Photo credit: Georgios M.W.
Prompted by Make Money off Your Blog, a recent editorial article from The Washington Post contributor Mike Peed, I would like to share my discoveries and recommendations on how to make money with online content while keeping interruptive ads (banners, pop-ups, flashy ads, etc.) off your site.
On February 1, 2005, as promised, I turned off the rest of the banners and sponsor promo boxes appearing on my mini-network, as current revenues no longer rely on traditional, in-your-face, interruptive promotional messages. As the road to successful online ad promotion is indeed another one.
But these are unique, effective revenue channels you might want to consider to boost the sustainability and profit potential of your micro-publishing enterprise. If used right, these channels help any serious online publisher move her news site from a part-time passion into a serious, competitive business.
You can't do it overnight, but with enough nose, patience and dedication you can make good content pay back for itself and then some.
1) Google AdSense
AdSense is by far the best, most rewarding monetization resource for blogs, news sites and small, content-rich information sites. Google offers AdSense, a service that lets independent publishers, bloggers and news site owners to publish text-based, context-relevant ads next to the content on their sites. This is done automatically without you, the publisher, having to worry about anything else except putting small-sized code inside each of your Web pages.
For every click on Google AdSense contextual ads, the publishing sites receives credit for a small amount of money, while Google keeps an undisclosed amount of the total advertising share. Though many lament lack of relevance for the ads and little return for the increased info clutter on their pages — many silent publishers — probably the ones who consciously make less noise about this, are making serious money with this program.
What few understand, is that to make AdSense work for you ($$),it involves strategic work. Just placing the code on your pages isn't enough. The focus of your site, the way the content is organized, the way web pages are coded, the titles you use and the color and position you select for placing your AdSense ads on your Web pages all make a difference to the results you get. Significant.
What is important is that different rules apply to different types of pages and content. So no set of rules equally apply to all sites. The key is for the publisher to keep questioning the integration of contextual, text-based ads by doing systematic, ongoing testing, experimentation and optimization. For a focused blogger, this can mean from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month. For a dedicated publisher covering high-paying information areas, it is possible to get into the 5-digit range without any major investments and with a relatively short time-to-market. I am not talking about a blogger in the traditional sense, but rather to focused and very professional independent information resources like SearchEngineWatch.com or Paidcontent.org, for example.
AdSense offers also the opportunity to monetize site searches while providing a powerful, lightning-fast search engine for your own site at no extra cost. By providing search-relevant ads on your site's search results pages. Google AdSense adds another great opportunity to monetize premium service and access with relevant text-based information about products and services.
Too bad Google AdSense doesn't let you select your contextual advertisers from its inventory.
Here some great examples of AdSense at work.
Alternative solutions to AdSense: Chitika, Kanoodle, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo! Publisher Network
