If you’re hoping 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 cover the costs of running your site. Many large sites on the Internet do this, including many forums, hobby sites, and the popular dating site, PlentyOfFish. This approach of allowing ads to display on your site to generate revenue is often called monetization.

The amount of income that you could possibly generate for your site largely depends on the amount of traffic your website brings 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 competitor’s ads will be showing on your site, so you’ll need to think about the implications of allowing this:

• You can block URLs from specific advertisers to prevent competing ads from being shown.
• Earnings per click would potentially be low due to the lack of ad 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 ad system can sign up through their Adwords program.

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

• 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 for image banner ads, while AdSense allows for both banner and text ads. Banners are a good way to establish brand identity. Be careful with your choice, as you don’t want to scare off regular visitors to 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 a hard sell to advertisers if site visitor volumes are relatively low
• The default value reverts to AdSense if the inventory doesn’t 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 “classified” section. Forum members pay to advertise their own businesses in these sections, and some sites allow 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 advertising on your site is worth it, especially if your number of visitors is relatively small.

Option 4 – Affiliate Advertising

You may consider affiliate advertising whereby you are paid a commission for any potential sale caused 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:

• online backup from keepit.com (30% commission)
• sobres.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.
• 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 would recommend trying the AdSense or DoubleClick options first, as they are easy to implement and easy to remove. If you find these successful, you can always consider selling your own ad space or affiliate advertising later. Many visitors now accept the fact that websites have to be paid for and ads are one of the few ways to ensure that popular websites remain free.