Chapter 6

[Bruceper]

Chapter 6 - Adding advertising

So now you're pretty much all set up with your directory with a domain, hosting, categories and links. Now how the heck do you make money with this thing? There are a lot of ways, all of which I couldn't possibly cover without writing another book.

For this book I will list the most basic and common forms of advertising people usually add to their sites. These include banner ads, text ads, affiliate links, video ads, Google Custom search, feeds and more. I won't detail everything about these forms of advertising, but will include enough to give you ideas and possibilities.

Since Google is so well known and available to users almost anywhere I will focus primarily on their products. There are competing products but some of them only allow users in the US to use them. We'll start with Google Adsense.

Google Adsense is a very simple system where you display an ad, a user clicks on and you get paid. Simple enough really. You have the choice of using one of the following types of "ads" from Adsense

Adsense for content
Adsene for search
Referral units
Video units

Adsense for content is the most commonly used Adsense product. With Adsense for content you can choose and ad unit or a link unit. A link unit is a list of a few links in a few different sizes and shapes, both horizontal and vertical. Link units only contain a single line of text for each link, so this type of ad is typically very descriptive. This is a good way to place ads in a small area. An ad unit can contain either text or images or both, the choice is yours. Sizes of the ads range from 728x90 to 125x125 so the ad units can be placed almost anywhere you want them to be.

I have found two methods that increase click through rates of adsense ads. One is to have the ad completely blend in with your site and to appear as if it belongs to you. Users click on these ads believing that they lead to further pages on the site. While this may be a little misleading to users, it is perfectly acceptable to Google to do this. The other method only works for some sites, and this method is to cause the Google ads to appear as a total opposite of your page and make it presence known. If you have relavent ads on your pages users will see these links and click on them. Which way is better for your site? I can't tell you that because I just don't know. Try it for yourself and watch the click through rates to see which is better.

Adsense for search offers you a search box you can place on your site where users can typically choose to search the web, or to search your site. Either way, users using this search are taken away from your site to a Google page. This is not something you really want to do. Sure you can make money if a user clicks on an ad, but the user is gone from your site now. The Adsense for search is not very customizable, so you are pretty much stuck with what you're given.

The Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) is a much better search function that allows you to customize the size, look, feel and location of the search results. The Google CSE can be configured to send users to a Google page for search results, or the search can be done on your own site and the results sent to your site. This keeps your users where they belong.

The Google CSE can be configured to search only your pages, or it can be configured to search the web but give preference to your results. I find that the web search isn't the best way to go usually. In both cases the search results page(s) have ads on them that you can make money from. Ad placement, page size and the search box are all customizable.

Affiliate links are another great way for users to make money. Affiliate links or ads can be placed anywhere on the page and they can also be placed right in your directory. If for example you have a site about fishing and you have an affiliate link to johnson outboards (boat motors) you could place your affiliate link in the number one position of the boat motors category.

I'm sure that if you're experienced with search engines and directories that you already know that the first three links in a category end up with the most hits. It's common to see directories where the first three or five listings are affiliate links or links to the site owners other sites.

Finding a good affiliate program is difficult. There are thousands of them on the net and some are good, a lot are bad, and many more are mediocre. There are places like Commission Junction that offer thousands of affiliate program links, but the payouts on many of these programs are typically very low. Don't get me wrong, some of them do pay well, it's just that with the large amount of programs they have there are inevitably some stinkers in there and I've found some of them.

On a typical website with advertising you will find that the average clickthrough rate for banner ads is 0.18%. That means that for every 10,000 displays, 18 people will click on a link. Those aren't very good odds for most webmasters. The clickthrough rate for video ads is 4.64%. That means for every 10,000 displays, 464 people will click on the video. This is what banner clickthroughs used to be like a few years ago, so consider changing your tactics to keep up with current trends.

As you can tell by those statistics the advertising market on the internet is changing, and webmasters who want to make money need to sit up and pay attention and stay current with technology and trends.

So you have an idea of where to get some ads and what they can do for you. But there is also a negative side to adding advertising as well. Many webmasters see their website as their cash cow and savior of the world and figure that if one ad can make them $5 a month, then 20 ads on their site can make them $100 month. These so called webmasters don't know what they're doing and don't even realize that once a user clicks on an ad, they are typically taken away from your site anyways. Additional ads won't help one bit. Of course you could force the ads to open in a new page, but the focus is still taken away from your site now.

Then there is the website so full of ads you can't really tell it's a website. These look so bad to the user that they typically leave and never come back. Placing too many ads on your page kills the user experience and scares them away. Yes I'm aware some so called "professional" sites do this. That doesn't make them right, but then again, they're getting paid directly from the company to have those ads because they're big companies. You only get paid 2.1 cents if a user clicks on the ads. There's a big difference there.

Of course I realize that users must advertise, but to advertise you must send users away from your site to make money. So how do you continue to make money? Well you find more users, or you keep your users coming back by having the content they want. You can have it both ways, and that's to make sure they bookmark your site. Remember when we talked about content? That's why they'll bookmark your site.

Keeping a clean site with a few relavent ads will start to make you a few bucks. You can move up from there as traffic increases and eventually start to earn enough to actually make your time feel like it's no longer wasted.

(Stats were provided by AdTech and are based on European data. This data should be close to North American data)

Copyright 2008 Bruce Peresky - All Rights Reserved - No duplication permitted without written permission from the author