Advertising Options for your Website - A beginner's guide

by Startacus Admin

Advertising Options for your Website - A beginner's guide

“There’s no money in advertising” - That seems to be a common opinion that you may hear regarding making money from a website and in fairness there is quite a bit of truth in that statement. If you use a website simply to have an online presence, then quite honestly you will make pennies, not pounds from most advertising options.

If however you intend to create a website that is used not only to drive traffic to your business, but is a fundamental part of your business, then the options we have outlined below are all worthwhile considering. You may not necessarily make millions, but do it right and you could make a sizeable amount. Here are a few of the advertising options to consider:

Banner Ads
The best way to describe a Banner Ad is that they are like standard photo/picture adverts that you see in offline publications (that’s magazines or newspapers to you and me). In the offline world advertisers hope that an advert triggers a response in a consumer to buy or at least find out more; in the online world it’s exactly the same. An online advertiser is hoping that the viewer of the advert clicks the picture or text based link and goes straight through to their online shop or website to find out more. If you have Banner ads on your site, you generally will make your pennies or pounds when someone clicks that link. More on this later...

Sponsored Posts
If a website is a blog or has a blog element featuring regular original and informative content and generates ‘enough’ traffic then you may well find that you have become what we like to define as a ‘self professed expert’.(N.B. ‘enough’ is often hard to define - but generally we are talking 1000’s of page views per week, not 100’s), If you write about a particular subject or area or niche, you may find that advertisers related to that niche or sector may want to sponsor your posts in order to associate their brand or organisation with you. Whether it’s fashion or tech, write enough original and relevant content and generate enough traffic and they could come looking.

Site Sponsors
This potentially lucrative option again requires a website that both generates sizeable traffic but also generates a particular type of traffic. To attract the interest of any organisations as website sponsors, you will need to have an audience that directly relates to their particular organisation. So, if for example, you write about mobile tech and apps, you stand a better chance of attracting a telecoms sponsor than you would a stationery company! A site or blog will not attract sponsors just by looking nice, but rather instead by attracting sizeable and niche traffic which a potential sponsor wants to try and send its own way!

Adsense
It’s impossible to avoid Google Adsense, because as much as there are other options out there, it does seem to be the biggest and most popular. In essence it finds advertisers for you. By simply choosing the type and size of ads you would like on your site, Adsense will then aim to display adverts related and relevant to your website content.
Although Adsense does save you the time and effort of having to seek out your own advertisers, you won’t generally make as much money as if you were to sell a fixed or banner ad on your website directly to an advertiser.

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Published on: 17th February 2013