the Chitika eMini-Malls.
Advertising Agencies
The easiest way to put advertising on your site is to sign up with one of the internet advertising agencies. These agencies are relatively hassle free. They'll place one or more banner advertisements on your site and will handle all aspects of maintaining and rotating the ads. All you'll need to do is to put their information into your HTML code wherever you want their banners to appear. If you are uncertain how to do this, don't worry about it, they'll walk you through the whole process.
Most advertising revenue is generated by click throughs. A click through occurs every time someone clicks on one of the ad banners. Depending on which advertising agency you use and how much traffic your site gets, you can expect to receive anywhere from $0.10 to $0.25 in commission for every click through on your site. Some advertising agencies also pay you for impressions. Every time an advertising banner appears on your site, whether it is clicked on or not, you will be credited with an impression. Since impressions occur continuously while a visitor is on your site, the commission for impressions is far less than that for click throughs, often only a fraction of a cent per impression.
The tools to make money from your content are all at Google AdSense. Essentially you choose image or text ad units. Google's automatic bot reads your page and chooses the most contextually appropriate ads to serve on your page. That means a page about cats will show ads related to cats. This helps ensure that the ads served are relevant to your page, which is good for your visitors as well as good targetting for the advertisers.
The best advertising agency we've come across is Advertising.com. There are two reasons that we prefer Advertising.com to the other internet advertising agencies. The first is that their commissions are top flight. However, it is another advantage that really sets them apart from the rest of the field: the way they utilize technology to maximize the profits of their customers. Advertising.com monitors the success of each ad banner they place on your site, and use the results to determine which banners to put on your site in the future. For instance, if ads for sporting goods generate a higher percentage of click throughs than other advertisements on your site, their technology will identify this trend and automatically start increasing the amount of sporting goods ads your site receives. Although it may seem obvious that this type of strategy can increase revenue for all parties involved, they are still surprisingly unique for utilizing this approach.
The downside of going with an advertising agency is that you won't have much control over what ads appear on your site. The majority of site owners don't consider this a problem since their interests and the interests of the advertising agency are substantively the same; maximizing profits. However, others don't like the uncertainty of not knowing what will appear on their site. These individuals may object to the content of certain ads or be concerned that ads for their competitors will somehow appear on their site.
Affiliate Advertising
Anyone who wants to have complete control over what appears on their site should handle the advertising themselves. The easiest way to do this is through affiliate programs, which we describe in greater detail in our Affiliate section. Through affiliate programs you are able to partner with those companies whose products you want to sell on your site, and to determine for yourself how you want to advertise their products. The difference here is that the revenue you earn will more commonly be based on results rather than based on click throughs or impressions. For instance, if the affiliate program pays for sales only, a sale will need to be closed by your site visitor who clicked on your affiliate link. One important tip is to try to find affiliate programs that pay per lead. This usually involves your visitor signing up for a free service or newsletter, but many programs pay $1-$2 per lead. That kind of money can add up quickly if you've got good traffic at your site.
Chitika eMiniMalls
We've found one in-between option as well, Chitika eMini Malls. You can choose keywords that are best targetted for your page, or an array of keywords, and Chitika will display products with comparative pricing, description, and customer reviews.
The advantage of Chitika links is that they hit the impulse buyer with targetted ads full of information to help them along the buying process. The disadvantage is that not everywhere you click on the ad actually tracks payment. Yeah, stupid, and if you can find a better option, you may want to. However, there are times when this odd little feature may be worth suffering through in order to monetize your page content.
In general, try Google AdSense first. You're more likely to make a decent penney straight off.
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