Online Advertising
If your site provides valuable content and attracts visitors, you could earn some more by selling on-line advertisements. There is basically two ways to do it: all by yourself or having somebody run your site.
Doing It Yourself
When you do everything by yourself, you have to create an offering for your potential advertisers. What do you offer for them in terms of audience and traffic? What are your prices and how they are calculated? Are the advertisers billed when the customer views the advertisement or only when an action is performed? Answer these questions, first to yourself, and create a fact sheet about your site, audience and terms.
When somebody is interested in advertisement, you have to make a contract with them. The contract can be quite short; there is no need to make things overcomplicated. Just to make sure that you can ban the advertisements if you don’t get the money from your customers. Then provide the banners on display and create required reports for your customers on weekly or monthly basis.
Letting Somebody to Take Care of It
If you do not want to go through the hassles of selling your space and billing your advertisers, you can enlist your site to some advertising selling agency.
If your site has quite low volume, it is run with a shared environment, the big players are not interested in you. Instead, you can get advertisements from online advertisement brokers that collect a big bunch of web sites (publishers) and offer this space to their advertisers.
When you enlist your site to a broker, you can select the advertisers you want to have on your site. The broker will be provide you the HTML code fragment to embed on your pages to make the advertisements work and generate revenue to you.
The brokers usually offer pay for performance programs, in other words you will get paid only if your visitor has performed some action on the advertiser site. This means usually either buying or registering. So you do not get any money from casual visitors that just glance the banners or maybe even click them, but do nothing else.
The way to success is the same as with affiliation. Have a good base of visitors and provide interesting advertisements for them. Only targeted marketing will create results and revenue in pay for performance programs.
Some brokers provide also pay for click or pay for view advertisements, but the margins are much lower than with pay for performance ads. Of course the changes that somebody really buys or registers are quite low, too.
Google AdSense
This service is also hosted, but the concept is slightly different and it fits better for small and medium sized sites. Google provides content-targeted ads for your site, and you are paid per clicks only. The ad targeting is based on the Google index of your pages, so your content decides the running ads.
The main asset in Google AdSense is its simplicity. When you have been accepted into the program, you may create new ads with a few mouse clicks and copy the HTML code to your pages. Google will take care of the rest, and you start to wait for getting clicks and money.