Earning Money From Advertising on Your Website

You've got a website and you want to make money out of it. Displaying adverts can be a good way but with so many advertising providers out there it's difficult to know which one is best.

Once you've got a website up and running you will inevitably start to think about how to gain extra money out of it. One of the best ways is obviously displaying advertisements that you get paid for but there are so many advertising services out there that it can be confusing to know which is best to use.

There's Google Adwords, Adbrite, Oxado, AdJungle and many, many more. And they all have different criteria with many expecting your page to have thousands of hits per day. So where do you start?

What You Are Paid For
The first thing to do is decide how you want the advertisment provider to pay you for displaying the advertisements. By this, I don't mean whethert they pay you by cheque, Paypal etc but how you actually earn money from the advertisement display.

Pay Per Click
This is where you are paid for each time someone clicks on the advertisement. There is usually a very low level of payment (a fraction of a cent) for each click. And if you click on the advertisement yourself to bump up the number of clicks you will probably get caught and lose everything you've earned so far. Typical 100 clicks from different users will earn about $1.

Pay Per Impression
Every time an advertisement is displayed, you get credited. This is usually a credit for each unique impression so if you load your webpage every day it won't affect the amount you earn. The amount you receive per impression is usually a fraction of a cent and you would probably have to display. In my experience, about 1000 impressions earns you $1.

Pay Per Sale/Pay Per Lead
Pay per sale means that if someone clicks through to an advertiser from your site and buys something from the advertiser, then you get a commission. Pay per lead usually means that if someone clicks through to an advertiser from your site and registers on the advertiser's site, then you get paid. I have experimented with these and have never received any payment from them.

Revenue Sharing
This is where all the money raised by the advertising service is shared amongst the websites displaying the advertisement. The advertising service takes a percentage of the revenue first to cover its cost and then shares out the rest amongst the website owners. There doesn't seem to be very many of this type of advertising service, mainly because they don't make their owners much money!

What Type Of Advertisements Will Be Shown On My Website?
This depends on the advertising service and the advertiser. There are several types of advertisements which may or may not be appropriate for your website. In general, there are two main types of advertisement - one is graphic, usually a banner or skyscraper adverttisement and these are often animated gifs or flash; the other type of advertisement is a text link which is literally a bit of text describing an offer or service. Both types of advertisement are usually clickable links, which takes the viewer to the advertisers website (either in a new window or takes them away from your website).

Within these two types of advertising, advertisements can be broken down into three further types.

General Advertising - The advertisements delivered to your site can be about anything at all, from online poker to dog grooming. This type of advertisement is, in my opinion, the most useful because it offers visitors to your website a broad range of advertising content that may or may not be of interest to them. I also think that this offers the advertiser the widest scope to get new customers.

Contextual Advertising - Services like Google Adwords and Oxada provide what they call contextual advertising, where your site is scanned and certain keywords determine the type of advertisement shown. This is great if you are not selling something but are merely providing information - the links can be useful to your audience to jump to advertisers who provide something that they want. But if you are selling something, then contextual advertisements will probably display your competitor's wares too.

Targeted Advertising - This is where the advertisements delivered to your site are particularly aimed at the sort of people who are likely to view your site. Great idea for the advertiser if they have a very unique product that they want to sell to a niche market but for the most part it tends to advertise to people that know about the products in the first place (people with a games console already know about the X-Box so advertising an X-Box on a site relating to games consoles is pretty pointless unless the site is going to get lots of people that know nothing about the X-Box which is unlikely).

Which Type Of Service Pays The Most?
This is a good question and in answering I can only go on past experience with advertisement delivery services that I have tried and I have tried an awful lot of them, not just for research purposes but also on various websites for myself and clients over the years.

I have found that the big players, like Google and Adbrite, make you work really hard for very little money. There is no payment for displaying the advertisement on your site (which takes up space on your page!) - you are only paid if someone clicks on the advertisement. Furthermore, they will only pay once for a user's click on an advertisement and if a user clicks too many times your account will be suspended, even if you don't know that user and haven't asked them to click on the advertisement. I decided a fairly long time ago that these type of "pay per click" advertisements is not worth the time to put the code on your webpage.

Looking at other advertisement delivery services, like Oxado and Adjungle that are more likely to pay per impression, again in the time that it takes to make a dollar it just isn't worth the hassle of putting the code on the page. Even worse, they don't take any account of the fact that a user might load your page several times a week - you only get paid for delivering one impression per user. That was a long standing complaint - they are still displaying the advertisements and they are getting paid for it but are not willing to share it.

In conclusion, I have found that those few that use the revenue share system actually make more money for the webmaster in the long run. This is because they share the revenue they raise with the web site owners after taking their cut (which can range from 10% to 50% so it's worth checking what they offer - if they're keeping 50% then there isn't that much to share out amongst the website owners).

What's The Alternatives?
There are several alternatives to putting paid for advertising on your site. These include

Join A Banner/Advertisement Exchange - this is where you display banners or advertisements on your website in exchange for other websites displaying your banner or advertisement. Be careful to check the exchange ratio - it should be at least 2:1, i.e. they show your advertisement once for every two advertisements you display.

Sell Your Own Advertising Space - this is very hard work but this is the only way you are going to keep all of the advertising revenue. If you have a very popular site, with lots of hits in a day, then it could be worth doing this. You will have to market the advertising service yourself but to aid you in doing this ensure that you have your Alexa rank showing on the page to prove your traffic.

What If My Site Contains Adult Material?
To be perfectly honest, I wouldn't know but there is such a proliferation of adult sites that I assume there are specialist advertising services for these. There are certainly banner exchanges and at least some of the main players, such as Adbrite, allow for advertisements to be targeted at these sites.

It is unlikely that an adult oriented site would get much in the way of advertisements from big corporations or government departments because they wouldn't want to be associated with such sites.

What Is Your Recommendation
Firstly, check what each advertising service has to offer, how much they pay and what they are paying for. Also check their restrictions and, perhaps most importantly, what would make them cancel your account and keep any money owed to you.

If you can't be bothered or haven't got the time to do that and just want a recommendation, then I would say join one of the newest advertising service providers that seems to be pretty fair- Amber Adsystem. This service shares 90% of the revenue with the website owners and although they do have some restrictions they don't seem to be going around cancelling accounts. And their minimum payout is only 1 British penny, payable by Paypal. According to its website, this company shares the revenue according to the number of unique visitors each site in the system receives, so if you get 10% of visitors throughout the network then you will get 10% of the revenue they share. That seems to me to be a pretty fair way of sorting payments out.

Links To The Services
Here are some links to some of the advertising services available. There are probably plenty more but these are the main ones:-

Links To Paying Advertiser Services
Google Adwords - http://adwords.google.com
Adbrite - http://www.adbrite.com
Oxado - http://www.oxado.com
Adjungle - http://www.adjungle.com
Amber Adsystem - http://www.adsystem.co.uk (this is the recommended one if you don't want to check the others)

Links To Banner Exchanges & Mutual Advertising Services
Adgridwork - www.adgridwork.com
Hit JB - http://www.hitjb.com/exchange/
UK Banner Exchange - http://www.ukbannerexchange.com/

Final Word
I hope that you have found this article to be of help. More articles have been written and have either been posted on this blog site or will follow, including ones on how to better your Alexa rank, get better search engine rankings and loads more about marketing your website.

Improving Your Alexa Rank

Getting Started

You've got yourself a website and now you want to get lots of people to look at it. More importantly, your website is so brilliant that lots of people will look at it and you can sell advertising. But you've joined lots of advertising providers and you're getting nothing. Sound familiar? Read on.

Why IS Your Alexa Rank Important?

Advertisers and some advertising suppliers use the Alexa rank to help them determine the worth of your site. Some "pay-per-post" companies determine what they pay for your blog posts based on your Alexa ranking whilst some companies determine how much they will pay you for advertising based on your Alexa rank. When it comes to money in your pocket (or Paypal account), this is WHY it's important. Having said that, read on because you may not need to improve your Alexa rank at all.

There are three things that you need to consider:-

First Consideration

Now you firstly check your website's rank and see if it is quite pitiful. At this stage, I would recommend that you check your website's Alexa rank by visiting http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500 and typing your site's URL in the box just under the navigation bar, then click "Get Traffic Details" (if you can link to Alexa's site from here then use your right mouse button and select "open in new tab" or "open in new window" so you can come straight back here once you've seen your rank).

There are two ways to tell if it is pitiful:

• 
  firstly because the site won't show a graph of your actual traffic but will display a graph with a background text stating "Not In Top 100,000"
• second, your traffic rank number is more than 1,000,000 (the lower the number the better)

At the moment, knowing that your Alexa is quite poor should be reason enough to start you sweating if you really want to make some money out of your site from advertising.

Second Consideration

Are you making enough money from your site? This will probably sound strange but if you are making enough money from your site then you won't need to bother with improving your Alexa rank. The trouble that you will have to go (unless you jump to step ??) is really not worth the effort because of the time it takes to actually improve your rank. You should only be trying to improve your rank if you need to make more money from your site from advertising that you sell on the site (if your site makes enough money without advertising don't bother with advertising - it is annoying to your viewer and may even may some of them go to a rival website).

Third Consideration

Is your business or level of trade for your business dependent upon the internet? If your website is merely an information website about your business but you don't trade from it or are not likely to trade from it then you don't need to improve your Alexa rank. For example, if you are a "Pound Shop" then you might want a website that gives information about your company and possibly your product range you are unlikely to want adverts on there so your Alexa rank is unimportant; on the other hand if you are a blogger looking to make money from your blog site then you will want to make sure your site is as valuable as possilbe and hence your Alexa rank needs to be as high as possible.

So now, you've looked at your Alexa rank and you've worked out it's not very good and you are not going to make very much from advertising. You now need to improve your rank considerably but how do you go about doing it? There are a few techniques that can help.

You've Decided You Definitely Want To Make Money From Adverts - How Do You Improve Your Alexa Rank?

Get Alexa To Crawl Your Site

Go to http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters#crawl_site and fill in your site's URL and click on "Crawl My Site". This ensures that Alexa knows about your site and their robot will, within a few weeks, crawl your site and gather information about. More importantly, it will make sure that Alexa knows about your site and will gather statistics about it.

Get The Alexa Toolbar

Download the Alexa toolbar because it records a hit for every time you visit. If you have more than one computer download it to all of them. You can get the Alexa toolbar by going to http://www.alexa.com/site/download and hitting the "Install Now" button.

Ask your friends to download it as well and then both you and your friends should visit your website everyday. This won't make much of a dent in your rank, unless you have a fair few millions friends, but will help.

Install The Alexa Widget On Your Website

The Alexa widget displays your traffic rank information on your website. You can get the widget by going to http://www.alexa.com/site/site_stats/signup - choose the small widget that shows your rank only (don't choose the graph, the widget that shows your links or the banner).
This isn't useful at first but every time your site is loaded it does tell Alexa that someone has visited your site. In the first instance, you might to place it on your site and then hide it by placing a graphic image over it. This isn't in the spirit of what Alexa intends but there again if you have a very poor traffic rank you really don't want to be advertising the fact that your rank is not very good!

Set All Your Links To Your Alexa Re-Direct

Joining link exchanges can help drive some traffic to your site (they can also help improve your Google page rank). Ensure that whenever you provide a link to your site it is set to your Alexa redirect lnk, which goes "http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?mydomain.com" where mydomain.com is your web domain (e.g. if your site is called www.cheapfleas.co.uk then your Alexa redirect link is http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?cheapfleas.com.

Do this for every page on your site, for example if your site (the mythical cheapfleas.co.uk for example) has a contact page, set the Alexa link for the page to http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?cheapfleas.com/contact.html.

This informs Alexa every time someone calls up your site and even if they go to your homepage by typing in the URL directly into the browser without using your Alexa re-direct then whenever they go to another page the redirect will kick in.

Join A Traffic Exchange

This is useful to get traffic to your site and to get your site noticed by other internet users.
Join an automatic traffic exchange because otherwise you will need to sit there clicking which takes up valuable time. One of the better sites for this is UpMyRank which is a traffic exchange designed to help increase your Alexa rank. You will need to have Internet Explorer 7 and the Alexa toolbar installed. Then go to www.upmyrank.com and go through the sign in process. Once approved, you can run the exchange program on your computer. This exchange gives you a ratio of 1 hit to your site for every 4 that you visit (not the best, not the worst but it is free).

A tip here is, if you can, run the program on a separate computer or run it overnight, when you're away from the computer etc. It is impossible to do any work when this program is running even if you run it in minimised mode (keeps popping message up which makes you lose concentration).

I have tried other traffic exchanges, such as 24SevenHits and Traffic Temple which really don't deliver anything like they suggest - it takes a long time for them to deliver any hits at all to your site even you autosurf using them for 24 hours a day, seven days a week! They are not designed to specifically increase your Alexa rank and won't let you use your Alexa redirect URL. Unless the other people in the exchange have the Alexa toolbar installed, it really isn't going to make that much difference to your rank.

Buy Traffic

There are an awful lot of sites out there that offer to sell you "targeted" traffic to your site. Be careful of these because I have used a few of them in the process of my research and have found that very few of them actually deliver unique visitors to your site each day. By unique visitors, I mean individual visits by different people in a day and not people returning in the same day. It is important to your Alexa rank that you have a large number of unique visitors every day.

When looking at these sites, there are a few tips to ensure that you get value for money. Firstly, install a hit counter on your site and set it so that it only counts unique visits rather than page loads; this will tell you how effective any bought traffic program is. Secondly, check their prices - they mostly seem to be around the $30 per 1000 visits. If they are more or less than this then they are too expensive or too cheap (there is one exception, carry on reading) and hence are unlikely to deliver. Finally, make sure that they provide a timescale over which the hits will be delivered and that you check your website stats to ensure that they do.

The exception to the one being too cheap that I mentioned is one called "Just Hits". I came across this entirely by accident during my research as they don't advertise to the general public and tend to be a bit geeky. In fact, they are so geeky that they suggest that you install a hit counter and then order 50 hits free before you use them. Then, if you order hits from them they will give you an extra 50 hits free for every thousand that you order (if you order 1000 you get 1050, if you order 2000 you get 2100 etc). They charge £10 (10GBP) per thousand hits that you order and deliver them over 48 hours from the time they receive your payment. This is the best "buy traffic" deal that I have used. You can find them at www.freewebs.com/justhits

What Worked Best For Me

During my research I have tried a number of services. I experimented with a number of websites to see what would work most effectively. One site's rank jumped just under half a million places up the rank in just a week using the following techniques:-

• putting the Alexa toolbar on my computer and getting about 100 friends to do the same
• 
  visiting the site every using the Alexa redirect URL and getting my friends to do the same
  (these two alone made virtually no difference!)
• used the service provided by Just Hits (I told them that I was researching for this article and asked if they would do it free but wouldn't!)

I have now used this for one my main sites and am continuing to use these techniques, buying 5,000 hits a weeks from Just Hits (this actually gives me 5,250 hits every week for just £50 which is well worth doing because I'm earning a lot more than this from advertising! If you want to quickly improve your rank then following this technique is well worth the money you need to spend because my site's rank is constantly increasing. Once it gets to where I want it, I will stop using this service and only use it again if the rank falls significantly.

What Was Mediocre For Me

On another site, I ran a test using the following

• putting the Alexa toolbar on my computer and getting about 100 friends to do the
  same
  visiting the site every using the Alexa redirect URL and getting my
  friends to do the same
  (these two alone made virtually no difference!)
• used the service provided by UpMyRank (it's free)
  

This made a small dent in my Alexa rank with it going up just over 500 places in a week. This is wholly free so no cash investment is required but it will take a lot longer for your rank to increase significantly but if you stick with it then your rank will increase over time.

What Failed Completely

On another experimental site, I tried the following

• putting the Alexa toolbar on my computer and getting about 100 friends to do the same
  visiting the site every using the Alexa redirect URL and getting my friends to do the same
  (these two alone made virtually no difference!)
• used a traffic exchange (in this case 24sevenhits)
  

In a week my rank hadn't changed at all. It hadn't gone up and it hadn't gone down. It just didn't move. In my opinion, it was a complete waste of time although when I joined another trraffic exchange (Traffic Temple) the rank for the site got worse rather than better!

What Is My Recommendation?

As always, I recommend that you do some research yourself. I'm not here to endorse any service but I have told you what has and hasn't worked for me. This may not be the case for you however if you are too busy or perhaps too lazy to undertake the research for yourself then I would suggest following the route that worked best for me. I have recommended this route to a friend who also tried it and found that his website's rank also improved.

A Word Of Caution

You should do any and all of the above before joining any advertising provider because you will probably find it is against their terms and conditions to use traffic exchanges etc. especially if you are being paid on a cost per impression basis (i.e. you get paid every time the advert is displayed!). You should only do this to improve your rank before you start selling adveritising in order to get the best price for your site. If you do continue to use these techniques to improve your rank whilst signed up to an advertising service then I would suggest that you create a special page that is advert free and use your Alexa redirect URL to direct to that page e.g., if you set up a page called hits.html at the mythical site called cheapfleas.com then make sure any Alexa ranking boosters refer to http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?cheapfleas.co.uk/hits.html
This means you will not be cheating your advertising service provider but you can still keep your rank value, and hence web or blog site value, high.