Advertising Options for your Website - A beginner's guide

by Startacus Admin

Text Links
In essence, these are simply adverts with the text content on your site. They often can be seen as rather intrusive, especially if a pop up advert hovers up if you move your mouse over the text. Generally, just like with a banner ad, you make a few pence or at best pounds if someone clicks on the text link and it goes through to the advertiser’s website. Often not seen too favourably by Google and other search engines, if the links are not directly related to the website’s content.

Affiliate Programs
If you write about a particular subject, service or product and you refer to other products or services or organisations, you may be able to sign up for an affiliate program. Basically when you include a link to that other company or product on your own site and someone clicks on it, you will get some “credit” for doing so. For each referral you make, you may earn a few pence and if the referral customer actually buys from the website you directed them to, you may get a commission on the sale too. Many brands and companies operate their own affiliate programs and there are also affiliate brokers and platforms that you can sign up to as well.

Sell your wares
This may seems pretty obvious, however if you sell physical products and services, make sure that each product has its own page and that each product is on display. This may mean that you have a specific e-commerce area of your site, that you link your products in certain articles, or simply that you create your own ads that appear as banner adverts on your home page etc. In essence, every time you have a visitor to your site or blog, you have an opportunity to sell your product or service to them. This doesn’t mean of course, over-saturating your website and its pages with advert after advert though - nothing can be more off-putting!

Letting advertisers know
If a potential advertiser was to visit your website, would they know that you welcome adverts and the like. Quite possibly! However the direct (and less subtle) approach works well too! An ad declaring that you welcome advertisers, a “ Your Ad here” ad or even a dedicated Advertising page can work wonders. Here is the Startacus Advertise page as an example!

Of course, many website and blog owners prefer not to have any ads on their sites at all, believing that their typical audience would not be too enamoured with big ‘in your face’ ads, others may adopt a few of the advertising options we have mentioned.

The key thing is to simply do what is right for you and your audience and customers.

Subscribe to our newsletter

If you would like to receive our startup themed newsletter, full of the latest startup opportunities, events, news, stories, tips and advice, then sign up here.

• #

Published on: 17th February 2013