When it comes to generating revenue from your website, there are three primary ways in which you can do this. These are e-commerce, which is receiving direct profits from the sale of products or services on your site, advertising, where you are paid by an advertiser to display their ads on your site, or affiliate marketing which is where you promote a product or a service for a merchant and receive a cut of the revenue if you site generates a sale.

In this article, we’ll be looking at the different forms of website advertising, and the various ways in which you can use them in order to generate revenue from your website. Advertising is a tried and tested way of earning money from a website and you can start using it almost straight away.

Sell Advertising Space

Perhaps the most common way in which website owners make money from advertising is to sell advertising space directly to advertisers. If like most websites, yours has space to fit in an ad that will be easily viewed by your users – and if it doesn’t, you might want to think about de-cluttering your site – it’s a good idea to contact advertisers directly or use an agency to get paid for putting ads on your site. However, it’s good to bear in mind that when using this method, your website should be part of a commercially viable industry, and should also provide high quality content which attracts a lot of traffic. Simply speaking, advertisers usually won’t buy your ad space if they don’t think it’s worth it.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is also another very popular method used by website owners to generate an income through displaying ads on their site. With PPC ads, you are paid each time a user clicks on an ad, with some PPC agencies paying more if the click leads to a sale. You can easily get set up using PPC advertising for the first time using Google AdSense or through a reputable PPC and online advertising company such as Click Booth. PPC is often a common choice for many website owners as there is no need to sell ad space directly to advertisers, and the ads are based on your site and traffic.

CPM Advertising

If you have just started out with your new website and are currently relying on low traffic generating sources, you might want to consider CPM advertising in order to get started. Like PPC advertising, CPM advertising will pay based on a number, however it is views rather than clicks which generates your payout. In general, you will need 1,000 views of an ad to earn some money – with no clicks needing to be made.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an excellent way of making money from your website through advertising and promoting products that you don’t need to obtain or make beforehand. Affiliate marketing works in similar ways to an e-commerce store – however, the difference here is that the products are not yours, but are rather being promoted on your site on behalf of a merchant. If your site generates traffic or sales for the merchant, you will be paid accordingly.

Increasing Your Profits

When it comes to making good money from advertising, it unfortunately takes more than simply selling advertising space on your site or signing up to a PPC or Affiliate Marketing program. In order to earn money you will need to gain traffic, as well as ensure that the ads you display are relevant to the content displayed on your site so that your users will be interested. Chances are, if you run a cooking blog, users won’t be interested much in an ad for garden tools – so it’s important to make sure that they’re relevant.

Your content is also important – in order for users to be interested in the ads displayed on your site, it’s likely that they’ll need to be interested in your content as well. Although there might be a one in a million chance where a user sees an ad for something they’ve been searching everywhere for, it’s more likely that interest in your content will generate a desire to click on the relevant advertisement. For this reason, keep your content of high quality, interesting and informational.

How do you make money from advertising on your website? Do you have any great strategies for making money from ads that you’d like to share? If so, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.