Sell Ads at Your Website Real Estate
Your website can be compared to real estate where advertisers can put up their billboards or other kinds of advertising. Advertisers are interested in locations where there is plenty of traffic. They might also be interested in spots that their particular customers visit, even if not in large numbers.
The case with your website is also similar. If the site is visited by a large number of Web surfers, advertisers will be interested to put up ads on the site. Niche sites catering to particular groups can also attract merchants trying to sell to those groups. The advertisers will pay you to display their ads.
If your website has too few visitors, you should build up the traffic first. Refer to Traffic Building Methods for ways to increase traffic to your website.
How Do You Find Advertisers?
You can of course visit different websites, and use the Contact Us link at each to seek advertisements. You can highlight the specific advantages that the site owners will get by advertising on your site. However, that kind of approach is tedious work, and might also discourage you if you do not get satisfactory responses.
There are much better ways to get advertisements. There are third parties who work with website publishers on the one hand and merchant advertisers on the other. You open an account with these third party advertisement networks and they will get advertisements for your site.
In the discussion below, we mention contextual ads, banner ads, text link ads etc. These terms are explained in a separate article.
Advertising Networks
Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) serve contextual ads on your website. You register the website with these agencies, and insert code snippets that they provide in the code of the pages where you want the advertisements to appear. Full instructions for inserting the code, and of optimizing the click rates, are provided by AdSense/YPN.
Once the code snippets are inserted at appropriate places on the page, as decided by you, ads will begin to appear. When a visitor to your site clicks on the ad, you get a share of the ad revenue that the agencies earn. The agencies will check for fraudulent clicks, i.e. clicks by persons not really interested in the ad, and penalize publishers responsible.
Banner networks such as ValueClick, Advertising and Burstmedia will supply banner and other kinds of advertisements that you can display on your WebPages. Here also, you just insert code snippets in the codes of your page and the ads will appear. However, these are not typically context sensitive ads and you will have to select those ads that are likely to get greatest response on your pages.
To produce desired results, you will have to select ads that are relevant to your page content. Irrelevant ads can irritate your readers, leading to loss of goodwill for you. Another issue is to read the Terms & Conditions carefully.
For getting text link ads that occupy little space on your web page you can check out Text Link Ads, LinkWorth and TNX. Text link advertisers have link popularity objective in mind in addition to advertising objective, and there is a great demand for link popularity.
For PopUp and PopUnder ads that appear on pages separate from your own web page, you can check the same ad networks mentioned above. In this case, you typically insert the relevant ad code snippet in the … section of your page code instead of in the main body. The ads will then load every time your page loads.
The ad networks might also set up the code so that the ad will appear only once a session and not every time the page loads. This is less irritating to the readers of your page, but reduces the number of impressions of the ad itself.
In the next article, we look at several terms that you should be familiar with if you plan to sell ads on your website.
