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How to Make Money on Your Website - Using Ads

Small Online Business Idea: Making money with your high traffic and/or high reputation website using Ads.

(The rest of this post assumes you’ve already got one or many high traffic/high quality websites. If you haven’t finished step 1 yet, go here for information on how to build a high traffic website.)

Getting Money from Putting Ads on your Website - Basics:

One of the easiest ways to make money online is by selling advertising on your website. There are many major services on the market, so the process is extremely simple. In other words, they’re easy to install, easy to run, and its easy to collect payment.

How it Works:

Businesses all over the world are trying to get consumers’ attention and get their message in front of an audience. In the offline world, this includes magazines, TV, radio spots, etc. In the online world, it means any website with an audience, which means you and your website.

In order for ease of administration, these businesses go to a major broker in order to sell a bunch of ads across a network of good websites. The biggest brokers are listed below. These brokers then need websites to place their ads on, which is where you come in.

By adding a small piece of code to your website, major brokers gain the ability to display ads on your website for as long as the code is left untouched. Once the ads are there, there are 3 main methods by which you can get paid for having these ads:

1) CPM (cost per mil / cost per thousand / cost per impression) – Every time an ad gets displayed 1000 times, you get paid the agreed amount. This can be good for very high traffic websites.

2) CPC (cost per click) – Every time a visitor clicks on an ad, you get paid the agreed amount. This can be good for a high traffic website or a site within a niche where visitors are likely to click on ads for more information.

3) CPA (cost per acquisition) – Every time a visitor buys an item on another site after getting there directly from your website, you get paid the agreed amount or % of revenue. This can be really lucrative or result in little revenue, depending on your niche and the likelihood of people buying something.

The best thing to do is try different models, let each system run for an appropriate amount of time, and then see which model produces the best results.

Dangers:

The biggest danger is the loss of a hot prospect in the event that you have a higher-value potential conversion on your website. If a visitor might be worth $500 dollars to you, but they leave on an ad that gives you $0.15, putting ads on your site might be the worst strategy you can implement.

For information-based sites, some website visitors do not like seeing ads. As a result, your readership may be offended and culled if you introduce ads to your website.

Also, putting ads on a high-profile website can look petty or unprofessional, which is not worth the damage to your brand if you’re only going to get a few bucks out of it.

Some of these sites sell ads primarily to get inbound links to their website to trick Google into giving them higher search rankings. Sites that try to sell links based on their value for “increasing your link value” are highly disfavoured by Google. So, if your website relies heavily on Google traffic and you don’t want to get penalized by Google, consider staying clear of these companies (see list below). The details surrounding this last danger are contentious and numerous; a fodder for a future post…

Important Partners:

By far the easiest and best system to get started with is Google’s Adsense program. Sign-up should take less than 5 minutes, and you can have ads on your site in as little as 10 minutes. Plus, its free, trustworthy, user-friendly, and has a large number of people buying ads through it (so the ads on your site will likely be relevant to your content.)

For those of you convinced to try something beyond Adsense, the following vendors are places to start your search (although I think this list is a complete waste of time):

User beware if you rely on Google traffic: