How to Make Money with Your Website - Part 2 - Advertising
This is the second post in the series on how to make money with content websites . For a long time, banner ads were the main or only source of income for content websites. They are still the most common form of online advertising around, although the game has changed a lot.
Regular banner advertising is when the advertiser pays the website owner a certain price for a certain number of times the banner is shown (impressions). These are known as CPM (Cost per Mile) ads because the prices are quoted in dollars per thousand impressions. Read on if you want to know if regular advertising is good for your website.
Website owners love CPM ads for one basic reason – you don’t need to worry about how good the ad is. You show it a thousand times, you get paid your $50 (or whatever your price is) – that’s it.
The more popular your site, the higher your CPM rates, so all you need to worry about is getting more people to your website – which is what you would do normally.
Advertisers, on the other hand, are not so keen on CPM – not anymore. The problem with CPM is that you pay for the number of times the banner is shown, even if nobody clicks on it. This means that you won’t know how much each visitor will have cost you, until after you run the campaign.
If you have a website that you want to monetize, you can go with CPM – but don’t count on it as a primary source of income. You need to have a very popular website if you want advertisers seeking to advertise with you.
If you’re just starting out, your CPM rates would be negligible. However, if you establish yourself in a niche, you might be offered a sponsorship deal – e.g. a company in that niche offering to pay you $10,000 to place their ad on your website for a month – that would be something worth accepting.
Posts in the series:
- Introduction
- Regular advertising
- Contextual advertising
- Affiliate offers
- Amazon and eBay widgets
- Premium areas
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