How to Put Advertising Banners on your Web Site
So, you've got a pretty cool website and its doing a little bit of business. Maybe it's really more of a hobby, but it has some potential to be big. You might have thought about taking on some advertisers. (Take on a few big sites for a monthly fee). Maybe you've emailed a few potential advertisers, but haven't really got a response. Is this the way to go about this?
Have you heard of banner ad networks?
Consider a network where an advertiser who wants to buy, say, 50,000 ad impressions for a short run of one week on sites of a particular nature. If a network has 50 sites of that kind registered with it, each drawing 1,000 page views, it can sell these 50,000 ad impressions right away, and then run them over 50 different websites. The owner of a member site is happy to sell his inventory, the advertiser is happy to be able to buy his ads at one place, and the network is happy because it gets a commission on the sale! A truly win-win-win situation.
Also, the network serves all the ads off their server. It tracks traffic and response rates to these ads. It sells ads specific to your niche topic to advertisers who desire this narrowly targeted audience - at higher CPM or CPC rates than the default ad campaigns. The network also allows you to run some personal campaigns on the site.
You won't be a millionaire overnight, but ad networks are a great way to help pay for hosting while you build traffic to your site.
Recommended Banner Ad Networks
Recommendation #1: Casale Media
Casale Media is taking the online advertising industry by storm by offering unprecidented flexibility for both publishers and advertisers in pop under serving. They pay premium rates (70% of their price) to publishers, and allow many great features to publishers including frequency cap selection, and a default system which allows you to serve pop unders when you have no other ads to show with other vendors.
Casale is really friendly with live stats so you can see how you are doing in real-time.
Recommendation #2: Google Adsense
More about Google Adsense here.