If you hope to make some money from your website, you might consider allowing ads to generate some revenue. This approach isn’t for everyone, but it can be very effective in helping to cover the costs of running your site. Numerous large sites on the Internet do this, including many forums, hobby sites, and the popular dating site, PlentyOfFish. This approach of allowing ads to show on your site to generate revenue is often called monetization.

The amount of income you could possibly generate for your site largely depends on the amount of traffic your website brings in and the type of visitors that come to your site.

Consider your competitors

If you’re a business that sells through your website, there’s a good chance that your competitors’ ads will show up on your site, so you’ll need to think about the implications of allowing this:

• You can block URLs from specific advertisers to prevent competitor ads from being displayed.
• The earnings per click would potentially be low due to the ad’s lack of relevance.

Option 1: AdSense

Google offers two separate programs for website advertising, AdSense and DoubleClick. You will have to think about which one will work best for you.

Google serves ads based primarily on the content of the website and the location of the user. Those who wish to advertise with Google’s targeted ads system can sign up through their Adwords program.

AdSense allows other businesses to advertise on your website and has a number of benefits:

• Ideal for smaller sites that don’t have the resources for ad sales programs.
• easy to implement
• low maintenance
• Text is often considered less intrusive to visitors than graphics.

Option 2 – Banner Ad with DoubleClick

DoubleClick allows display banner ads, while AdSense allows both banners and text. Banners are a good way to establish brand identity. Be careful with your choice, as you don’t want to drive away regular visitors from your site by focusing too much on advertising.

• You can target the type of audience and match with more relevant advertising
• Effectively sell your ad space inventory to advertisers
• Potentially difficult to sell to advertisers if site visitor volumes are relatively low
• The default value returns to AdSense if the inventory does not sell.

Option 3 – Direct Sales of Advertisers

You can always offer yourself the sale of advertising space on your website; many forums do this themselves with a “classifieds” section. Forum members pay to advertise their own businesses in these sections, and some sites allow the ads to appear as banners within other pages of their sites.

With this approach, you will bear the overhead of selling and managing your website’s ad space yourself. This can be a huge headache for some small businesses that don’t have the time or resources to manage it.

The fees you may receive may be small, and you may find it difficult to convince other businesses that your site is worth advertising, especially if your number of visitors is relatively small.

Option 4 – Affiliate Advertising

You might consider affiliate advertising whereby you are paid a commission on any potential sale triggered by a referral from your website.

Commission Junction www.cj.com is a very popular company that offers this type of service. Current examples of commission percentages are:

• keepit.com online backup (30% commission)
• envelopes.com (5-15% commission)
• vistaprint (3-16% commission)
• grapas.com (6% commission)

Advantages of affiliate advertising

• Requires some initial handling but generally low maintenance
• You have full control over who you target and what assets you use, eg banner ads, deep links, etc.
• You earn commission on sales

conclusion

Allowing ads on your website is not for everyone and you should consider how your visitors will react to ads. Many modern web browsers have options and extensions available to hide ads on websites. Personally, I’d recommend trying the AdSense or DoubleClick options first, as they’re easy to implement and easy to remove. If you find these to be successful, you can always consider selling your own ad space or affiliate advertising later on. Many visitors now accept the fact that websites must be paid for, and advertisements are one of the few ways to ensure that popular websites remain free.