Internet advertising is having a comeback and you don't want to miss it! You can test the waters on $50 a month. If you have the traffic, its not impossible to make money from Internet advertising. Google has made recent strides which makes it easier than ever to advertise and to place ads on your sites.
Spending Your Advertising Budget
There are three main streams from which to do your media planning:
Independent websites - You know your audience and where they come from. Contact the top websites that fit your audience and negotiate a long-term ad deal. If they've been around for a while, they'll show it in their response time and hopefully fair offer. The relationship is more personal here - over time you might find yourself doing more business with some of the sites you advertise with.
Advertising networks - An ad network might let you advertise on a few sites at once that fit your demographic. They typically comprise of anywhere from ten to hundreds of websites.
Google - Google's ad system is an easy and worthwhile place to spend part of your advertising budget. You buy a few keywords and can market even the most obscure item!
Making Money From Internet Ads!
If your website doesn't sell anything, then you'll be focusing on advertising revenues. Its not impossible to make a living from ad banners if you have a strong brand and a lot of traffic.
First things first - If you plan on making money from ads, you'd better start reading about advertising, marketing, public relations and Internet media. You're not going to tackle this on being able to talk numbers alone. Get a few books, find a few online magazines and start reading.
While you're reading, you should get your feet wet by putting Google ads on your site. It doesn't take long to sign up. Once you've signed up and added Google ads to a few of your pages, you can learn the terminology and math of things by tracking the results of your ads. If you have an ad server, you can track it on your side and compare it to Google's numbers.
Find a few ad networks that have sites comparable to yours and try joining. They usually won't demand exclusivity, so you can have ads of a few ad networks and Google all at the same time. Now fill your websites with ad banners!
Where's the big money? Patience. Until you have 1,000 unique visitors a day, you're not even on the map as far as being able to find your own advertisers. When your site has a strong audience base, its time to look for adverisers. Like in any business, you need to know who your best potential customers are. If you give away free information on a specific topic, who sells services or books or other media of that topic? Find them.
