Online Marketing Methods
The aim of this section is to highlight the online marketing methods that can actually work and the best way to use each one in order to make a profit.
Contextual Advertising (AdSense)
Contextual advertising is a way of showing adverts online which relate to the context of the page they display on. The idea behind this is that if someone is reading a page about used cars they are much more likely to click on a car advert than on one about say, health insurance. With contextual advertising you get paid per click, so the more relevant the adverts are to the content the higher the click through rate (CTR) and more money goes in your pocket.
The largest contextual advertising network is Google’s AdSense program and you have probably clicked on many AdSense ads without even realising. You can submit your site to Google and if it is accepted they will give you the necessary code to add to your pages to start earning money. Google will accept most sites that have useful and original content.
With AdSense there are many different advert sizes and formats which you can customise to your liking but the best feature is the accuracy. If you have a well optimised page the adverts displayed are usually very close to the theme of the page.
In fact, this is a useful way to test the on-page optimisation of a page. Place AdSense adverts on the page, give it a few hours to settle in and check the adverts displayed. If they are relevant to the content on the page, you know you have a reasonably well optimised page for ranking in the search engines. If the adverts do not match, you need to work on the theme of the page, visit my On-Page Optimisation page for tips on how to optimise a page.
In order to maximise the CTR of the adverts, it is usually best to make the colour scheme blend in with the rest of your site. Also, the best location for AdSense ads is in the main body of the page above the fold. You can still put them in footers or side columns but the CTR will be significantly lower.
As you get paid per click, if you have little or no traffic coming to your site you will not make any real money. The amount you get paid depends on the topic of the advert. Some higher end topics like insurance will pay you over $1 per click, the average seems to be between $0.30 and $0.50 per click but some low end keywords like tattooing will pay just one or to cents per click. CTR’s also vary depending on the format and position of the adverts on a page, 3 – 4 % is probably a good target here if your adverts are placed in with the content.
From these numbers you can see that an average personal website using AdSense with under 100 visitors per day is not going to make you wealthy. You could bring in a few dollars a day though and cover your hosting costs. However, if you have a large site with lots of traffic you can make decent money, especially if it is based on one of the higher paying topics.
A few words of caution before you go and put AdSense adverts all over your website. Consider the type of website you have. If you have an e commerce site you could get paid a few cents to send a visitor away from your site when you would have made a lot more from selling one of your own products.
I worked with a client once who had an online jewellery store and he was using AdSense as a secondary income source. He didn’t realise that the adverts on his site were sending his customers away to buy jewellery from his competitors. We removed the adverts from his site and the following month his revenue increased by 12%, a lot more than his earnings from AdSense!
If you use AdSense be very careful to stick to the terms and conditions laid out by Google. Pay close attention to the number of adverts allowed per page and avoid clicking on your own adverts. This is the quickest way to get banned from using AdSense, don’t panic if it happens once or twice while you are working on your site but never click your ads intentionally. Google can ban you if they are even slightly suspicious of the activity on your account and they can also keep any funds you have built up between payment dates, so be careful.
If you do get banned there are other alternatives to AdSense. The best one I have used is Kontera’s in text advertising. The CTR’s and price per click are nearly as good as AdSense and it is fairly straight forward to add to a website.
