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Making money from your website using advertising

You have managed to get your website to that magical point where you have established popularity, traffic, loyalty and a community of fans. Your site contains a wealth of information, resources and services that you provide free because that’s just the kind of person you are. You may not have intended to make money from your site but now that you have an audience you realise that it’s possible, or perhaps you have to start thinking about generating income because your costs to manage the site have increased and it’s starting to hurt.

You have been diligent over the years to build up your community, but now you wonder how to go about making some revenue by leveraging this audience (as the marketers would say, you want to monetise your site). Maybe you have some big dreams and plan to one day generate advertising income from your new web project. This is a very common plan for online business given people tend to expect information and services to be free on the web. Advertising may be one of the only revenue generation strategies available to you.

How much traffic do I have to have to make money?

In my experience once you have about 500-1000 unique visitors per day to your site *at least* before you can start to make real money. You can make chimps change from day one from your 50 hits, but this article is targeted at those that have a larger audience, or perhaps are constructing a business plan (either real or in your head) and would like to know how to go about monetising your website. If you get more then 1000 unique visitors a day chances are you already make money from your site (if not you should be!) but my points are still relevant.

As per usual I will illustrate my article using real world examples from what I did to make money. Over about five years I managed a hobby site that started off as a very local site focusing on people in my area that played the game Magic: The Gathering. I wrote reports and did news coverage for the game. Later I expanded the site to Australia and eventually opened it to the world although it remained mostly Australian with a good chunk of Asians and New Zealanders.

Banner programs

At around the time I was getting 500 unique visitors a day I decided to start playing with advertising methods. This was before the advent of Google Adsense (more on this later) but there were many banner programs available that paid either on cost per click (CPC) or per impression basis. An impression is a banner being displayed to a user once, a click is someone clicking the banner and visiting the site being advertised.

These networks act as a middle man between business that want to advertise and people like me that have an audience and want to make some money by displaying banners. Unfortunately these programs display banners that often don’t match your audience. I tried a few but it was a short lived experiment that made me a few dollars if that.

I recommend you avoid any banner programs. If you are confused about what I am talking about regarding banner programs take a look at Burst Media to get a grasp of how they work. For small sites they just don’t make much money. For large sites there are much better ways to make money. I’m sure there are people out there that make good money from these programs (I’m sure the program owners do!) but in my experience a little effort to find the right type of advertising can yield much better results.

I decided the best way to make money was to really leverage the demographics of my audience. I had a fairly focused niche, card game playing young males. I started by emailing all the local and international card game shops and asked if they were interested in exposure to my market. Instantly I had responses but I had to come up with a pricing structure first.

How much should you charge?

By this time my site was getting close to 1000 unique visitors per day, with about 300,000 impressions per month. I had done my research and I knew that advertising on websites was usually via a standard 468×60 banner so I would start with that. I also knew that many companies charged by what is called CPM or cost per 1000 impressions. Back then this was by far the most commonly used scale for pricing of web advertising and you could expect to earn anywhere from $0.10 to $10.00 CPM. I never liked this method of advertising because it didn’t guarantee any visitors. Charging by click-throughs is a far better method, but didn’t become mainstream until later.

I decided that in order to keep my advertisers I had to offer value so I went for a blanket approach. I started charging a flat rate of $30 per month to have a banner on my site which offered as many impressions that my traffic could provide. I signed up my first few advertisers at this rate.

Banner management software

In order to “rotate” different banners across my site I needed some special software that would dynamically place banners. This allowed me to have more than one advertiser banner in a single location so I could optimise my adspace and make sure my audience didn’t get too bored from seeing the same banner over and over again.

Let me save you some time, phpAdsNew is the best banner management software out there. It’s under an open source license and has all the features you could ever wish for at a price you can’t beat, it’s free. If you don’t believe me and absolutely have to try searching elsewhere try this category at the PHP Resource Index.

There is a learning curve with phpAdsNew and you do have to install it on your own server. If you are like me and you do things like this yourself most of the time you shouldn’t have too much trouble. Otherwise you might try contacting your favourite ITGeek and get them to give you a hand.

Statistics are important

The best feature with phpAdsNew is that it allows you to provide a unique user login for your advertisers to check their banner statistics in real time. This means at any point in time they can learn how many impressions and clicks their banners are receiving from your site.

Before you start searching for advertisers you should be very familiar with the statistics of your site. Do you know how many unique visitors you get? How many hits you get? How many impressions? Do you even know what the differences are between these? Try this stats terminology primer on for size if you don’t.

Most web servers come with a statistics package. Ask your web host if you don’t know. The most common are Awstats (demo) and Webalizer (demo) which often are preinstalled on many hosting packages. Become familiar with these packages so you can accurately assess your site traffic.

Increasing ad revenue

I now had the foundations laid and was serving the ads of my first few advertisers. From the point onwards I went to work attracting more advertisers by directly emailing North American online card stores and other related sites. I kept an excel file to track which websites I had emailed and their responses so I could follow up in a timely manner.

I created new banner positions and started initiatives like a newsletter to generate more revenue. I created monthly packages that combined newsletter advertising and different banner positions and offered them at $500 per quarter. I increased the top prime banner position fee to $50 per month and started offering a tower banner position for $50 as well.

Eventually I had to limit the number of banners I could take in the prime positions to avoid dilution. I had a guarantee in place that offered at least 30,000 impressions per month (averaging 40,000-60,000) to advertisers so that they always received a good equivalent CPM rate. I even had some advertisers purchase the rights to “own” a position for a certain period to make sure no other advertisers banners would be displayed.

Eventually I reached a point where I was averaging $500 per month and peaked at $1000 in one month. Some advertisers came and went quickly but many stayed loyal and in fact still advertise today though I sold the site a long time ago. The niche for the site was so focused that it became the pre-eminent site for Australia in it’s marketplace and consequently some Australian advertisers simply stuck their banners up as a branding exercise. They knew that the exposure from the site would help to align their business as one of the pre-eminent retailers or event organisers for the game. Some advertisers stopped caring about click through stats and kept advertising purely for the branding exposure.

Google adsense

At some point Google Adsense popped up and I was in with other early adopters to try it out. My results were okay. The money wasn’t nearly as good as the established relationships with advertisers I had, however the ads being displayed were a lot more targeted than banner networks I had tested early on.

I eventually stopped using Adsense because I could better monetise the adspace with my traditional advertisers. However that was before Google went to work providing such a variety of banner sizes and display options. Nowadays Google Adsense is a viable income source for many websites so I definitely suggest you look into it as a possible option for generating revenue, but remember it’s not the only means and you can earn more if you get busy chasing targeted advertisers.

Ongoing maintenance

I wouldn’t call web advertising income passive, but it sure is close. The systems I had in place handled everything automatically. While I did have to manually create advertiser accounts, pursue advertisers and control billing, once the systems were in place, in particular phpAdsNew, I didn’t have to do much. Of course depending on your website often the maintenance of your community is were the labour is involved, but chances are if you started the site you either enjoy it or have plans in place to eventually remove yourself from the maintenance role.

In the end I sold my site but if it wasn’t for the advertiser revenue my asset would not have been valued nearly as highly as the final sale price. Investing in advertising is like investing in any asset, the time and labour you put in today will lead to benefits in the future.

Yaro Starak
Web Entrepreneur

What is Liberty Reserve

What is Liberty Reserve

Liberty Reserve is an account-based payment system where you can store value in U.S. dollars and transfer payments to others and receive payments from others. It is safe, reliable and confidential. Payments are irrevocable (meaning they cannot be reversed). Liberty Reserve is instant, real-time currency for international commerce. In just minutes, you can send and receive payments from anyone, anywhere on the globe!

Concepts

Account

It all starts with your account. This is where you see your balance, history of transactions, security features, private messaging, and all other features of the website. Access to your account requires the full spectrum of login and security details to be entered.

Wallet

The wallet allows you to quickly access a dedicated portion of your funds in Liberty Reserve using a faster login procedure if you wish to pay someone quickly. It is recommended that you keep only a small amount of value in your wallet because the security procedures necessary to access your wallet are less than the security procedures to access your full account. In order to transfer funds from your account to your wallet, you will need to login to your account, and do it from there. You are not required to initialize a wallet, and are free to make payments from your account without using the wallet. This is an optional feature for your convenience.

Once you have funds in your wallet, paying someone is very easy and quick, with a faster login process.

e-Currency

E-currency, or digital currency, is a stored value and payment system, usually account-based, that allows users to store funds (such as Euro, USD, Yen, etc., and metals such as gold, silver, etc., or anything else of value for that matter). The main feature of a digital currency is that spends (payments) are irrevocable, unlike bank payments (wires, checks), and other systems that have similar features (online payments) but can easily reverse payments, such as PayPal.

Digital currencies evolved as a need for merchants to have an alternative to credit cards due to the high cost of accepting credit cards (credit card % fees and fraud). Merchants using digital currencies get paid, and stay paid, lowering their costs of operation, eliminating fraud, and pass on the savings to their customers.

Balances

A balance is the total amount of funds or value that you have in your Liberty Reserve account. It is displayed on most pages within your account for your convenience.

Security

One of the most important features of Liberty Reserve is the security of your account. Passwords, PIN's, stop account feature, and anti-keylogger (trojan) login system are just a few of the security precautions that Liberty Reserve has added to keep your value safe and secure within your account.

Nothing works better, however, than your own due diligence when it comes to security. Always use an anti-virus for safe computing.

Working with Liberty Reserve site

Account registration

Creating an account is easy at Liberty Reserve. Simply enter your details, such as your name, account title, and address, etc., and you will have a full-functioning, free Liberty Reserve account in minutes. Remember to write down all the information for future reference such as your Security Code, passwords, account number, etc.

Logging in

Once you create a Liberty Reserve account, you may access your account by logging in with your account number, password, and login PIN in order to access the value in your account and make payments, check history, use the internal messaging system, etc.

Profile settings

Once you are logged into your account at Liberty Reserve, you can click on "profile" and change your account name, password, and other features, such as email notifications.

Transfer

This feature allows you to send funds (make payments) to any other Liberty Reserve account instantly.

Withdraw

You can withdraw (redeem) value from your Liberty Reserve account by using any number of independent exchange providers listed on the Liberty Reserve website. Usually, exchange providers will have an account number starting with the letter, "x".

Exchange providers are not affiliated with Liberty Reserve and your dealings with them are at your own risk. We recommend that you only use exchange providers that are members of the Global Digital Currencies Association.

Deposit

You can deposit funds or value to your Liberty Reserve account by using any number of independent exchange providers listed on the Liberty Reserve website. Usually, exchange providers will have an account number starting with the letter, "x".

Exchange providers are not affiliated with Liberty Reserve and your dealings with them are at your own risk. We recommend that you only use exchange providers that are members of the Global Digital Currencies Association.

Internal messaging

Once you are logged into your Liberty Reserve account, you can send private messages to anyone else with a Liberty Reserve account. All you need to know is their account number. You can also check your message inbox to see if you received any messages, and you can save messages. This is a private, internal messaging system developed exclusively for Liberty Reserve account holders.

Wallet

Liberty Reserve's wallet is a handy feature that allows you to access only the portion of funds that you have placed in your LR wallet quickly and easily, bypassing the regular, enhanced login security features of your main account.

You do not have to activate or use the wallet if you do not want to. But if you choose to use it, it is a way to save time when logging in, and to make payments very quickly, accessing only a small portion of your total LR holding, just like going to a bank ATM, withdrawing a small portion of your account balance, and keeping the cash in your pocket.

This less secure, though quicker, way of logging in to your separate wallet sub-account is recommended only for small payments, and keeping small balances in the wallet. Do not transfer a large portion of your main account to your wallet.

Settings

To enable or disable the wallet sub-account feature, log into your main Liberty Reserve account and click on "My Wallet." Once there, you can see your wallet balance and have the option to enable or disable your wallet sub-account, and to add or remove funds from your wallet.

Refill

To fill or refill your wallet, the wallet sub-account has to be enabled. While logged in to your MAIN Liberty Reserve account, access the "My Wallet" link, and click on "Add funds." By doing this, you will be given the option to move funds from your main account to the wallet sub-account. You cannot add funds to your wallet account unless you are logged in to your main account.

Discharge

To discharge or remove funds from your wallet back to your main Liberty Reserve account simply access the "My Wallet" link, and click on "Remove Funds." By doing this, you will be given the option to move funds from your wallet sub-account back to your main Liberty Reserve account.

Logging In

Logging in to your wallet is easy. All you need is your account number and Login PIN. You do not need your Password or Security PIN. Once you are logged in, you will see your wallet balance and a funds transfer screen. You cannot access any of your main Liberty Reserve account features and balances from this sub-account.

Transfer

When logged in to your wallet, you can transfer funds quickly and easily up to the balance that is available in your wallet. You do not need your Security PIN since this is a less secure interface for low balances and quick payments.

If someone sends you a payment to your Liberty Reserve account, that payment goes to your main account, not your wallet. You cannot receive payments into your wallet. You can only send payments. To replenish your wallet, you would need to log into your main account, and refill the wallet from there.

Streamster Application

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