Advertizing Programs

The big difference between affiliates and advertising is how you get paid. With advertising you get paid on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis. It doesn't matter if the person who clicked the ad actually buys the product or not. You get paid regardless. Not surprisingly the amount paid from CPC advertising is a lot less that you get from affiliates but there are far more people willing to click on an advert than actually buy something.

If Amazon is the mother of all affiliates, Google's Adsense is the daddy of all advertising programs. In minutes you can sign up for Adsense and be serving relevant adverts to your visitor. This last point is critical to Google's success.   Because of how Google works, it already knows what your web site contains enabling to serve adverts that matches your content. Ensuring that your landing page for “Left Handed Widgets” displays adverts related to left handed widgets. This relevance between your content and the adverts boosts the number of visitors who will click on the adverts.

Like Amazon, Google Adsense is a great starting point for the new web site owner. How much you make depends on your market. The advertisers bid for advertising space based on keywords using the Google Adwords program. For some keywords there are not that many advertisers and lots of web site with relevant content. In this situation a click of an advert can earn you just a couple of cents. The reverse situation can also arise where there are lots of advertisers but not many places to advertise. This drives up prices as the advertisers try to outbid each other for those precious clicks. There are some reports of $20 a click being paid in these situations. Obviously web site owners that find such profitable, niche markets don't talk about them so don't expect to find a gold mine easily.

Between the highs and lows of Adsense there is a great deal of fluctuation. One day you may earn 30 cents a click, the next 5 cents. It all depends on companies' advertising budgets.

Google isn't the only company offering adverts. Big names like Yahoo and Microsoft have them plus smaller firms like Bidvertiser. If your content is aimed at a niche market then you may struggle with some of the smaller companies. They don't attract the wide range of advertisers that Google can with its dominant position and this may result in them serving generic adverts (e.g. for credit card or cars) rather than something relevant to your content. This can decrease your click-through rate because someone searching for “left handed widgets” will probably not be distracted by an advert for a credit card.

Many advertizing programs only allow to join if you have a specific level of traffic or a cartain Page Rank and new programs are appering all the time. This makes it is worth regularly hunting around for a good advertizing program as your blog grows. There are also different models of program out there. I found to run on one of my blogs. Rather than a constant churn of differnt adverts all paying a differenet CPC, advertizers sign up for one or more months to advertize on your specifc site, for a set fee. Over time you build up a list of advertizers who are happy with the level of click through they are getting and it provides a steady income for a fairly small amount of on-screen real estate. The set-up works perfectly with that particular blog and I found it by randomly searching for advertizing programs.