Get Started

Advertising revenue is one of the most effortless ways to earn money from your site. You merely have to put the banner there and wait for the money to roll in. (Well, okay, not quite. You will still need to have some visitors first before you can make anything.)

Why wait? If you already have a website, let it earn even while you sleep (literally). Every day you let your site "idle" without advertising is a day of lost opportunity.

All the best in your endeavour! Remember also to check out our other article, Increasing Your Affiliate Program Income.

Automated Context-Sensitive Advertising

One of the latest trends in website sponsorship is to sign up with an advertising network like Google Ad Sense The advertising network automatically checks your web page and determines the most relevant advertisement for the page. As a result, without much additional effort from you, you get advertisements targeted at the interests of your visitors. As mentioned earlier, targeted ads tend to result in better performance and returns.

How to Choose an Affiliate Program

How should you choose an affiliate program? My suggestion is not to choose a program according to the payment scheme, but rather according to the kind of people who are likely to visit your website. For example, if you are targeting parents on your site, links to affiliates with educational software, books and the like may generate more revenue than banners that link to web hosting companies. The most important rule of choosing an affiliate program is to know your target audience.

Another point to consider is whether you really want to join every single affiliate program that comes your way. Some studies suggest that sites that make the most money from affiliate programs are affiliates of only a small handful of programs. Furthermore, concentrating your advertisements from one network may allow you to be paid faster. If you advertise for hundreds of different affiliate networks on your site, you may wind up earning only (say) a few dollars per month from each network. If your advertiser's minimum payment amount is higher than what you can earn each month, it may take you a long time before you accrue enough to be paid.

On the other hand, that formula does not necessarily hold true for every site (or every page on your site, for that matter). For example, if your site has a particular theme, and an affiliate network only supports one or two suitable advertisers, you might want to sign up for a few affiliate networks so as to get a greater number of relevant advertisers. After all, advertisements that are relevant to your audience are more likely to be taken up than general advertisements. (What's the point of putting banners from only one affiliate if nobody is going to click them?)

Cost Per Sale or Lead

While you will probably get the highest payment rates with this method, it has the lowest conversion rate of the three schemes. You will only earn if your visitors click through the banner and either purchase an item from the advertiser or take some other prescribed action (eg, sign up for a service). Like the Pay per Click method, you get much better results if you carefully select your advertisers to suit the target audience of your site.

In general, to avoid wasting resources in issuing cheques for very small amounts, advertisers will usually accrue the amount owing to you until it reaches a certain level (such as $25) before they pay you.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

When you are paid per click, you are only paid when visitors click the advertiser's banner on your site. The amount paid is usually higher than the pay per impression scheme. Whether you get a high conversion rate here depends on the banner (whether it attracts people to click it), although in general, it has a higher conversion rate than the pay per sale method. A high traffic site will probably enjoy a higher click rate than a lower traffic site, although you will probably get better results if your banners are carefully selected to suit the target audience of your site.

Cost Per Impression (CPM)

Here, you are paid according to the number of times the advertiser's banner is displayed on your site. The amount you earn is typically calculated based on the number of thousand impressions of the banner (impressions = number of times the banner is displayed), often abbreviated CPM (cost per thousand, with the M being the Latin numeral for thousand). That is, $5 CPM means that you get paid $5 for 1,000 displays of the banner. In general, the amount paid is usually small, but it is easy to earn since everytime a visitor loads the page, you earn. This is known as a "high conversion rate". Needless to say, this method will allow you to automatically earn more if your site attracts a lot of visitors.

Payment Schemes

Before joining any program, you should probably be aware of the different payment schemes available.

Cost Per Impression (CPM)

Cost Per Click (CPC)

Cost Per Sale or Lead

Making Money From Advertising

If you look at many websites, you will probably notice that there are banner advertisements displayed on most pages. If you are a newcomer to the scene, you might think that you must either be a company or that your site must be famous before you can get advertisers, just as it is the case in hardcopy publications.

In reality, anyone with a website can get advertisers. While it is true that if your site is well-known, you may get companies contacting you to offer to advertise on your site, you can get advertising revenue even if you are just starting out and your site is relatively unknown.
The way to do this is to join as an "affiliate" of various sites, either directly, or through an affiliate network. An affiliate network is simply an intermediary where you can select from a variety of

EASY WAY TO GET MONEY

Now that you've created a website, how do you make money from it? There are at least two ways in which sites can make money:

Advertising Revenue

Selling Goods and Services

I shall deal with the second case, "Selling goods and services", in another article. In this article, I will address the issue of how your site can actually make money from advertising

EARNING TIPS

Google AdSense is easy to install on a web page or blog and constitutes additional source of income without spending anything. You have to apply on-line for Google AdSense Program and generally approval comes from Google within two days. Those having AdWord account can use AdWord e-mail address and password for AdSense account also. After acceptance of application, Google confirms creation of your Adsense account thru e-mail. You get a code for AdSense text ads and another code for AdSense search. These codes are to be installed on web page or blog and within minutes the page will start displaying ads from Google, and a Google search bar. AdSense is available in dozen languages worldwide. The code for AdSense can be placed on any of your web pages. I think placing it on your blog will give you distinct advantage because blogs have several points in their favor. They are easily indexed by search engines. Recently two of my simple blogs were indexed by Google within 2-3 days of submission of URL's which I think is quite fast. With Yahoo! it is even easier - just add the URL of your blog to your My Yahoo page and Yahoo! will start accessing it immediately. GoogleAlert is a free tool that can be used to know when your blog is indexed by Google. You can have your blog up and running in minutes free of cost from several sites that provide this service. I personally use blogger.com. With blogs you do not need to worry about designing websites, registering domain name or hiring web site hosting service. You simply write your content on the blog and it is ready for publication. An excellent example on how to blend the blogs with adsense can be found on websites With AdSense wide range of options is available - number of ads for display, shape and size of display, color schemes. More than 200 colors are available from which you can choose color for border, background and text. 24 pre-set color palettes are readily available; in addition you can have your own custom-palette to match with the appearance of your web page. Similarly, color schemes are available for Google search bar. When the web page is opened, Google ads are placed which match with the content of the page and are highly relevant. Google finds right ads for the web page from 100,000 AdWord advertisers. Several options are available for the ads that you would like to be displayed on your page. Ad filters can be activated which will block up to 200 URL's of your choice which you do not want to show on your page. You may like to filter away ads from your competitors. You can even choose your own default ads for display. Google uses sensitive content filters to prevent display of sensitive material. If you find that your page is not really getting relevant ads, it may be time to look critically at the content of the page, particularly the keywords used in text, links and tags. Little SE optimization of the page should resolve this problem. Sometimes Google places public service ads when no target ads are available. To suppress public service ad, it is possible to specify your own image ad or HTML page ad which will appear in place of public service ad. This ensures that some ad is always present there. Or, if you like, the space reserved for Adsense ads can be made to collapse. AdSense tracker is another useful feature which tracks the ads on your pages and generates report for you. The reports can be customized based on requirement. Typically reports can give page impressions displayed, number of clicks and click-thru rates. It is also possible to check earnings any time.