The first money I made online was really non-marketing.
I was around in the days when you could build a really good site, build up its content, and host banners for other people, filling your remnant space with non-exclusive ads from companies that had good run-of-network CPM payouts. I cashed in on impressions only for our main sites back then. $300 – $600 ( See an archive of the main site my various partners and I ran from before we changed the domain name.)
We were also briefly part of About.com’s network of poetry sites. Ah, those were the days. Shortly after about two years of constant checks from advertising, rates dropped and the money wasn’t worth the quality difference for our visitors to continue to display banner ads. Around that time, I started looking for alternatives.
Can you still make money from advertising? Sure, but until you build up to at least a mlliion page views per month, don’t expect to make thousands of dollars from it. But if you read that last article, you know that the key is to “spend less than you earn”.
Still, the money is out there. You just need to do your research, increase your traffic so that you’ll start getting accepted to the existing programs, test different formats and placements, track the results, and turn the whole thing into a system.
(And if you build a list at the same time, you can either charge for the ezine itself, or run advertising in each issue. But that’s really for another day.)
So where can you find advertising to run on your site? Obviously the preference is to have a mix of advertisers that will pay you per impression, as well as per click.
To earn money from clicked ads, I find that Google AdSense is easy to set up, and after you learn how to work with the system, can pay enough so that they’ll actually send you checks (the threshold before they’ll go out is $100). We’re going to feature a site that teaches many of the tricks of the AdSense trade tomorrow on Google Tuesdays, as well as the reason I think you should really sign up for AdSense today, whether or not you think you’re going to make any money from it.
Another program, that pays you via paypal once your account balance hits $5 is TextAds.Biz.
You display text ads on your site – advertisers can run ads just at your site, or throughout the Network.
But what I like even better is that you can place filler ads on your own site advertising whatever you want – rotating text ads for your audience on your own site, free. Great for Affiliate products.
