How To Maximize Your Advertising Revenue

If you’ve got a website or blog that generates a steady high volume of traffic on a regular basis, then you’ve probably already explored some ways of monetizing your traffic. Perhaps the most common Advertising Networks that people will try include Google Adsense, Chikita as well as Clickbank products and services and place banners, such as the ones I’ve got on this blog. There are lots of other networks around paying on a different basis, some on a Cost Per Click (CPC) or Impression basis, whilst others on a CPA (Cost Per Action) or PPV (Pay-Per-View). Most blog owners or site owners, will already have some kind of monetization going on, especially if their traffic is substantial, and possibly the most recognizable and utilized network is Google Adsense.

Google Adsense is great from an ease of use standpoint (you can pretty much have a display ad, or several display ads, from the Google Network of Partner sites within minutes) and also good from a reporting and optimization standpoint. Google Adsense allows you to monitor the performance of each ad, and set up channels – this is good if you’ve got a large network of sites, and make customizations to the ad colors, font size, etc. However, just plugging in some adsense and code and praying for the best, will certainly not get you the best returns, or trying to game the system by clicking on your own ads or getting others to will more often than not, result in an epic fail. As many other commentators have set people straight, making a quick buck never comes easy. With adsense, you will have to try and test new things constantly to maximize your advertising revenue. Things like altering the positioning of your ads, the colours of the text links and ads, font size, how many ads appear on a page (remember Google guidelines a maximum of 3 ads are allowed on any given page), testing different sizes and styles of banner ads, testing google referral banner ads against text ads or flash against static images, and so forth. It’s only through trying different things and leaving them running to collect the data, that you can begin to make improvements and start seeing what works and what doesn’t for your site.

In regards to other ways of monetization there’s plenty of programs out there that offer less intrusive ways of advertising, but still make you money. One such way, is pop-under advertising. Note this is different to pop-outs that you see on sites (if you haven’t got them blocked by default from your browser), as pop-unders are exactly what they sound like, they appear underneath the main page you’re visiting and you can usually notice them by hovering over your dropped pin browser icon. Often you won’t notice them for a while after they’ve appeared, until you realize that you’ve got more windows open than you’d expected from your browsing activities. The pop-unders are very subtle in how they appear but often feature a very large banner image that people quickly close once they cotton on to it.

Anyway, a lot of networks will pay you for hosting a script that will place a call to implement these pop-unders when you get a new visitor to the site, on a pay-per-view basis most often. You can sometimes customize the settings, so you can alter how many pop-unders they are subjected to and for how long, and if you only want them appearing once per session and so forth. However, the disadvantage to pop-unders and monetization is that you need a substantial, and I mean substantial volume of traffic. If you have a large network of sites, say getting 1,000 hits a day, then this could be a nice earner. If you just have one blog getting about 10 hits a day, on the other hand, then don’t bother implementing until you’ve built up your traffic volumes.

On a final note, it’s worth carefully researching your targeted ways of monetization and doing some quick calculation based on other sites traffic volumes and adsense/clickbank/affiliation average earnings. You can always seek out recommendations from experience affiliate marketers and advertisers on forums. But continued persistence, hard work, testing and implementation are the basic ingredients for success!

P.S This is not the first article I’ve written on Adsense, you may want to check out my initial feelings when I was just starting out in this blogging malarkey.