Articles with Tips, Tricks, and Issues about the Internet, Advertising, and Websites.
Free Hosting May Be More Profitable Than Paid Sites
There are two types of basic Google Ads that are displayed on most websites that earn you money. The most prevalent ads that you are probably most familiar with are the Text based contextual ads. Google scans your page for relevant keywords and tries to automatically determine the best types text of ads to be displayed that fit with your content. Usually they come in a block of 2-4 different ads per banner, each with their own short description. The idea is that By having multiple slots of relevant ads, a reader will hopefully see something they are interested in among them and click on the ad. But if nobody clicks, you don't get paid. You can display 5 billion ads until the end of time and have the highest traffic in the world, but it won't do you a bit of good. That's why responsible Adsense users optimize their websites to make their ads more noticable. That is why irresponsible users try to fake the clicks (and subsequently get their accounts cancelled.)
But there is another kind of ad out there that's pretty common. You may have noticed some websites with Adsense displaying image banners. Or you may have noticed Text based banners with only one ad in them, written in big and bold text. If you're a publisher with a relatively well trafficked site, you may have noticed yourself earning a couple cents without anyone ever clicking on your ads. The good news: These are Site-based ads that you get paid just for displaying, even if nobody clicks on them. The Bad News: Most small time website publishers don't get these ads.
But there is a way.
These "Site based" ads are chosen by advertizers to be run on well known websites. The idea is that regardless of context, it's valuable sometimes just to get your ads out there where people will see them. Or if you're a particularly clever advertizer, you can choose a website or blog relating to your product and get the best of both words: Relevant ads and stand alone attention on a high trafficked areas. A good advertizer can leverage these ads and pretty much pay to knock the competition off of a site! Still, unless you run a very well known website, chances are you as a publisher won't be attracting too many of these types of ads.
The loophole comes with free website and blog hosts. Everyone knows Geocities and Googlepages. Everyone knows Blogspot and Typepad. Even advertizers. Advertizers who want to launch a wide ranging campaign to reach as many people as possible will launch campaigns for these websites. Simply by choosing to put your website or blog on one of these services and putting up Adsense on your site, you can guarantee yourself a few extra ad cents a day. Just bring traffic to your site and you can start earning immediately. So before you go out and pay for your own host or server, consider this bonus benefit to free sites. TIPS: 1) Websites I have personally seen this work for: Blogspot, Googlepages. Surprisingly, it also works quite a lot for Geocities as well. This makes almost no sense when you consider how Geocities already puts a frame of Yahoo! ads on the side. Why would publishers then bid on ads for Google? It's not just one or two campaigns; there's an almost steady stream of multiple campaigns running for geocities at any one time for Adsense. My only guess is a couple Advertizers are retarded, and the rest are clever enough to know people put Adsense ads on Geocities sites too (There are many Geocities paid sites that have no Yahoo! ads and thus avoid any conflicts.) 2) If you are going to put ads on a free service, or if your website is already famous enough to earn its own site ads, it pays to max out your ads and have 3 ad placements on every page. Since it's a certain percentage of your ads that will be of this type rather than the standard ads, more spaces = more opportunities to catch one. They pay only a fraction of a cent per pageview, but if you have any sort of decent traffic whatsoever, then it pays off over time. 3) If you've optimized and people still aren't clicking ads, or your subject matter just doesn't produce good contextual ads, this tactic is definitely for you. If you keep noticing public service ads (which pay you nothing) on your website, definitely consider moving to a free service to at least make some profit. 4) Have at least one Rectangle or square ad on your website if you do this: Google has introduced new video ads that work the same way (but only for these formats) and pay quite well! 5) Still optimize your ad placement like normal. Not all your ads will be like this, no matter how popular your site is. And even then, clicks still pay! 6) There is a downside to this tactic: If your contextual ads keep getting preempted by these site ads and your website usually does well with clicks, you can actually be hurting yourself - trading the guarantee of fractions of a cent for the possibility of higher paying ads and losing an opportunity for those higher paying clicks that come with contextual ads. Use your judgement to decide which is best. 6a) The other downside is you have no control over what ads are shown with site ads, since the advertizers choose and context becomes irrelevent.
