival networks.
- Check the payment terms. Some networks only pay you long after the money is earned.
- You should have the right to refuse to allow any advertisement you don't want displayed on your website. (It is your website, after all!)
- All networks have rules about what kind of site may participate. Make sure you are happy with them.
- Read the entire contract.
That brings us to the end of this tutorial on website advertising. Of course there is another kind of website advertising which we haven't touched on yet - affiliation advertising. It's a hot topic right now, and it gets a complete tutorial all to itself...
Links / Resources
Website advertising networks:
Google Adsense
BidVertiser
Burstmedia
Contextweb
Clicksor
DClickAds
Kontera
Valueclick
ExitJunction
More articles on website advertising:
Google Adsense - Who wants to be a millionaire?
Banner ad sizes, formats, location and colours
Selling advertising on your website
How to generate advertising revenues for your website
How to sell advertising on your website
Make Money: Website Advertising Top Prev Next: Affiliate Links
Copyright © 2009 - 2011 EasyWebsitePrimer.com Last updated: September 2011
Website advertising can bring you a steady income