It’s likely you have heard about the amounts of money that you can make by putting up advertising on a website. As with any myth, there is a certain amount of truth to it. There are people that have made millions in advertising revenue off of a website, while others have made nothing. There’s no doubt that there is money to be made with online advertising, you just need to know what kind of advertising fits for your site and then which ad networks can be help you implement the kind of advertising that will make your site as profitable as it can be.

Each form of advertising can be profitable for your website if done right, but some forms of advertising are more profitable for some websites versus other sites. For example, a general purpose site might be best monetized with Google Adsense ads, while a mobile phone website might be better monetized with ring tone affiliate offers. Honing in on the advertising to best fit the site is one of the biggest challenges in monetizing a website.

Banner Advertisements: The original ads that built the web advertising industry are the banner ads. You can still see the banner ads found on a variety of sites, but they have changed to fit the changing market conditions. It’s now quite common to find the banner of yesterday replaced with smaller 125 by 125 stickers. They can be used to advertise other sites or even products. They are easy to place in the sidebar of a site and, by making them a good value, many site owners have been able to increase their income on a site without expending a lot of energy unnecessarily.

Pop-Up Advertisements: Another early web advertising advance was the pop-up and the pop-under. Basically, when you visited a site, an ad would pop up and ask you to deal with it. Usually, this meant blocking out the window to read what you visited the site for. These pop-ups were quite annoying. They were replaced by pop-under that would come up after you left a site. This made it difficult to trace the advertising back to a particular site. These pop-ups and pop-unders are slowly being replaced with lightbox/thickbox solutions that give a message and a call to action.

Text Link Advertisements: Text link ads have been around in varying forms since the early days of the commercial internet. Basically, instead of using a banner or other kind of graphic to compel people to act on the ad, it uses simple text to prompt people to visit a website and learn more. In many instances these text link ads have proven to be even more popular than graphically based ads. In fact, Google Adsense text ads are a form of these text link ads that are now best called contextual text ads. Nowadays when people talk about text link ads, they think of simple text links put into existing website content in an effort to get traffic and search engine link juice.

Contextual Advertisements: Contextual ads represented an advancement in web marketing. These were text link ads that would change based on the content of the page they were found on. This was particularly good because this meant that ads would be targeted to those already interested in the content. These became a win-win for ad networks, publishers, and advertisers alike. These contextual ads are constantly being refined to be more effective and to be more relevant to the people viewing it. This increases both click-through rate and advertiser conversions. Google Adsense is currently the leader in this area.

Affiliate Advertisements: Affiliate ads have been around since the early days of CDNow and Amazon. Basically, an affiliate ad is an ad you choose to put on your site in the form of a graphic or a text link that pays you a commission based on action that your visitor performs. This can as simple as visiting the affiliate site in question or it can be buying a product on the affiliate site. In other words, these are performance based ads. The better that the ads perform, then the more income you make from having them on your site. Because of the huge range of affiliate products out on the market, this can be one of the most profitable advertising vehicles.

Now that you have a good idea about the type of ads that you can put on your site, now comes your chance to find out a little bit about some of the better ad networks out there and how they can help you monetize your site. Some networks work better than others, depending on the site, so read this section with your own site in mind.

Google Adsense is one of the most popular ways to monetize a website. Google has made it very easy to create a website on a subject that you love, put up ads on the website, and then make money as people click on appropriate ads. The ads delivered are contextual and usually related to the content so visitors find them compelling to click on. Basically, they already have an interest in what the ads offer. Google Adsense ads seem more appropriate for general sites that don’t have a lot of opportunities to make money using affiliate ads. This is because Google Adsense ads do not offer a high rate of payment, unlike other types like affiliate ads.
Adbrite is one of the biggest competitors to Google Adsense in the contextual text ad market. They offer publishers a chance to earn money on their sites without conforming to some of the rules that Google Adsense has. While they are the largest competitor to Google in the market, prices paid per click and per 1000 impressions are still quite low. They don’t have as large of an inventory of ads and this creates problems in having well targeted ads for your visitors. Still, Adbrite continues to provide an alternative to Adsense for some publishers.

Bidvertiser is a growing company in the Adsense-like contextual text advertising market. They handle many different topics and keywords that other companies do not. Bidvertiser is quite popular as an Adsense replacement on sites that definitely cover those topics that Adsense avoids. That said, there still aren’t enough ads on the Bidvertiser network to fill up ad units with ads that are contextual. Because of this, Bidvertiser’s best use is as an Adsense replacement in subjects that Adsense shies away from.

Commission Junction, now known mostly by its initials CJ, is one of the most popular and famous affiliate networks out there on the market. This is because they have developed a reputation over the years of only dealing with advertisers that had quality affiliate offers. By serving as a middle man for advertisers looking to find people to promote their offers, CJ developed a positive reputation in the industry. While the payout may not be as high as for other ad networks, the quality means that you can abide by the rules and still earn income on the CJ offers.

Linkshare stands alongside CJ as a major quality affiliate marketing company. Like CJ, they help match internet marketers with high quality advertisers. The commissions are not as high as they could be, but this is mitigated by the fact that advertisers are screened and they usually offer a superior product. Many people find success on Linkshare by talking on their blog about the products they are promoting affiliate offers with.

Pepperjam Network is one of the more interesting affiliate ad networks out there on the internet. They have a good variety of affiliate offers that pay a decent return for action. Unlike many other affiliate networks, Pepperjam Network allows you to create text links ads for the affiliate offers you are promoting. These ads appear like a Google Adsense ad on a site, but they pay much more. It’s like having the very best of both worlds, simplicity, and good returns. The only drawback for Pepperjam Networks is that it’s a little cumbersome getting approved for different advertising offers.

Neverblue Ads is another affiliate network. Instead of Adsense like contextual text ads, they allow you to choose from banners, stickers and text ads and then bundle them together to show randomly. This means that you can easily add several offers to a single unit and see just how effective each ad is. This allows you to do the testing needed to maximize your income for a particular advertising spot. Neverblue Ads is easy to sign up for, and to get approval for offers. All of this means that they make it easy to monetize your website.

Copeac and Azoogle are two other networks that are quite similar. They are very traditional high value affiliate networks. They offer many of the same affiliate offers and the payouts are similar. Usually they focus on the offers that have high payouts like zip submits, debt offers, and ringtone offers. Some people make large amounts of money with Copeac and Azoogle. Both of these companies continue to make refinements and advancements on their system, and these advancements help you make more money.

Finally, these last two are not networks per se; they are really just individual companies that have their own affiliate programs. Amazon and Ebay each have affiliate programs that offer great commissions for sales on their sites. Ebay will pay for several different actions, including a successful bid. Amazon, for example, will give a percentage of the sale price of any product referred. They offer many different ways to integrate the products into your site, from simple text links to product display boxes. Amazon and Ebay seem to work the best on sites that have a lot of products and product reviews. It’s quite easy to do a product review, then put in an Amazon or Ebay link.

With this knowledge, you are finally able to go out there and monetize your website. You can find out which type of ad will work best for your site and then figure which network will make that spot the most profitable. There are more opportunities than ever before to make more money online and you can show that the myth may indeed be the truth for you.

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