f you have a website that has gained popularity, visitor loyalty, and high numbers of traffic, internet advertising is often the next thing to consider and an ideal way to monetize your website.
There is no secret formula to internet advertising. One of the key factors to successfully making money and making it worth your advertisers' time is to have a large following and number of daily hits.
After all, there's no point in someone paying for an ad on a site that barely gets 10 visitors a day. At minimum, wait until you have somewhere between 800-1000 visitors daily before asking for compensation in return for ad space.
Once your daily visitors are coming in lucrative numbers, it's time to decide what kind of internet advertising works best for you. Monthly ads? Text link ads? Banner ads?
First, you're going to want to determine your target demographic to make sure ads you're displaying are relevant to your site. If 80 percent of your visitors are females between the ages of 18 to 24, your advertisements will have to be considerably different than those displayed to a group of men in their 40s.
For this example, let's say your target demographic is men between the ages of 18 and 45 who golf. The best internet advertisers for you are going to be golf courses, product distributors, sporting goods stores, etc. Now that you know the types of ads you want to display, you're going to have to determine a pricing structure.
When internet advertising first became popular, one way of doing it was to charge by a CPM, or cost per 1,000 impressions. This way doesn't guarantee visitors and an impression only means someone clicked on the web page and was able to view the ad, so in this age of advertising you're far better off offering fixed rate monthly ad slots.
Determine where you would like advertisements to go on your site, such as one banner across the top and 10-15 ads on each sidebar, and start with a fixed rate slightly lower than what you think someone would be willing to pay. If you think $35 per month is reasonable for a sidebar ad, start with $30 and see how many ads begin rolling in.
Many websites also have a monthly limit on ad spaces available, so if you're charging $30 per ad and have a waiting list 3 months long, that is a good indicator that it's probably time to increase your rates.
Aside from knowing what you're offering and your target demographic, you're also going to want a detailed and regularly updated analysis of your site statistics.
Potential advertisers are going to want to know how many unique visitors you get, how many daily, weekly, monthly hits you get, and how many subscribers and followers you have on various social media pages such as Facebook and Twitter. Providing a transparent link to your statistics info and/or a media kit outlining all this information is the simplest way to display the information.
If all of this sounds like too much of a hassle and you'd rather not deal with advertisers directly, one way to start out and test the advertising waters on your website is through Google Adsense.
Google Adsense offers a variety of banners and customization options to website owners, allowing you to create ads that fit perfectly into the space you have available and blend in seamlessly. You'll get paid per click and as you create more content, the ads become more and more relevant to your readers, thus making you more money.
The better you maintain and update your site, the more visible it will become and the more you will attract advertisers. It doesn't have to be intimidating, and with the right resources and mindset, you'll find your website to be quite profitable.