Leading the way in Internet Marketing and Development
Everyone these days is setting up websites these days but one of the things everyone is asking, is how do I make money? Well, we have a few tutorials on setting up your site to make money that we will be posting here in the coming days and weeks.
The tutorials will contain everything from putting advertising on your website to selling things over the internet.
Volume 2 Number 2
February 2010
Of all of the things that we can do to improve the monetization of our websites, the content is usually the item that drives the traffic to the site. Very rarely is it a novelty item that drives long term traffic. While it may provide a big initial pop and a huge turnover for a day or two, it is not the item that will provide that annual high traffic number that people look for when they are looking to buy ad space.
This is one reason sites like Yahoo, Google, MSN, and a handful of other websites are constantly making money. They have the thing that people want everyday. Also in this group is sites like The New York Times, Washington Post, and other major news outlets. People go there every day faithfully and read the content. They also click on Ads on these sites.
While we talked about Google Adsense last month, this month, we look at the other some other ad space buyers on the Internet. These include buysellads.com and chitika.com, two popular ad space buyers.
The concepts behind these two companies are different in each respect and are different from the approach taken by Google. While adsense is click-through driven, these other sites take more of a Commission Junction type approach, where the buyer of the ad space is paying the seller a commission on sales.
Buysellads.com actually puts the selling of the adspace into your complete control through their website. Their site allows you to submit a particular property for approval and then once approved, allows you to set the pricing for your ads. They will give you advice on the pricing but the actual price you charge for the ad space is purely up to you. This process is not much unlike what would happen in the real world except they bring the advertisers to you rather than you having to go out and find advertisers through cold calling or just having the advertisers come directly to you.
One other feature of the Buysellads.com website is that they give you real time stats on the ads performance allowing you to tailor a campaign if you are a buyer of ads space. If you are a publisher, this allows you to see how a particular sellers ads are doing on your website. Choosing the type of ads that run on your website as a publisher is important as this can make the difference between having an income and just giving away the space for free.
The only drawback to any of these sites is the approval / denial process can take a bit of time. Also when they deny sites, they have pretty strict standards for approval and deny sites for the following reasons:
Obviously, they have chosen to be in a very niche area and present that as a plus to their advertisers and customers alike. If you arent within these standards, we suggest you look at other alternatives.
Another ad company that is up and coming is Chitika.com. Until 3 months ago, I had never heard of them, however, as many of us in the industry know, the face of the Internet changes on almost a daily basis. Thus, this upstart ad company is growing in the industry by leaps and bounds. The reasoning behind this growth is two fold.
Firstly, Chitika offers more user targeted advertising outside of the general search targeting. This is a key item in actually getting ads that are in tune with your users. This select type advertising makes the items the are advertised come in line with what the content of the web site.
Secondly, Chitika allows you to set the price that you want to charge for the ads space. this is particularly key in producing income that is commensurate with where you want to be. Also, the ads displayed play a bit more nicely with other ad services such as Google which has extremely strict rules in what you can and cannot do as far as combining ad services on a particular page.
Unfortunately, Chitika only does in US / Canada advertising at the moment which is problematic since the Internet is a global reaching item. If 99% of your traffic only comes from the US, then this will not be a problem. But if you are like we are where your website has a global appeal, then you could wind up not having much monetization of your traffic.
With Google, the process is relatively instantaneous so that is the reason that Adsense is a bit more attractive to those who dont want to wait around for the approval process. Obviously, while Adsense has a mass appeal with the number of eyeballs on product, there are obviously other products out there that can help you to make money from your ad space. The one word of advice we always give our customers is keep a close eye on your traffic and adjust it accordingly.
Next month, we will cover some ideas about product sales on websites and the best methodologies of making products sell.
Volume 2 Number 1
January 2010
In the past two sections of this tutorial, we have covered two items which allow you to increase your revenue that your website brings in. There are others out there and this week we cover one that our actual milage with has been less than desirable with.
Commission Junction is an affiliate management house which brings together hundreds of advertisers who want to set up affiliate programs with the web masters and Commission Junction manages the whole lot. While this has its advantages, it also has some severe down sides as you will see later in this tutorial. However, for those who do not have the time to manage their own affiliate programs, they will find the Commission Junction brings together a great assortment of advertisers.
The good thing about a place like commission junction is that they can bring together advertisers from almost every realm. Thus if you are a web master with a pet grooming site, you will likely found advertisers whose programs are specifically tuned towards that type of site and that are selling pet foods or grooming supplies. This can go a long way in bringing the site and the advertising into line so that the site seems to be seamless and not overrun with ads.
Commission Junction also shows you the percentages, the sales terms, and the amount per sale that you will receive when you sign up to run a certain advertiser's promotions. And like Adsense, they provide the code for the ad based on the size of ad you choose. While they do have a good number of sizes, compared to Adsense, the number of ad sizes is somewhat limited.
The biggest disadvantage to Commission Junction is the fact that people tend to select too many advertisers for their website. Thus their website becomes one big billboard for everyone else's products instead of your website with information for the end user. While it may seem prudent to include a number of ads in order to hedge your bets, I have found that this does not exactly translate into money. Your ads need to be selective and inline with what your website is about.
PlentyofFish.com is one site that proves that this inline concept works. Their site is a dating site that only carries ads for dating sites. They make money handily and they are not doing anything special other than being selective in the ads they place and while one may think that you would not want to advertise other sites when yours is the one you want people to come to, you also need to remember, that those other sites are the ones that are paying the ads. And while your site will be a passthrough point for those other sites, keep in mind at the average eyeball time on a particular site is very low unless their is something specifically that users want.
Commission Junction is a good collection of advertisers but a lot of the responsibility for selecting a good advertising plan lies completely with the web master and Commission Junction will not help you with this process other than to provide possibilities and to provide statistics on the performance of the ads. This means that you must take more time to select ads that fit.
This is where Adsense and other advertisers are better for a website than Commission Junction. The other websites use keyword tracking to place the appropriate ads and Comission Junction uses you to place the ads.
While this type of advertising management company is alright for some users, most individual users will find that they should stick with Adsense or other advertisers that are more attuned towards the individual user.
Next month, we will take a look at some of the other advertisers in the ad placement real including BuySellAds.com and other similar sites.
Volume 1 Number 2
December 2009
Over the past 10 years or so, Google has become the leader in advertising on the internet. One might even say they have become the only game in town when it comes to standard advertising online, however, this would be disrespectful to the dozens of companies that compete in the same arena.
The one great thing Google brings to the table is revenues and eyeballs. One of the most important things in making money on the Internet is that you must have traffic. Google provides the perfect way to drive advertising to the site that you are trying to get traffic to and they provide one of the easiest systems for providing the ads.
Signing up for Adsense is the first step in using their system. The entire signup process takes less than 10 minutes and is relatively simple. If you live in the US, be prepared to provide tax identification information to them, especially if you are setting up the Adsense account for a business. But individuals will need their Social Security Number in order to complete the setup and begin receiving payments.
Users in other countries don't need to provide such tax identification information. However, you will still need to comply with local laws of the country you live in. These days, Google even provides the Adsense currencies in the local countries currency making it easier to track in other countries.
Once you have your Adsense account set up, you will need to decide on the number of ads you will carry (1-3 per page), the size of the ad, and the location on the page. There are complete studies out there that say that an ad in a particular location does much better at attracting the user than do ads in other locations. It is important to place the ads in line with the content, taking care to not over whelm the content, but instead make the ad supplement the content.
One thing that Google does not take kindly to is people telling users to click on an ad. In fact, it goes against the terms of service. In other words, you cannot say things like "Support XYZ by clicking an ad". They are always checking for such enticements and it really isnt necessary to tell users that if you have set things up appropriately.
One item that you need to adhere fairly strictly to is your keywords. Certain keywords do actually perform better than others. You will find that the Keywords you choose for the pages on your website will attract certain types of ads. The ads that perform the best will be ones that are similar to the content in your website. Also, make sure that the keywords are related to the content of your web page. This will not only help with the ads but also with the ranking in the search engines. These days, the search engines have become much smarter and are placing those sites that are factual near the top of the rankings. Thus it is best not to try to fool them by putting illogical keywords.
It has been our experience with Google Adsense that one ad per page performs better than 2 or 3 per page. Primarily, this is due to the fact that, in this manner, the ad blends into the page rather than over powering the page with ads. Your milage in this respect may vary.
The great thing about Google Adsense is that the code for the ad is a nice little Java Script that will basically fit seamlessly right into you web page. We have used a variety of publishing tools including hand programming and the ads have always fit right in. The only thing to make sure of when placing the ad is to make sure to get the correct size otherwise, it will slip off the end of the area you want it to be placed in.
One thing many people arent too keen on with Google Adsense is the lack of transparency. While your server stats show you one thing, Google's may show another. But there is no way to verify these differences in a meaningful manner. However, the fact that Google is providing the money, means that they can distribute it how they see fit.
While we have had a very successful time with our Google Adsense, you may want to choose one of the other advertising companies out there. But we say to check out the company first, and we will talk about some of those companies in upcoming issues of Making Money on The Internet.
Volume 1 Number 1
November 2009
There are several things that will allow the end user to make money on the internet, all within the realm of legality and none of it particularly difficult. It is more about persevering and having a bit of patience.
We started adding advertising to our website, Virtual Apple ][ in 2005 when we saw that traffic on the site was increasing to the point where we figured we should ad the advertisements to help off-set the costs of the server and the bandwidth. This presented new issues that were not only challenging but gave us a list of questions a mile long.
Which advertiser do we choose? How much will we make? Will the users rebel against the ads on the site? What key words work the best.
We started out by selecting what we thought was one of the better advertisers in the business at the time, Amazon.com. While, one might wonder what we would look at from them, we figured there were a ton of things that went hand in hand from them.
Game consoles, electronic games, books in both the programming realm as well as the how to realm. It was a match made in heaven as far as we could see from the perspective of matching content with products. Of course, the site was catering to the vintage realm, thus we placed ads for books of projects that were more for the vintage aficionado. This proved quite popular with the browsers, but the problem is always making sure to push the sale through.
To facilitate the sale, one must create a page which truly sells the book or the product that you have listed on the page as an advertisement. While this may seem like a lot of work to make a few dollars, the rewards of a bit of extra work in a web site can also put the customer in the mood to absolutely buy the product. No work into a sale means that the customer is left up to his or her own wiles and whims as to whether a product is really necessary. Part of the purpose of creating the sales page is to inform the user so that they can make an intelligent purchase. It can also give them that overwhelming urge to purchase the product due to the amount of detail provided about the product.
This type of sales page is particularly important if you are trying to sell your own product. Do you have a novel the software package that you have written, which you think is the best thing since sliced bread? Then you have to make the user feel that way too. This is the same attitude that you must take when you are selling other folks products, particularly if you are tying in specific products into your website.
While you can rely on other advertisement management systems to figure out the sales part, our suggestion is that you go directly to the source. Amazon.com 's affiliate program is a good one for those who want to include books and DVD's or electronic gadgets in amongst their content.
The affiliate program web site which is at https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ provides several types of advertising including the standard Links and Banner ads, as well as specialized things like widgets and even a self contained store feature which allows you to set up an affiliate store containing only those items you find fit the persona of your website.
These days, the program also offers new tools that allow you to add products to your blog if you use Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com) or to send tweets with ads and ad links in them if you are on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com). The Twitter posts are posted to Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) as well if you have the posting feature turned on through the Twitter website.
The really cool thing about Amazon's afilliate program is that the more referrals and sales you send them, the more your percentage goes up. This is a boon for those that are sending more traffic to the site. However this can only be accomplished through good management of the ads .
One important note is to remember that many people have ad blockers installed these days which means that a good number of your readers will not be seeing the ads you put up in the first place. This is why it is important to vary the type of ads and include links to the sales pages strategically placed in the content of your website. This will allow the user to be exposed to the ads even if their browser is blocking them. This is easily accomplished with the way Amazon handles the ads and the store.
While we have covered a few tools here to help you get started in advertising on your website. But this is only the beginning of this real of advertising. There are many other advertising avenues and we will be talking about those in the coming tutorials.
All content on this website (c) 2004-2010 Seattle OmniWorks All Rights Reserved.
