A recent question was posted to me on how he could increase his advertising revenue, and so I went over to the blog and noticed he had one Google AdSense banner above the first post, and above the single post titles.

This left everything open for him, as he wasn’t using advertising effectively.

I have tried a wide variety of advertising programs, and haven’t been blown away by too many, but one thing I want to recommend to everyone is to diversify your advertising sources. If you haven’t signed up for every possible advertising service to test it out and see which one works best for your audience, you could be doing yourself a huge disservice.

Text Link Sales

I used to be a big fan of text link sales, but then Google cracked down on the whole thing, and killed my will to risk my site, but that doesn’t mean there are no ways to sell text links in a way on your site, and the main product that comes to mind, and worked decently for me was Scratchback.

It allows you to quickly and easily monetize your site in an inexpensive, quick and interesting way. It doesn’t always work out very well, and you have to either draw attention to it in some way, or place it high on the sidebar of your site.

CPC Advertising

For the most part, Google owns the CPC marketplace. Being in Canada, I can’t sign up for Yahoo’s competing product, but either one is pretty much the default way to run advertising on your blog for cost per click.

The one tip I will give in this area is to make sure that you try a variety of different sizes and locations on your site to see which works best for your audience and don’t be afraid to place more than one of these on your site, if it is managed well.

CPM Advertising

For me, there is no other CPM advertising system other than Adify and its partners. I am signed up with Forbes’ Advertising network through Adify, and I couldn’t be happier. I recently reviewed the Adify service, and it was noticed by Adify and mentioned on the Adify blog, which shows how closely they are tracking their brand, so kudos to them.

There are so many other CPM advertising systems to try out, but I haven’t tried many of them, and those that I have tried haven’t been successful for me.

CPA Advertising

Affiliate advertising is a staple for the blogs in my niche, but I haven’t promoted them very much because they don’t always work as well as we would hope. You only get paid when the company gets paid, and sometimes the payment structure is such that it isn’t worth taking up too much space on your site.

The only positive experience I have add with affiliate programs or CPA advertising have been private affiliate systems like SEO Book used to have. Other than that, I would say that you can try out Pepperjam, as they have some great companies working inside their system.

Private Ad Sales

Contact people, and convince them how useful it would be to advertise on your site. It can be difficult, time consuming, but well worth it.

There is no reason not to try to do this, but work on your advertising rates carefully.

Conclusion

Please go beyond Google AdSense and try various things out. Research CPC, CPA, and CPM advertising programs and find out what works for you, especially in our ever changing society and the slow down in the economy.

Let me know what works for you, and what doesn’t. It would be great to put together a list of advertising services that work well for tons of people.

Originally posted on May 22, 2008 @ 7:51 am