Advertising Online

Recently through one of my clients, TheProgressivePolitico.com, I’ve opened up the door of ad serving to smaller websites. As some of you know I work at COXnet and I have about 1 ½ years experience with DART as well as a couple of months experience with Yahoo! APT. Well, both of those have a yearly cost that can eat away at the revenue that you may have earned from any advertising on your website.

After some searching, I’ve found a few different solutions and after looking into the pros and cons of each of these solutions I decided to go with OpenX. OpenX allows for the standard statistics, tracking, and setup. One of the major pros to this is that it’s free, you install it on your server and the rest is up to you. It’s widely used among smaller websites and businesses. There is an active community, and support forum that others regularly help out on.

There are a few different types of advertising that you can do through your website to help earn revenue.

I think the most popular is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is when you display similar products, or services. When somebody clicks on the ad, they are taken to another website and if they buy something then you get either a percentage of that sale or a flat rate. The bonus to affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to have a lot of traffic to have ads on your website; you don’t have to stress out about under delivering impressions, not having a high click ration, finding new people to advertise on your site. There are a few sites out there that combine many different affiliate programs and show you the percentage that they offer, or the standard amount than what they will pay for leads.

Another type of advertising is what you see on the bigger websites. This would be selling ad space depending on how many page views you get each month. For example, you could tell a possible advertiser that you get 50,000 page views a month and you will sell them a spot on your website to advertise. The biggest difference is that no matter if people click on the ad, you still get paid. You could sell 10,000 impressions for say $200. You don’t have to have people click on the ad, they just have to see the ad. The reason that not as many people do this is because you have to get a lot of traffic to your site, and you also have to find advertisers to buy this ad space.