Summary: You can generate a return from your website using Google Adwords and other pay per click schemes.
If you’re not already selling stuff on your website but are successfully building some traffic, perhaps you should consider ways that you can make your website pay – either to cover your website hosting fees or to generate a second income. Pay per click advertising schemes enable you to give up a bit of your space for Google, or other pay per click schemes, to drop in adverts. These ads are usually relevant to the content of your page so users interested in the topic you’re talking about should in theory be also interested in the adverts on your page.
Google Adsense is the most popular pay per click program. You create ad boxes in the size and colour that best fits your site and then Google feed ads into those boxes which are relevant to your visitors (based on your content).
The best results from this come from ads placed above the fold (i.e. displayed without the user having to scroll down the page) and ads blended with content (e.g. in blog posts).
Adsense have other ways to make money with them too – there is Adsense for search which places a search box on your website. When users type search terms and conduct a search, the regular search results page opens with more pay per click ads on like any other Google search result. If they click an ad, that’s where you make money. You can customise the search results to match your site.
You can also make money from AdSense for feeds, which places relevant ads in feeds Google manages for you. Adsense for domains allows you to display ads on your parked domains. Adsense for mobile content is just placing regular adsense ads on your mobile site if you have one. When you sign up to Adsense, you can create any of these types of ads.
To figure out which content on your site is likely to perform well, use Google Keyword Tool and look for high advertiser competition as these pay more. Top performers are often mortgages, financial services etc. Make sure your content is good quality and original, or readers will lose interest and not get as far as your advert! Also, make sure it has sufficient keyword usage for Adsense to fully understand what your site is about – there’s no need to keyword stuff but you do need to use a reasonable quantity of keywords to get accurate ads (a regular 3-4% keyword density is fine).
Organic traffic from Google generates better results with Adsense – social media users are more tech savvy and ignore these ads.
There are other programs besides Adwords – try:
- AdBrite – http://www.adbrite.com/
- AdToll – http://www.adtoll.com/publishers_faq
- BidVertiser – http://www.bidvertiser.com/bdv/BidVertiser/bdv_publisher.dbm
- Chitika – http://chitika.com/publishers/
- Clicksor – http://www.clicksor.com/
- Google Adsense - https://www.google.com/adsense/
- Infolinks – http://www.infolinks.com/
- ValueClickMedia – http://www.valueclickmedia.com/
- Yahoo Publisher Network – http://publisher.yahoo.com/
Avoid Exit Junction if you’re using Adsense – Google state at clause 5 (iii) of the Google Adsense agreement that ‘attempt to deviate end users from a search result page or a referral page is prohibited’. It is thought by SEO experts that this could also affect natural search engine rankings and so should be avoided.
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