Selling
Website Advertising
Selling
advertising on your website involves renting out some of the
space on your web pages. This space is given over to an ad service
like Google AdSense or Yahoo Search Marketing that
generates the ads every time your web
page is viewed.
Usually,
the ad service scans the content of your page and, hopefully, delivers
ads that are relevant to the content of your page.
You
get paid when a visitor clicks on the ads, then leaves your website
and links to the advertiser’s site.
Once
these ads are on your page you don’t have to do anything
but cash the checks. It is really remarkable, however,
there are a few things
you should know first.
You
will need lots of traffic. The ad revenue will start to trickle in
with just a few dozen visitors per day but
you will
need to
have 500
to 1000 website visitors per day to start making any
real money.
The
ad prices are based on the price of the keyword, which is determined
by a bidding process. If your web page is about real estate, you
will make a lot
more per
click than
if your
page is about knitting.
Example:
Web pages based on the keyword “Irish food” get around
5 cents per click. Web pages based on the keyword “real estate” get
around 50 cents per click. The prices go way up from there. The keyword "plumber
in los angeles” will cost $14.30, and “college loan consolidation” will
cost $34.44.
The
keyword price is based on an elaborate formula where people bid on
the prices they will pay for
ad clicks.
The more popular a keyword is, and the more money
to be made from clicks on those ads, the more the
ad clicks
for
that
keyword will
cost.
Tips:
• This is another reason that it is critical to do keyword research
before you
build
your
site. You want
to build
your site
using the highest value keywords possible
so you will make the most money from your ads.
•Make
your ads look like they are part of your website. People have learned
to ignore anything
that looks
like an ad. Choose ad colors and styles
that will blend into your site and use only text ads so they will
blend in
with the
other links
on your
site.
The
big picture on selling website advertising
Adding
an advertising program like Google AdSense to your website is
easy. The hard part is first building a content based website
that draws enough free traffic to make money with ads and affiliate
links.
See our information on building
website traffic. |
Buying
Website & Search Ads
The
'Big 3' – Google, Yahoo and MSN
Live also offer ads for sale.
These are called Pay-Per-Click ads,
or PPC. You can buy PPC ad space on other websites and also on the
search results pages.
When
you do a search with these search engines, the paid ads appear at
the
top and to the
right of the
search
results, and
these ads
also appear
on websites that have added content
ad code to their pages.
A
Few Words of Caution: I am not even going to try to cover more
than just
the very
basics of
PPC ads.
I strongly
urge
you to
read all that
you can before you start a PPC
campaign. There are a lot of
pitfalls and a
lot more to making
a PPC
campaign work
than
just creating
an ad.
Is
it important that you understand that the prices of the ads can
fluctuate day-to-day
and even hour-to-hour.
These
PPC charges
can add
up fast and,
if you do not have a properly
written sales letter on
your website to greet the traffic
the ads bring
to your website
converting
them into
customers, you will be throwing
money away.
When
you do start a PPC campaign, be very cautious and keep your
daily budget
no
more than $20.
Tweak your ads
until
you get them
to work well
and only then should you
consider spending more. Always run at least two different ads, and
compare the performance. This is called split testing. Delete the
ad with the lower click rate and then write a new ad to go against
the winner. By repeating this process you can actually lower your
ads costs by improving the ad performance.
Google
has its own special set of rules for PPC. Their
goal
is to protect
their
visitors,
making
sure they
have a good
search
experience
and that
they find what they are
looking for.
Google
actually scans the page the ad points to,
called the
Landing Page and,
if the
content of
the page does
not match
the keywords
in the ad,
most likely the PPC ad
is a scam, trying to
trick or
mislead
the
searcher.
Google
will
penalize
the PPC
ad buyer by
raising the
price of the ad,
and the ad will most
likely stop running until the
buyer raises
the bid.
If
the ad buyer does not correct the problem
by
making the Landing
Page
relevant to
the ad, Google
may just
instantly raise the
price to $10
per click, which is
Google’s way of telling the buyer to take
a hike. This is called
the Google Slap. You have to walk a fine line when
you buy ads from Google.
Yahoo and MSN advertising have less strict rules for their advertising
and are easier to work with.
Google
also tracks the relevance of all
your
ads and also
how well they
convert.
It calculates
a “quality score” that
determines how much
you will pay for
ads overall and where,
in the list of ads
on the
page, your ads will
appear.
The
best way to avoid the Google Slap is
to make
sure that the
ad and the
landing page
are both
relevant and use
the same keywords.
You should
use the keywords
from
the ad on your
landing page several
times for
best results.
Yahoo
and MSN Live don’t give as much weight to relevance, don’t
have quality scores and just
give the highest bidder the top ad positions. These are radically
different methods of delivering ads. If you are a PPC
ad buyer
you probably
will prefer Yahoo or MSN Live but, if you are a web surfer clicking
on PPC ads, you probably will prefer Google because you will find
what
you
are looking for
more often.
Something
to consider: While
PPC can bring
in traffic
to your website
very
quickly,
once you
stop spending
on the ads,
the traffic
stops. The
alternative
is using
free website
traffic
techniques.
These involve
a bit more
work -- and
a lot more time
-- but
it
costs
nothing,
and can actually
bring you
a lot more
traffic than
PPC.
The
best advice is to use both strategies: Use PPC to bring traffic to
your site now, and also build up your site using SEO strategies to
begin to bring in more and more free traffic over time.
More
Info:
The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords is
the best overall introduction and guide to the Google advertising
program,
and is focused on promoting your own website.
Yahoo Cash for Idiots, despite the unfortunate
name, is an excellent introduction to using the Yahoo Search Marketing
ad program for promoting your own products or the products of others.
