How to Make Money from Your Website

Let's deal now with the advertisements.

How Do I Go About Getting People To Advertise On My Site?

Remember that there is no point in anyone advertising on a site that receives no visitors. Content is king in this situation.

At its simplest level and if you are running a local site there is nothing to stop you advertising a local service if such a service is willing to pay for it. Taxis, Plumbers and Joiners are a good place to start. You could also consider Estate Agents and other professional services.

In these cases you can simply place a text advertisement with a contact telephone number on a web page. If the advertiser has a web site you can also link to this.

At the next level, you could design a graphic or use the Google Image search to find something appropriate (watch for copyright restrictions). Inserting a link to an advertisers web site from a graphic looks better, catches a visitors eye and will produce better results.

Google Adsense

Google, the world's most popular search engine, also sells advertising space both on its own website and on websites belonging to other people.

It uses a context sensitive advertising program which it has named Adsense. This means for example, if you have a website on fishing the Google ad robot can tell this by looking at your sites content and will then choose appropriate ads to display such as fishing equipment suppliers. These appear in small boxes approx 2cms square.

The advertiser pays Google according to the number of times their ads are clicked on (not merely displayed). Google then pays the website owner a proportion of this. I have found that the actual amounts per click vary. Quite how this works is, I suppose, a matter for Google whose own charges must logically speaking also vary. What I will say is that the amounts are not ungenerous - we are not talking 1-cent-a-click here and if you are prepared to work at your website you could build up a fairly reasonable supplementary income.

You have to apply to the Adsense program which you can do so at http://www.google.com/adsense.

Google will have a look at your site in order to assess its suitability and quality. In general, they do not accept personal pages or chat sites into the AdSense program. However, if a site contains targeted, text-based content that is useful to visitors and/or provides a product or service, they will consider it for participation. Hobby sites and specialist sites may well qualify in this context as they often contain quality information that visitors would find both interesting and useful. If you have a presentable site which looks as if it will receive a reasonable number of visitors then you stand a good chance.

Setting up an Adsense account is easy enough. The advertisements are text ads and can be displayed in a variety of styles and colours. You decide which. Google then constructs the HTML code which you then copy and paste into the main body text of your code. Don't be put off if you are not
familiar with HTML. You are not programming here - you are copying and pasting.

Once the code is inserted and uploaded to a server the ads will start to appear. Until the Google ad robot has a look at your site and figures out what it is about you will see public service and charity ads for which you will not get paid. You may have to wait an hour or two before seeing 'real' ads.

To see how many people have clicked on your ads and how much money you have made you sign into your account on the to the Adsense web pages and view the report. Payments to yourself are made by cheque if your monthly account reaches $100 - Google pays monthly in dollars but your bank will accept a dollar cheque wherever you live with no problem. If your monthly account doesn't reach $100 the amount rolls over to the next month until it does.

Only a small proportion of visitors will click on the ads so don't go planning that holiday yet.

Google filter out any clicks on your own ads and use pattern analysis to work out if anything underhand is going on. Be assured that Google are much cleverer than any hare-brained scheme you can come up with so don't do it! If you do expect to have your account closed.

A few final points:

If you use a robot.txt file on your web site then you need to add the following 2 lines to it to allow the Google ad robot to do its thing:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

If your site contains frames then have the sense to run the ads in the frame with your page content.

Don't place ads on pages that require a login.

Change the content of your page by all means but don't change the subject matter or the overall context. For example, if you change your page on fishing to one on flying kites don't be surprised if you see fishing ads on your new kite flying page!

A few of the more obvious Q & A

Q. How do I get paid?

A. By cheque to the address you supply when you open your Adsense account.

Q. Does Everyone who views my site see the same Google Ads.

A. No. Google use IP addresses to work out where someone is from and tailors the ads accordingly - told you it was clever!

Q. Will participating in the program improve my website ranking in Google.

A. Nice try - but definitely not!

Q. I run a business site. Will ads for my competitors appear?

A. You can filter out any URLs you do not want to appear on your site by adding them to your 'filtered URLs' list in your Adsense account.

Q. Can I show my ads on more than one web site or do I need another account.

A. Yes you can show ads on more than one web site with one Adsense account -just use the same code. Adsense will automatically adjust the content of the ads to any new page irrespective of which web site is in use. AdSense don't like you opening more than one account. It produces unnecessary administration e.g. each account needs a separate cheque. It's easier for everyone if you just keep the one account.

Q. Does it cost to set up an account.

A. No

There is a good Help section within the Adsense pages.