Is your advertising in context? Earn money for nothing by just displaying a few adverts for similar sites but is it really that easy?
How to make money from having contextual advertising on your site.
Contextual advertising is the provision of space for adverts which are, in turn, automatically placed on a web-page, the focus of which is supposed to reflect the nature of that web-page. For example, I would expect this page to have offers of AdSense, Kontera, Yahoo, Overture and other forms of contextual advertising appear. If not, then I have not made this page as clear as I should have done!
I first started experimenting with this several years ago. I confess I was concerned that the company I was running would lose business to competitors as a result of the latter's adverts appearing on our site. Although it is impossible to say with confidence that there was no drain, I can definitely vouch that there was a) no marked loss of business (and, if anything, an increase) and b) the extra revenue from contextual advertising was quite significant.
The way I look at it now is that I see having contextual advertising on my pages is a bit like having adverts for our company plastered around railway stations, bus depots, football grounds etc. Any 'direct' business arising from that is likely to be minimal - the effect is more subliminal. In our case, I have never had the advertising budget to indulge in such things but with the likes of AdSense, I don't have to afford it, I actually get paid for doing it!
So, how do you go about getting the best out of it?
First, you need to sign up with one or more of the companies which offer it. The most popular player here, is, of course, Google with its AdSense. Having signed up, you then choose which shape and size of advert best fits your site (more on that later) and what colors you require the advert to be in. Don't laugh at this - I experimented (as you should do) with colors and positions of adverts and the income varied by a factor of nearly 8. Just think of that - 8 times as much money for just changing an advert's color or position.
When you have finished selecting (and you can always change this), you are left with some simple Javascript code which you copy and paste onto your page. Google then spiders the page (usually within a few minutes but sometimes it takes a few hours) and decides which adverts to display.
These adverts are placed by people who have signed up for Google's Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign and they pay every time someone clicks their advert and passes through to their site. How much they pay depends upon how much they bid when the signed up. How much you get paid is a function of what the advertiser pays and how much Google decides to pay you from it. Some advertisers will pay as much as $50 a click but that does not mean you will get paid anything like that.
There is a strategy for contextual advertising that will work for your site and give the optimum return for your efforts and that is what we will discuss in the next section.
It is certainly possible to earn good money from contextual advertising.
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