Making Money With Sponsored Ads Introduction Thank you for downloading this free ebook. I hope it will erase all the fear and confusion that is sometimes involved in getting started with Sponsored Ads and show you how to proceed. It really is quite simple - even I can do it! The first thing you must decide is which Sponsored Ad company (or companies) you are going to sign up with. There are probably hundreds of these today, but I have listed some of the best known ones in the table below. Click on the links below and you will go to the signup page for that company be sure to signup as a 'publisher' (not an 'advertiser'): Google Adsense Adster Revenue Pilot
AdBrite Kontera Clicksor
Alternate URL Text Ad Links Auction Ads
To sign up is simple and your application will sometimes take up to a few weeks to get approval, so it's best to sign up sooner than later! At signup, you usually have to supply a little information about your website (the one you plan to put the ads on) and once you are signed up, you will be able to get some codes from your Sponsored Ad company - which you can then paste onto various pages on your own site. Once your own pages have had the codes added and then they have been uploaded to your website area, you may see ads appearing on them straightaway! Usually, it takes a couple of hours to a day or so for anything to appear. But what should you consider when thinking about the actual webpages you are going to place the codes on? Read on ...
Making your pages Now you have your ad codes, you should perhaps paste them (with a little paragraph explaining what they are for!) into a Word document or something similar. You can always recreate them at source on the Sponsored Ad company's site, but you will save yourself the effort by just pasting them somewhere safe! You might just put above each one a single line saying e.g. 'Adsense vertical column ad with 5 ads' or 'code for Kontera inline ads' ... something nice and descriptive.
Your next job is to make your webpages. Some of the Sponsored Ad companies' ads are what are referred to as 'contextual ads'. Examples would be Google Adwords and Kontera. This means that if you changed the content of your page, so would the actual ads shown change. Other companies, such as Adbrite, do not have contextual ads, and so if doesn't matter too much what you show in terms of content - the ads will be just the same. So, in this way, your content doesn't matter so much for Adbrite pages as for Kontera pages, for example.
Which pages pay best? How can I optimise my pages? Well, this depends once more on your choice of Sponsored Ad company. Google, for example pay higher for a visitor clicking on an ad about Cancer or Life Insurance than for a click on an ad about mousetraps. So, if you have ads that are 'contextual' (e.g. Google, Kontera, Clicksor), then you could write webpage content about a 'high paying keyword'. You would need to make sure that the keyword appears many times in your text and perhaps consider using meta-tags which contain the keyword as well. But, of course, if you already have website content, then ads would be generated based on your text that already exists. For Adbrite ads, there is no concept of page optimisation. So my recommendation would be as follows: •
If you are using ads which are NOT CONTEXTUAL (e.g. Adbrite, Adster), then you should just include these in any pages you already have or generate some new ones for you ads. The actual text will have no effect on the ads that appear - you cannot affect the ads or how well they page by making changes you your site content
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If you are using ads which ARE CONTEXTUAL, you could simply include ads in pages which exist on your site already, or you could write special optimised pages with 'high paying keywords' to be the ones you will use to earn from Sponsored Ads. [A tool for determining what are high paying keywords can be found HERE]
When you have designed your pages, include the ad codes in accordance with the Ad company's advice and rules, upload them to your remote website and soon your very first Sponsored links will start to appear. Every time someone clicks on these, you will earn money! It's easy to earn hundreds of dollars per month in this way. For tips on how to get it all moving along nicely ... read on ...
Tips on how to improve your earnings with Sponsored Ads One of the things you will definitely get in trouble doing is clicking on your own ads -so just DON'T! Break this Golden Rule at your own peril! Don't even do it "just to test them out and see how they work" , because Adsense (or whoever) will not be interested. Too many people (myself included) have been caught out this way. THEY WILL JUST AXE YOUR ACCOUNT AT A STROKE ... YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! HOWEVER, what if I showed you some of my pages which contained ads, in return for you showing me yours? What if we both 'decided' that we would click on the ads (on the other person's sites) that 'interested' us? Then we could mutually get clicks from one another, right? What if there was a little community of people, all of whom had webpages with ads on them, and all of whom were interested in checking out ads from other folks' pages? Then you would end up with a group of people all RECEIVING a group of clicks on their OWN SITES. Fortunately, such communities do exist ... and anyone can join them! Traffic Exchanges (TEs) are special membership websites where members submit some of their own website URLs (links) and these get entered into a huge 'rotation' of sites. When a member logs in and surfs the system, a webpage appears with a timer that counts down, then another page appears, times out, another page ... etc, etc. The member never sees any of their own pages, but other members WILL see them. Now there are special Traffic Exchanges which only accept webpages with Sponsored Ads on them (i.e. like the ones you have now hopefully prepared). So, all the members don't just surf through the pages like in a normal Traffic Exchange, but they additionally click the ads, one per page. The best of these special TEs (called PRO-only TEs) charge a small monthly membership fee (typically $2 or $3 per month), in return for which you get to surf about 20 sites per day, which amounts to about 600 clicks on your pages per month. If I tell you that a click on your site will typically earn you around $0.20 - $0.40 ... well you can do the math !!!
A note on 'funnel pages' One thing you will notice if you do join a PRO-only TE is that there will be a number of pages which don't appear to have any ads on them! So you might ask 'How can I do the website owner of this page any favours by clicking on ads if there aren't any on the page ...'? Well, some of the Sponsored Ad companies have worked out a means of being able to detect where clicks come from, in particular if they have come directly from a page in a TE rotation. Google in particular are known to have this ability and will close down accounts for publishers who use pages that contain their ads in TEs!
But fear not! There is a way around this, and that is to use so-called 'funnel pages' in the TE, which have links on them which are not actual ad links, but lead to pages that DO have ad links on them. So, if you see one of these pages that don't have adlinks, just click one of the ordinary links and then click an ad on the new page that opens. This is not only important to understand as a surfer in a TE, but also if you use Google Adsense yourself ... if you do use these ads, you MUST use funnel pages (or something equally clever) to avoid clicks coming directly from the Traffic Exchange rotation.
A note on click-through-rate (CTR) If every time your webpage was shown to a visitor, it got a click (which is what happens within the PRO-only TEs), then the Sponsored Ad company would get extremely suspicious and close your account, because it would be clear that you were doing something to 'get' clicks. What you need to do therefore is to also show your ad pages to lots of other visitors who will not click in order to balance things out. For a given webpage with ads, the ratio of the number of page views that get a click to the total number that you have shown is called the click-through-rate, or CTR. You should aim to keep this below 5%, the lower the better for any given Sponsored Ad company. About 2% is probably pretty optimal. You can use regular Traffic Exchanges to get the non-click views.
So which are the best PRO-ONLY TRAFFIC EXCHANGES? I have a theory that says that the oldest is the best in terms of TEs. The two best ones I have found can be viewed by clicking on the banners below (open a new browser, so you won't lose your place in this ebook):
For a regular Traffic Exchange, to deliver non-clicking page views, I recommend the following site:
Step-By-Step Procedure 1. Sign up with one or more Sponsored Ad companies as a publisher (website owner) 2. Login to your Sponsored Ad account and get some ad codes - paste these somewhere handy for when you need them 3. Prepare your webpages that are going to contain the ads - you might want to optimise your pages using special keywords 4. Paste the codes you saved into your adlink pages and then upload the pages to the Internet 5. Possibly use search engine optimisation methods to improve your sites' visibility on the Net. 6. Sign up at www.ViewXDirect.biz and www.Gimmeclicks.com to increase your earning potential, observing carefully the rules imposed by your Sponsored Ad company. NEVER CLICK YOUR OWN ADS ... USE FUNNEL PAGES IF YOU HAVE GOOGLE ADS ... KEEP YOUR CTR WAY DOWN AT THE 2% LEVEL 7. Sign up at www.Hitfun.biz to keep your CTR down (or rather under control)
Closing remarks Well, I hope this short ebook has shown you how to get started with Sponsored Ads. If you follow the steps above, you will be well under way to making money with your websites. If you need any more advice about this, please feel free to contact me via email (click here). I wish you well in whatever you do! Simon.