eMoms at Home

The Basics of Online Advertising Programs for Blogs and Web Sites

Once your blog is up and running, these are the first companies you should sign up with to add advertising to your site. The signup process is easy and simple for all of them - and their ads are also easy to set up on your blog.

Google AdSense is the most common form of blog advertising to be found. Simply generate the ad code and paste it into your blog template. Relevant ads will appear automatically, and you can filter out any competitors if need be.

Amazon’s affiliate program is the biggest on the internet. You can earn between 4% and 8.5% of the purchase price of products sold through your links. Although you can earn a higher percentage with other affiliate programs, Amazon’s brand trust makes for an easier sale.

Sign up for Amazon’s Associates program

Commission Junction (CJ) is an affiliate network. They represent thousands of advertisers that pay pubishers a commission on sales, leads, and sometimes clicks. Each advertiser manages their own program separately, so you have to sign up for CJ, then apply to the various advertisers’ programs. Some will automatically accept you, some will reject you. Don’t take it personally.

CJ ads work best as banners and as text links in sidebars. Find products and services that your blog readers would be interested in, and earn commissions on every sale that is made.

Sign up for Commission Junction as a publisher

Text Link Ads (TLA) have been one of the highest paying advertising programs for a majority of bloggers. Ads are sold by TLA, and they automatically appear on your site when you add a bit of code.

The higher your Alexa and Technorati rank, the higher your ad price. But no matter what your traffic rank, sign up now, because the longer you have an account with them the higher your listing appears in their blog directory - which makes your blog easier to find by potential advertisers.

Sign up for Text Link Ads

Intermediate and Niche Advertising Programs

Your blog niche and traffic will determine which of the following advertising programs will perform best on your site. The only way to truly find the ones that will earn the most revenue is by researching each option and testing them out.

ReviewMe is a sister company to TextLinkAds, and also works to pair advertisers with review requests with established blogs and sites.

Minimum traffic, subscribers, and incoming link counts are required to be accepted into the ReviewMe program. So if you apply and your application is rejected, simply reapply in a couple of months when you have increased these factors.

Apply for ReviewMe’s Written Review Program

Chitika eMiniMalls can be an extremely lucrative advertising program if your blog is in the right niche. Your blog will do well if gadgets, electronics, home and garden, health and beauty, toys, phones, cameras and/or games fit in with your writing topics.

Like ReviewMe, there is a minimum traffic level requirement to be accepted into their program.

Apply for Chitika eMiniMalls advertising program

AdBrite is an advertising program very similar to Google’s AdSense. The difference is that AdBrite has a great setup in which you can use both programs simultaneously - because they also offer ad revenue by selling ads directly to your visitors — something other ad systems don’t do.

By setting your eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) manually, AdBrite can be a simple way to generate additional income while working seamlessly with your existing AdSense ads.

Sign up for AdBrite’s Advertising Program

AdVolcano is a brokering site similar to AdBrite, but AdVolcano takes a more hands-on approach. They let you determine your own ad placements, ad pricing, and you get to approve or deny advertisers based on what you want to appear on your site. It’s also CPT - cost per term, meaning advertisers buy advertising on your site for a certain period of time, and earnings are not influenced by clicks or number of page views.

AdVolcano is a newer player on the market, and as of this writing, I have only been signed up with them for a couple of days. It looks promising, though, so watch my blog for updates on actual results.