February 9, 2011
It’s easy to monetize your website with ads and BizBytes 101 is here to help you get started.
By Tasha Cunningham
tasha@bizbytes101.com
Online advertising is booming. You read that right. Even as the effects of the economic recession continue to linger for businesses large and small, online advertising continues to thrive in the U.S., according to figures released in the latest Internet Advertising Revenue Report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).
Businesses spent approximately $12.1 billion on online advertising in the first six months of 2010. That’s up 11.3 percent from the first half of 2009 and 13.9 percent from the second quarter of 2009. According to the IAB, these stats are record breaking for two reasons — it was the highest first-half and second-quarter revenue ever recorded.
This means you need to ask yourself: Are you effectively monetizing the traffic you get on your small business website? You may not garner millions of page views a day, but no matter how much traffic you’re getting, there are ways to make money.
BizBytes has created an easy six-step guide to get you started — and quickly! In future columns, BizBytes will also show you how to monetize your social media and mobile marketing efforts, too.
STEP ONE
Check your traffic: How much traffic does your website get? If you don’t know the answer to that question, find out fast. If you haven’t already done so, install Google Analytics on your site and take a look at the number of page views you get over a 30-day period. Google Analytics can also tell you which pages are the most visited on your site. These are the pages you should pay particular attention to when deciding where to place your ads. Visit http://www.google.com/analytics/ for more information.
STEP TWO
Access your available ad inventory: You can’t run ads on your website if you don’t know what kind of inventory you have to sell. The IAB offers guidelines on different ad sizes that can work on your site. The most common ad sizes are 728x90, and 300x250. If you don’t currently have ads on your site, you may need to tweak your design. Visit http://www.iab.net for more information:
STEP THREE
Sign up for Google Adsense: Let Google serve ads on your site by signing up for a Google Adsense account. With Google Adsense, you get paid every time someone clicks on an ad they see on your site. This is also known as Pay-Per-Click advertising. For each ad size you select, Google will generate a code that you will need to place on your site. Google will test the code after you’ve placed the ads to make sure everything is working. After that, you will begin to see ads on your site. You can check your Adsense account at any time to see the amount of money you’ve generated. Visit https://www.google.com/adsense/ for more information.
STEP FOUR
Join a CPM- based advertising network: CPM advertising is based on the number of impressions an ad generates rather than the number of people who click on it. CPM stands for Cost Per Mille and it refers to the cost for every 1,000 ad impressions. Advertisers offer Web publishers a certain rate for every 1,000 impressions an ad generates on your site. For example, if your site generates 100,000 page views a month displaying an ad that is being sold at a $2 CPM, you will earn roughly $200 per month on that ad. CPM rates vary greatly, but there are networks such as Burst Media and Value Click to help find the right solution. Visit http://www.burstmedia.com and http://www.valueclick.com. for more information.
STEP FIVE
Monetize your RSS feed If you’ve got an RSS feed on your website (and you certainly should), you should be making money from it. Google Feedburner offers Adsense for Feeds, which gives you the opportunity to monetize the content you distribute through your feed. Visit http://www.feedburner.google.com for more information.
STEP SIX
Put your website in context: Contextual or in-text advertising is another great option for monetizing your website. In-text advertising shows up in your website content and is based on popular keywords. A visitor to your site will hover over a word in a paragraph of content that is on your site and an advertisement will appear. There are several popular in-text advertising networks to get you started including Kontera visit http://www.kontera.com for more information.
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