Making Money with Your Content
Making Money with Your Content Building a website with great content and getting it to rank well is a great thing. If you’ve done the building and optimizing correctly, you’ll start seeing traffic increasing and page views starting to climb. As a reality check, let’s discuss timelines at this point. I realize the goal here is to make money with your website. Fair enough. But the basics of business still apply. It’s improbable that you’ll place your site live online and within weeks begin seeing revenue. Sure, you might see a dollar or two every few days, but what we’re after is more like $500+ per month – something real, something you can actually use. A lot of talk exists about whether Google has a “sandbox” – a place where new websites go to “age”, before being included in the general search results. Google denies it exists, and while I’m not going to say it DOES exist, I will say that about a year after one of my sites went live, there was suddenly a large increase in inbound search-related traffic from, guess who…Google. The idea of “aging” a website certainly makes sense. It gives the site a chance to establish itself, grow its content and get the bugs sorted out. It also allows Google to watch things for an extended period of time to judge if the site is real, or just some fly-by-night POS that won’t ever get updated or expanded. Google likes sites that receive frequent updates, so using this time (let’s call it one year, it varies, but that ballpark is realistic) to add more content and fine tune internal cross-linking is a very wise move. Having a website and making IT make money takes work and an investment of time. Be prepared to run through several months of you updating content and not generating much revenue. After you emerge from the “sandbox” or “aging period” or whatever it is, though, you will see traffic begin to increase, and along with it, revenue. More traffic, more revenue – it’s a simple equation. Which Ads To Use Well, I’ll focus mainly on suggestions here based on the Google Adsense platform, but the recommendations will work for any contextually based ad system and placement suggestions will also work well for image-based ads. I’ll start by suggesting you stick with contextual systems such as Google and Yahoo offer Webmasters. They are easy to set up, easy to use, offer decent tracking and stats and pay regularly. Google’s system now offers the option of allowing image ads to be shown in the assigned ad spaces, so if you have to have images in those spaces, there you go. If it sounds like I’m not a big fan of image-based ads, well, I’m not. After half a decade of using online ads to drive traffic to various websites, the simple fact is that text-based ads outperform image-based ads easily. Users know a picture is likely an ad, so they ignore it. Text, on the other hand, forces a user to read it if they want to interact with it. Placed carefully on your site, these text-based ads can generate handsome revenues for you. Larger ad formats generally perform better than smaller ad sizes. So, if you plan to place an ad across the web page, then choose to insert the 728 x 90 format, rather than the 468 x 60 format. The point here is bigger is better, though you will have to balance this against your design goals, obviously. The rectangular formatted ads tend to perform well when placed “inside” the page, meaning they are placed inside the actual text/article, like you would a picture. Here are some common sizes, as recognized by the Internet Advertising Bureau: Rectangles and Pop-Ups 300 x 250 IMU - (Medium Rectangle) 250 x 250 IMU - (Square Pop-Up) 240 x 400 IMU - (Vertical Rectangle) 336 x 280 IMU - (Large Rectangle) 180 x 150 IMU - (Rectangle) Banners and Buttons 468 x 60 IMU - (Full Banner) 234 x 60 IMU - (Half Banner) 88 x 31 IMU - (Micro Bar) 120 x 90 IMU - (Button 1) 120 x 60 IMU - (Button 2) 120 x 240 IMU - (Vertical Banner) 125 x 125 IMU - (Square Button) 728 x 90 IMU - (Leaderboard) Skyscrapers 160 x 600 IMU - (Wide Skyscraper) 120 x 600 IMU - (Skyscraper) 300 x 600 IMU - (Half Page Ad) Other sizes can easily be used, but you’ll find that 99% of the ad programs you’ll want to join use these sizes. More information can be found here: http://www.iab.net . All units are measured in pixels, so a 160 x 600 is 160 pixels wide and 600 pixels tall. It’s also important to remember that you should not be loyal to any one size – test them and see which ones perform best on your web site, then use those sizes. Though larger ads generally perform better than smaller ones, the price you pay is that a site with too many large ads might put off users. By taking the time to plan how and where you will place your ads, you can work them into the design of the page and have a workable solution for you and your users. Most of the programs you’ll want to sign up for have built in limits on how many actual ads they will show on a page, so having too many ads should never be a real problem if you’re running a system like Google Adsense. With Google, you are allowed a maximum of 3 ad units and one text link unit per page. Try for more and the system will see what you’re doing to turn off some ads. Same deal goes for using two systems from competing companies on one page – if Google sees code from Yahoo on the page, it’ll stop showing ads. They may also suspend your account of kick you form the program. Your best bet when joining any advertising or affiliate program is to read every word of the agreement carefully. It will spell out in detail what you can and cannot do. Ad Placement There are many places you could turn to for this type of data, from specific white-papers to historical data, but the easiest to find and understand is from Google themselves. They want you to succeed and generate revenue with their ads on your site. It’s a win-win situation. So, they share the following “heat map” with users to help them place ads in areas of the page that have proven to perform in the past. It’s not a guaranteed formula that works 100% of the time, but after studying reams of data, this is what Google suggest Webmasters do. I can say from personal experience, they’re right on the money spots. Google Website Ad Placement Heat Map: 
Google Blog Ad Placement Heat Map: 
Google Posting Forum Ad Placement Heat Map: 
Obviously, placing ads on a web page takes planning and forethought. Unless you like the idea of editing a hundred or more pages every time you want to change an ad’s location, best you plan this in advance. It doesn’t really matter where the content resides on the page, but it certainly matters where the ads are placed. Before you build the entire site, make yourself a template page. This template will be used for all the internal web pages of the site and will have spaces defined for ads, logos, footers and content. Following the heat map provided by Google, it’s a simple exercise to build a template that will be a good starting point. Your main (index) page will look different form the templated pages, most likely, but that’s fine. The main page is the page which is meant to collect all the bits and pieces you offer to users and showcase them in an easy to follow manner. In effect, it’s a page that has one job – to get users to the content they want as directly as possible. Don’t sweat the ad placements on this page, as it’s more important to get users into your content and develop page views, than to have them leave form the main page because they couldn’t figure out how to get to the content they wanted. Blending ads Ideally you’ll want your ads to look as much a part of the site as possible. Same font colors, same background colors, etc. The idea is simple – users tend to tune out things they perceive as ads. Making your ads look the same as the site itself reduces the chance of users thinking of them as ads. Text based ads perform so much better than image-based ads because they can blend in and users simply see the text, not pictures. If the text they see is appealing, they’ll click it and you get paid. Some folks this is trickery, but the bottom line is this is what it takes to generate the revenue. If you don’t believe me, try running ads with the default colors set by Google, etc. and watch your revenues tumble, or never really grow. Inclusion of Ads You will need to decide how you want to place ads into the page itself early in the build process. One way to get ads into the page is to “hard code” them in. This basically involves taking the ad code given to you by Google, etc. and placing it in the code of the page while you are building it. When you save and publish the page, the code goes live and (after a short delay) the ads will begin showing in the space you set the Google Adsense code into. Make sure to match the ad size you want to show (and thus the code you get from Google, etc.) with the space provided in your template. Dropping a 728 x 90 sized ad into a 468 x 60 space will result in a bad look. It’ll still show, but it will obviously be problematic and most of the ad will remain invisible. The biggest drawback to hard coding ads into the page is that to change an ad means editing the page. If you hard coded ads into pages as you built them, the workload is minimal. If you later want to change the ads in some way, across the entire website, you would need to edit every individual page to change each, individual ad. Lots of work after you’ve built a couple of hundred pages. A better way to get ads into a page is to use what’s known as an “include”. This nifty little item allows you to use a separate “document” that holds only the ad code for a given space and will be “included” anywhere the include code sits. The benefits are clear. You must edit only one item to change ads across hundreds of pages at once. The include code itself must be inserted into each page and ad space as the page is constructed, but once there, you’re done. Your server platform will dictate which form of include code you use, as Windows and Linux-based servers differ slightly in how they handle this action. The end result is the same, though. By constructing individual “includes”, one for each ad size you want to show, you can maximize the ads placed across your website. If you find advertisers who want to pay to show ads on your site, you simply replace the code in the include from Google, etc. with the information on where the advertisers ads resides (this will depend on whether you are hosting the ad or the advertiser is; either way it’s a simply URL – the direct path to the advertisers ad itself) and you’re done. It takes less than 5 minutes form logging into your administration system to seeing the changes. Here’s a sample of code used in a Linux environment (as with all code, you must use the proper <> brackets at the beginning and end of each string): ?php include('’includes/test_header.php'’); ? In this example, we’re including a file named “test_header.php”. It can be called .html and it’ll still work. This file resides in a folder on the server called “includes”. Thus, any time we want to update the header on this website, we simply go to the folder for the includes, open the file called “test_header.php” and make our changes. When uploaded to the server again and saved, the changes will be live across the entire site. It’s important to note that each character and space must be as shown here for this to work properly. You can change the folder and file names, but everything else should remain as shown. For Windows-based folks, this code should work: !–#include virtual=”/Headers_Toolbar/headers/header.html” — It will require you build your pages set up to use “virtual includes” or SSI (server side includes), which is s setting you’ll need to make in your editing software of choice. The bottom line is that when planning your ads and placing them into the pages, it’s a safe bet to use includes for them. It limits the amount of work you’ll have to do down the road and really takes no more time when building a page. Getting the right ads, with the right look, into the right spots takes some time and testing. This information should have you pretty close form the start, but it’s always best to test, test, test and refine on your own. Using the techniques outlined here, I have sites which have started with zero revenue, and after a year have grown to over $500 USD per month in revenue. This will continue to grow as the sites grow in popularity and more users find them. If you had the time and knowledge, you could build a series of these sites and create a whole new career for yourself – managing your websites from home each day.
