There are many kinds of ads you can put on your website in the hope of generating income:

• You can sell ad space either personally or (if you are big enough) through a media agency.
• You can promote affialite products personally through your recommendation
• You can choose affiliate ads from thid party sites and paste them on your website.

So the question is, how easy is it to generate revenue using affiliate ads or Google Adsense? Personally, for most people I don’t think it’s worth it. I am yet to meet someone who generates any decent income from this type of revenue option when running a normal content based website or blog.

Here is the low down on the kinds of ads I am talking about.

Affiliate ads and Google Adsense can be text, images or banners which appear somewhere on a page on your website.

Google’s program AdSense analyses the content on your website and posts corresponding ads, or places ads based on your users’ interests and previous internet behaviour. Other programs, such as clixGalore and Commission Junction, allow you to pick the ads yourself through their ad marketplace.

There are a few models for such advertising:

–   CPC (cost per click)—you make a certain amount of money each time someone clicks on the ad on your site

–   CPA (cost per action)—you make money when someone clicks through from your website and performs a particular action on the advertiser’s site, such as subscribing to a newsletter or requesting further information

–   Commission—you make money from the sales generated from the traffic you send to the merchant.

If you are considering hosting these type of ads, there are a few things to think about:

1.      Make sure the product and service adverts you host fit with the type of image and values you are aiming to portray on your website, and are what you would be happy to advertise personally.

2.      Consider how the ads will affect the look and feel of your website. Ads can make a website look cheap if not planned well.

3.      Ads create a major conflict. You want people to focus on the content you are sharing on your site, whereas the intention of an ad is to attract attention away from your content.

4.      Consider the cost of directing your visitors to go elsewhere. In the early days it can take a lot of work to get people to find and visit your website; do you really want them to leave again by clicking on an ad? Even if you get paid for them to click, weigh that up against the actual cost in your effort, time and money to get them to visit you in the first place—it may be higher than you think!

If you have a lot of traffic, a fast growing membership or people who visit your site religiously, this form of advertising may be worthwhile as an addition to your other revenue-generating activities. However, if you have a single, content-rich website, this type of marketing by itself is not likely to make you rich, or even pay the bills.

I suggest that you will probably have more success joining affiliate programs for quality products and services and personally recommending them to your database and visitors, and I will post how to do that in the very near future!

I would be very interested to hear if you have experiences to the contrary, so please share them!

Happy Hunting!

Serena