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I had started a website four years back without knowing
where the money would flow in. My only investment was time and I was quite
motivated to bring up the content for my website. My site did top the results
in
various search engines but I was still struggling to convert the traffic
(visitors to a site) into serious cash. During that period, I thought the only
way was to put up the commission basis ads which pay webmasters only the share
of the sale that happens through a visitor’s action. One needs to be very lucky
and at the same time have huge traffic to get such ads work. The other option
was the Google AdSense which has some
stringent policies and needed to be used with a lot of care. Well in this post,
I would like to share certain basic information about making money from a
website.
Before all that, let
me tell you that I am writing this mainly for the sake of upcoming Indian
Blogger's and Site Owners. So I will stick with the Indian Rupee wherever
possible. This article however will be handy for any website coming from any
country as the basics are the same wherever you are.
In these last four
years, there has been a rapid increase in the Online Advertising Networks.
These
Networks have been providing Webmasters (who are called as Publishers) the
various models of Ad inventory. Some of the most common models are the CPC, CPM
and the CPA. I shall give a brief info about all the three models
here.
For getting more revenue, the mantra is to gather more traffic and
at the same time to strategically have the right kind of advertisement
placements. Webmasters do need to experiment a lot with different banner sizes
and positions of advertisements on their pages and come to know which style
suits them well. Anyway, back to the three general Ad models:
CPC: This stands for a Cost per Click ad. The CPC kind of
ad model is loved by my most of the publishers. When a visitor to your site
happens to click on a graphic/textual banner of this model, then you get a
fixed
rate for the visitor action. This fixed rate can vary according to the
campaign.
For instance, publishers are paid higher rates for NRI Campaigns say 10-14 Rs
per click compared to the India-targeted campaigns that can be around 2.50-6Rs.
My guess is that even an advertising agency would like this sort of CPC model
but the advertisers could be slightly pensive, especially the medium size
ones.
The CPC model has an element of suspense I guess for the
advertiser. He wouldn’t be sure as to how quickly his budget can get exhausted.
The bigger advertisers who have plenty of money perhaps go for a time-based
period and end up paying for all the clicks that are generated during that
period say 1-month or 3-months or whatever.
CPM: This kind of model stands for Cost per Thousand
Impressions. To be more precise, a publisher gets paid a fixed rate (again
according to the specific campaign) for showing 1000 UNIQUE impressions of the
Ad banner. This is irrespective of whether a user clicks the banner or not
which
is quite a good thing for the publisher. But strangely I notice that the
revenue
generated out from CPM ends up almost the same as CPC! Probably this applies
for
the medium size websites. I can give a bottom line though and that is – Sites
with heavy traffic benefit hugely from this CPM model where every single unique
impression counts! The usual rates that I have encountered for the CPM is 15Rs
or so and for NRI Campaigns, it could well be 60Rs!
CPA: CPA stands for
the Cost per Action model. A similar model to this is the CPL model which means
Cost per Lead. Well these are the ads that suck if you are a publisher! You
might give tonnes of impressions to those wonderfully attractive banners and
you
can generate a few hundred clicks but all that costs to a big ZERO if you
didn’t
have any luck. This type of ad model requires the user to not only click the
damn Ad but also end up buying something on the advertiser’s site through his
credit card!
A slightly better model from the CPA is the CPL which
requires the user to click the ad and mostly fill up a big form and sort of
register himself or providing some essential details in the advertiser site. As
I keep saying one needs to be very lucky to make all these happen as a
publisher! Only yesterday I was discussing this with one of my colleagues who
asked me “who has the time to fill up these forms?” But of course if you have a
lot of inventory on your site, then it’s a NO LOSS situation in keeping one of
these banners. This model can work at times when the Ads are relevant to the
topic of your website.
Paid Text Links: Well the above are the three
regular models found in the online industry. There is one more Ad Model which
isn’t a main stream one but can be handy in being a second alternative source
of
income for publishers. It is the Paid Text Link model which is offered by very
few Ad networks in the entire world. I have been a big fan of this model but
unfortunately it is fading away because of the strict rules of Google. Okay
before that I need to brief what it is actually. Well there is something called
the Google Page Rank which is measured on a scale of 0 to 10 for every site.
The
higher the rank, the higher are the chances of a website in getting the top
listing for various search terms. So new websites tend to climb up the ladder
quickly by buying Text Links for a period of time say 1-month, 2-months etc on
the already established websites that have good Page ranks and other factors
like thousands of webpages indexed in various search engines etc.
As a
publisher if somebody decides to buy a text link on your homepage or sitewide
or
for a few number of webpages, then you get paid a fixed amount of money every
month. It doesn’t matter if your user clicks the Text link or not, you stand to
get an amount end of the month! Isn’t that cool? It feels as if you are renting
your house to somebody and the great thing is that they pay you decent amounts
for just a word or two! A Link Broker does the sales, payments, providing
reporting, publishing interfaces to both the advertiser and the publisher. I am
afraid this model seems to be disappearing with Google blacklisting websites
that sell Links on their sites!
Well this should be enough from me in
this post; I shall come up with some more stuff relating to this topic in the
near future like giving information about the various AD
networks.
Placing the ads also matters on the pages. See below.
http://earnmoney.mmhaq.net/
