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.