Add Advertising to Your Website
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If you own any form of advertising media, it always seems difficult to find advertisers willing to part with their hard earned cash and provide decent copy. However, if you have a web-site of your own, you can avoid the need to approach advertisers yourself and look to add other people's ready made advertising banners to it, using an affiliate program scheme which will earn a stream of income based on people being directed away from your website to one of the advertisers. You can also use these plans for carefully selected email targeting, although the rules on doing this are strict and generally require you to properly maintain opt-in email lists. The amount of money you receive depends upon the advertiser and whether they pay commission for sales only (or for joining the advertiser's website), or dependent upon the number of unique visitors that click on their banner. For this reason, it is imperative that you steer clear of free webspace as much as possible, since the providers will generally only allow a very limited amount of storage space and bandwidth (that is the traffic between the server where your website is stored and the visitors' browsers); and will almost certainly mean that additional advertising is added to each webpage by the company who provide the free webspace. Some search engines also seem to rate sites lower which are stored on free web hosting or which do not have their own domain name. We would therefore recommend that you look for a low cost webspace provider, who offer fairly high bandwidth limits. It is for this reason, that we would recommend iPower or one of the similar low cost high quality web hosting providers, since they provide 800MB storage, 40GB bandwidth per month, for a cost of only $6.95pm (with no set up fees and free domain registration).
Although adding advertising banners may seem an easy way of making money, you need to find a way of
enticing visitors to your website to click on the banners - this involves adding
interesting content and a lot of work on your part generally. Although
some advertisers provide ways of customising your links to their websites, it
can generally be difficult to direct customers to an advertiser. The rule
is simple - ensure that your adverts relate closely to the context of your
website and will therefore appeal to your visitors. Some
of the affiliate programs do however, allow you to create a store front,
offering for sale all of the products offered by the companies who are signed up
to that affiliate program.
You will also need to
consider how to market your own website - although you can create your own
banner adverts and create your own affiliate
program through one of the many providers covered in our review, the
easiest way is to use a service such as the ever popular
Overture
If you are interested in adding affiliate programs to your website,
or use email targeting, we would
recommend that you read our review of affiliate
programs
An easy way of adding banners to your website is also to use Google AdSense
which can works by providing a set of advertisements which appear to be relevant
to the text on the webpage where you insert the code provided by Google.
You can also add a Google search button, which will include the usual search
results from Google, but will have the benefit that you share any revenue from
the paid for adverts which appear. Some websites have been known to earn $1000+
per month from these adverts because of the fact that they are targeted
specifically at the people browsing your website. However, you do
have to carefully read the terms and conditions associated with Google AdSense,
and if they believe that your site has been subject to click fraud, you may be
removed from their program without much right of appeal.
This is where Google AdSense suffers with its
reputation. Because advertisers pay according to click throughs (rather than on
actual sales), Google needs to heavily police its links and banners in order to
try and detect where the adverts are shown on other search sites, or where
people are being promoted to click on the links. One of the effects of
this is that they may see a site as attracting click fraud (for example where
the site might be paying people to click on as many links as possible, or using
software to do it automatically). However, this can be replicated by your
competitors (or people who have a grudge), by going to your site and constantly
clicking on as many of the Google adverts as possible without spending any time
on the target sites. To give you an idea of the sort of earnings
available - we have provided a table of our earnings from the previous month
below. This does of course vary month to month and also depends upon the
advertisers which you promote on your website. Our
Advertising Commission Earned in 2006 | ||||||||||||||||
