How Small Websites Can Make Money From Advertisers
Think of your website as a magazine with ad space available. Just as a magazine changes content to attract people, you should do the same to give visitors to your website a reason to come back on a regular basis.
The number of people who read a magazine, or the circulation figures are important to the magazine’s advertisers, just as the number of visitors to your website is important to advertisers because it means the greater the number of readers or visitors the greater the exposure of ads to people.
How can I attract visitors to my website?
You might already sell a service or product, but you could also become a resource site as an added incentive to keep people coming back. You could have relevant content and visitors’ feedback on the particular area you specialize in.
Change your content regularly either by writing it yourself or inviting others to provide relevant articles that they have a particular interest in. But be sure the ‘guest’ articles are not for competing or too similar websites that would take your visitors away from you.
You could provide a directory of resources with links to many other useful sites that aren’t usually found in one place.
Submit your website to relevant Internet directories, a good place to start would be Google or Yahoo directories simply because of the number of visitors they get. You could try more specialized directories depending on your business type.
Offer visitors the opportunity to be informed when new content is added to your website with an e-mail alert to encourage them to revisit.
Where do I find advertisers?
You can use an advertising network to sell the ad space on your website. An advertising network is a marketplace for a collection of online advertising inventory from many different advertisers.
The advertising network determines the rates that advertisers will pay depending on the demand for your kind of website. Revenue from the ads is shared with you by the advertising network.
Most ads are sold on a CPM basis, per thousand page views or impressions. The more targeted the audience the higher the cost of the CPM.
A pay-per-click (PPC) ad is one where you are paid every time a visitor clicks on the ad, the rate is usually higher than the CPM rate.
Pay-per-sale or lead, also called pay-per-acquisition, pay-per-action (PPA) has the highest payment rates. Visitors click through the ad and either purchase or take some other kind of prescribed action such as sign up for a service.
The advertisements appearing on your website can be in a number of different formats, but all you have to do is insert some HTML supplied by the advertising network and they serve the ads straight to your website.
The better advertising networks will let you review the ads that are to appear on your website so that you can decide which advertisers are suitable.
Some of the biggest ads networks are Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network, AdBrite, Right Media’s Remix Media Network, Tribal Fusion, Kanoodle’s BriteAds, ValueClick, Casale Media, Ewo Click, Advertising.com, Feedburner, and RealTech Network.
