Back on September 11 I posted an article, “Easy Ways to Make Money Blogging.” I decided to focus a little more on the advertising part of that today. There are several types of advertising that can be used to earn money from your website. If your site has a lot of visitors, it can be very worthwhile to use a balanced advertising plan to ‘monetize’ your website content.

There are three major types of online advertising: Pay-per-impression (CPM), pay-per-click (CPC), and pay-per-action (CPA, CPL, CPS).

Pay-per-impression pays you a set amount for every 1000 times an advertisement is displayed to your website’s visitors. The payout is usually low, but you can be sure of a certain level of return - based on the number of visits your site receives per month. This is also known as CPM (Cost per 1000).

Pay-per-click pays you a set amount each time someone clicks on the advertisement on your site. The payout is higher than pay-per-impression, but you can’t be sure how many visitors will actually click on these advertisements. The more relevant the ads are to the page content, the more likely the visitor is to click on the ad. This is also known as CPC (Cost per click)

Pay-per-action commands the highest payout, but you ONLY get paid if the visitor that you refer goes on to make some pre-defined interaction, such as placing an order on the target website. Unless the ads on your website are very closely related to the content of your website, the chances that this kind of interaction will happen are rather slim, so you would need to have a very high level of traffic to make this type of ad worthwhile. This is also known as CPA (Cost per action), which is further divided into CPL (Cost per lead), and CPS (Cost per sale).

Overall, pay-per-click is probably the easiest way to start earning money from your website quickly. It can’t make you rich, but each type of income helps.

Google Adwords program is a very quick and easy way to earn money by way of content relevant advertising. You just sign up for an adsense account, specify some basic details about your site, and Google will generate some code for you. Simply place the code on your site to start earning money every time someone clicks on the advertisements.

The best thing about adwords is that the advertisements they choose to display are automatically selected to be relevant to the content of the page that they appear on. This makes the ads much more interesting to your website’s visitors. The downside is that the revenue is not very good - generally just one to a few cents per click.

Another good alternative, is to use an advertising agency. The plan is similar to adwords, but you can choose the advertisements from several offered to you, rather than the ads being automatically generated based on the page content. And the pay per click is generally higher than with Google, but the range of ads and their relevance may be somewhat limited, so your CTR (’click through rate’ - ratio of clicks to visitors) could be lower.

If you can find an affiliate program with a high degree of relevance to your site, this may generate some impressive revenue. For example, if the visitors to your site are interested webpage templates, you might try affiliation with Template Monster(affil). Most affiliate programs have various levels of participation for different website needs. Webhosts may not design themselves, but they may happily receive income from the affiliate ads displayed on their website along with webhosting content.

From Rags to Riches,
Arthur Browning