Which kind of online advertisements are the most suitable for your site?

All the professional bloggers launch their website in order to earn money. Some of them become successful in this venture and some do not. Everyone must agree on the fact that one needs solid quality content to win in the long race. While quality content is your bread and butter, you can’t ignore the other aspects. One such aspect is choosing the correct type of online advertisements and their placement in your site.

There are different kinds of advertisements available in the market.

CPC (Cost per Click) online advertisements

In CPC advertisement, the advertising network company charges the advertiser on per click basis. And the publishers also get paid accordingly. Adsense is the most popular advertising network in this area. However, be aware that the advertising network company never discloses the cost per click. The cost varies from advertiser to advertiser and it is also dependent on advertising Network Company. It also varies depending on the geographic region of the visitor. You will be paid higher amount if a visitor from the United States of America clicks on the advertisement.

Now the question is when you should give preference to CPC advertisement. Normally, majority of the blog traffic is organic or sourced through a search engine. The bloggers always concentrate on specific key word(s) to enable the search engine to find out their blog post. However, the revenue generating keyword may be completely different from search “Key word”. If you can take care of the both kind of keyword in your blog, it may make sense to give high preference to the CPC advertisement.

CPM (Cost per Mille) online advertisements

In CPM advertisement, you will be paid based on number of page views. Mille stands for 1000. Thus, if some advertising network company gives you 10 cents per 1000 page views, 50,000 page views will give you $5. Thus, if you have reasonable page views per month, CPM model is a reliable source of income. Unlike CPC advertisement, the placement of CPM advertisement is not that important.

Now a day, most of the advertising network has combined CPC and CPM model together. Thus it has become more difficult to segregate the income sourced from CPC and CPM.

CPA (Cost per Activity) online advertisements

In CPA advertisement, you will get paid only when a specific activity is performed. For example, the advertiser made a contract that he\she will pay only when someone downloads a specific software. This gives good revenue in some cases and may be better than CPC or CPM advertisement. CPA advertisement works well for those websites, which have high authenticity in the same niche. Thus the websites should be very reputed and exist for quite some time. The placement of CPA advertisement is very important.

Affiliate Sell

In affiliate sell, you will be getting a commission from the revenue if the visitor purchase online and is routed from your website. Alike CPA advertisement, affiliate sell also demands high authority. The placement of affiliate advertisement is also very important. An advantage in affiliate sell is that you have good number of choices to select online advertisements from your niche.

Direct Online Advertisements

When you get rid of the advertising network and directly deals with the advertiser, it becomes direct advertisement. In one hand, it helps to increase the profitability by getting rid of the advertising network company and on the other hand, you may have to spend extra time to deal with the advertiser and track few things yourself. Direct advertisement may be of any kind e.g. CPC, CPM, CPA etc. In direct advertisement, one of the most important types is banner. Banner advertisement is the most reliable source of income to any blogger. It is like a fixed salary. You have contract with a particular company to show their banner at a particular position for a stipulated period of time and in return, they will pay you a fixed amount. It is quite obvious that to get a banner advertisement, you must have a huge traffic.

There are other online advertisements like In-Text, Slide, Pop up, Pop Under. In In-Text advertisement, key words are highlighted in your post and when clicked, it opens up a new link. The most useful factor for In-Text advertisement is that it doesn't need any extra space like any other online advertisements. The other types i.e. Slide, “Pop Up”, “Pop Under” do as it is reflected in their name. Extensive use of such advertisements may derogate your site performance.

Photo Credit Bess Georgette - Some rights reserved by Bess Georgette

Things you should know before you become an online affiliate

Most of the bloggers are more interested in earning revenue through different ad networking agency. These advertising networking agencies work like a middle man between you and the advertiser. They take a % of revenue from both you and the advertiser. There are number of advertising model exists in the market. However, very few bloggers show interest in online affiliate selling.

For those, who are not accustomed with the term online affiliate sale, I would like to spend few words. “Affiliate sale” is selling someone else's product and take a commission from the overall sale revenue. It is nothing different from setting up a shop and selling products after adding your profit margin. Let us take an example; We are showing a banner advertisement for Walmart in our website. Now, if any visitor sees and clicks on this advertisement, he will be taken to the Walmart side. When the user clicks on the banner on our website, it passes a reference code, by means of which The Walmart website can capture source website, from which the traffic has been sent. Now, if the person buys something from Walmart site online, you will be getting a percentage of the entire sale revenue.

However as you can understand, there is a probability factor works behind getting the percentage of the revenue. It is not guaranteed as it is in the case of "Pay Per Click" or "Pay Per Mile". Thus, obviously people are not interested in putting advertisement for online affiliate sale. Still, you may see that many people go for online affiliate advertisement. I do categorize these people into two broad categories. 1. people, who have carved out a niche for them and have good popularity for their website and 2. people, who have just started blogging and yet to generate proper revenue with any other advertising model.

If we look deep into the websites, which fall in category 1, you will be able to understand a stark similarity among them in many respects. The first and foremost important factor is that these websites are in existence for quite a long time (at least 3 years). With the due course of time, they have carved out their own niche and always put affiliate advertisement pertaining to the same niche. The best example is Wpbeginner. Wpbeginner is a blog started by Syed Balkhi in 2009. This site revolves around everything about Wordpress. The main source of income of this blog is online Affiliate Sale. When, people were searching around for their questions around Wordpress, wpbeginner has done a tremendous job by putting all the knowledge base and news under the same umbrella. Over a period of time, it has got immense popularity and currently have an Alexa ranking around 2900 and Google page rank 6. It means that it has got good authenticity. That is one of the major points for the success in online Affiliate Sale.

I am not here to dishearten you, in case you have also put affiliate advertisement in your site, without much success (as do I). But, you may want to check whether your ad is aligned to the niche of your blog. This can be further enhanced, if you put ad in article page, which is aligned to the context of your article. For example, if you are writing about Wordpress themes, it does make sense to put an online Affiliate ad for site selling Wordpress themes.

The next question is how you get an appropriate affiliate advertisement. The easiest way to find out a site in the same niche as that of yours is that you just go to his site and find out the kind of advertisement has been put up there. It's okay even if the ad has been put up by some advertising networking company through PPC or PPM model. You must ensure that the ad is aligned to the central idea of your blog. Now, just go to that particular website and sign up for Affiliate sale. You can also go to some third party Ad agency, which manages affiliate sale. If you have good traffic from the USA\Canada, a good choice is linkshare. Through linkshare, you can apply for Affiliate Sale for different companies.

Photo Credit - Web Design Hot - http://www.webdesignhot.com/ [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Why should you post regularly in Your daily blog?

If you have a blog, you should regularly update it. The regular update doesn't only enrich your blog with contents but it also benefits you in different parameters. From the time, I started my blog, quite a few numbers of times, I was forced to keep a gap of good number of days because of several other engagements. And every time, I left blogging, the number of visitors came down and Alexa rank took a hit. However, the traffic is not the only point of concern; there are several other implications when you take a leave from your daily blog.

Your daily blog is your work place. Though it doesn't have a full-fledged office, it is nothing less than a routine office work. It does make more sense, when you are a full time blogger. When, you go for a leave, it becomes bit difficult for you to concentrate and write a good content, when you come back. Blogging also needs lots of reading. When you comeback, you still remain in another world; you may take some time to dive in the same habit of reading and writing your daily blog. Over all, it may take few more days to adjust yourself to the blogging habit.

You must be having a loyal user base for your daily blog. Your blog is just like a shop and you have handful of loyal customers over there. However, when you go for leave, your customers have to visit other shops to fulfill their needs. It is not sure that you will get back your customers, when you reopen your shop. Thus, there is always a threat of losing your loyal customers, when you are out for a vacation.

Many search engines including Google regularly crawl your site. These search engines always give a preference to the new and updated contents. If your site is kept idle for long time, you may slowly loose the rank in the search result. And the obvious result is loss of search traffic and the ripple effect is observed on your Alexa ranking.

Even if you go on leave, you don't have the luxury of keeping yourself totally isolate from your blog. This is more valid, if you are also handling administrative activity of your blog. You may get important e-mails from different sources pertaining to your daily blog, which may need your immediate attention. In an unfortunate case, your website may be hacked and it needs to be taken care of immediately. Thus, if you don't have anyone to take care of admin activity for your blog, you don't have any respite.

Does it mean that you will not be able to go for leave anytime? Not really; you have a work around for the same. You may have to have enough articles in stock. You have to post your stocked articles at regular interval of time. For the admin activity, you may have to have a back-up or otherwise you need to take care of it yourself intermittently.

Photo Credit Cortega9