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.