Discover Online Advertising for Your Website

by Learnthat.com Staff on Sunday, November 21, 2004
Originally, at the time I wrote the first version of this tutorial, the advertising market for the Internet was hot! Unfortunately, over the past few years the market has dried up (our revenue has declined about about 90%, though our costs and visitors have increased). Ironically, when I went to review the site and read this tutorial, most of the companies mentioned are out of business! I have decided to alter this tutorial a bit and change it to one of "How can I make money on the Internet?"
You've just created the next whiz-bang content website. You're starting to get a ton of page views, visitors from all over, but you can't seem to hook any advertisers. You've emailed a few companies, or just put up an "Advertise on this site" page, but nobody seems to be interested. How can you earn revenue and make any money off of this thing?
In the beginning of the Internet craze, you could get an firm to represent your site and sell advertising for a cut of the revenue. Unfortunately, you need a considerable amount of page impressions today to get the interest of the fewer and fewer online ad companies. Instead, you have to think creatively of other ways to generate revenue for your site.
One of the other potential methods of generating cash is to enter into an affiliate program with a company which sells goods that might appeal to your audience. Amazon.com is our affiliate program of choice and generates a tiny bit if revenue each quarter.
Another potential money maker is to sell products yourself. The downside, of course, is inventory and the time it takes to run your own online store though the profit margins can be good.
The third potential money maker is to create a "members" only section which you charge a monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription charge to join. You can use PayPal if you wish, they offer a business plan for subscription sites and they take 2.9% plus $0.30 a transaction.
Google has a new AdSense program which pays on a cost per click basis, though it targets its ads to the content of your page, making it a very highly targetted and profitable CPC ad network