Making Cash On The Web

General

Getting Started With Advertisers

The model for making money on the internet is the traditional magazine or newspaper. Publishers of periodicals sell advertising space to manufacturers and retailers. The more readers a publication has, the more advertisers are willing to pay. On the internet, advertisers pay either for the number of times their ads are shown, or the number of times people click on their ads, or for the number of sales that result from those clicks.

There are dozens of different advertising bureaus that you can sign up with. But I think that a few stand out from the crowd. These are the ones that are most likely to make you money simply because they have the largest number of advertisers who have signed up with them.

Here’s how the system works: Manufacturers and retailers contact an ad bureau and agree to pay the bureau a certain amount for showing the ads. At the same time, web publishers (like you) contact the ad bureau and agree to show the ads on their websites in return for payment. How the publishers get paid depends upon the agreement. The bureaus give the publishers some code to insert in their websites that enable the ads to be shown. Each time someone visits the publisher’s page, the bureau automatically delivers ads to be shown.

Here are some of the top advertising bureaus and their payment models.

Advertisers that pay the publisher each time someone clicks on an ad:

Google Adsense

Kanoodle

Advertisers that pay each time an ad is shown:

Fastclick

Advertisers that pay when someone clicks on an ad and then buys an item:

Amazon Associates

Commission Junction

The trick with all of these is that you need to have a website of some substance before they will approve your application as a publisher. Further, the site can’t be about illegal—or in most cases—even immoral activities. The publishers want to protect their advertisers.

To find out more about these advertisers, click on the links above.

Continue to Promoting Your Site

Posted by The Editor on 02/12 at 05:02 PM
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Getting Started With Amazon Associates

By far the easiest advertising program to get started with is Amazon Associates.

This post assumes that you have taken my advice and gotten started using the WordPress software. If not, just adapt this advice to your own system.

Here’s how it works. You sign up for the program and wait to be accepted.

Once you’ve been accepted, log into the Amazon Associates page that you receive in your acceptance email.  Click on the part that says “Build Links.” That will take you to a page with several options on it. Choose the one that says “Product Links” Use the search box to find a book that relates to your topic. Click “Get HTML”. You will then be shown a page with some code. Highight the code and copy it, using CTRL-C.

Then, go to WordPress. Begin a normal post, and insert the copied code as you would any other text. Amazon will take care of the rest.

Then, under the Amazon code, write a few words about the book. It helps if you’ve actually read it wink

When you’re done, click Publish, and you’re done.

Now, whenever anyone clicks on that Amazon ad and buys the product, you get a percentage of the sale. And, if they buy anything else at Amazon while on the same visit, you get a percentage of those sales, too. How much you get depends upon what items are bought.

Find out more about other advertising programs for web publishers.

Posted by The Editor on 02/12 at 05:02 PM
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Getting Started With Ads By Google

If you’ve been anywhere on the internet in the last several years, you can’t have missed Google’s text-based advertising program. Ads By Google simply are omnipresent. What Google’s ads do is “sense” (thus, Adsense), the topic of your web pages and automatically deliver appropriate ads. You get paid each time someone clicks on one of those ads. How much you get per click depends upon the ad. I absolutely am not allowed to tell you any more than that. The first rule of Adsense is not to talk about Adsense.

To get started, you need to go to Google Adsense and apply. Once your application is accepted, you can follow the link back and get started.

The first thing to do is to study the terms of agreement, because there are some very real restrictions on what you can do with the code.  One of the most important is that Google Ads cannot coexist with other ads that might be confused with Google Ads. This means that you cannot mix Google and Kanoodle ads on the same page, since they look similar. If you violate this, you will be terminated from Google. Another is that you absolutely can NEVER click on your own ads.

I’m not sure how much the Google Terms of Agreement allow me to tell you about what goes on inside Google Adsense HQ, so I will only say that it’s very easy to follow their instructions and get the HTML required to serve the ads on your website. Pick the ad format called 120x600 Tower.

Once you have the HTML, copy and paste it into a page on your basic text editor. Store it here while you get everything else ready. Now, all you have to do is insert the code into your web pages’ HTML. In difficulty, this is about a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. 

I am once again going to assume that you have taken my advice, and are using WordPress. I also assume that you are using a template with a “sidebar.” That’s the more narrow of the two columns on your site. Stuff like a calendar, links and so on will be in the “sidebar.” If not, you will have to adapt these instructions to your own situation.

Go to your site and enter WordPress. Select the Templates tab. The first thing you likely will see is an box on the page labeled: Editing index.php.

This is the base code for your website.

Now, there is the possibility that you will see a message at the bottom of the box telling you that you can’t edit the file becuase the permissions are not set correctly. If you see that, go to your FTP program and use it to access the files on your website. Select the file called index.php and right click. Select Properties / CHMOD. You will be given another window. Set the permissions to “666”. This will give WordPress permission to alter the file. Exit the FTP Program.

Go back to the Templates tab.

Scroll down into the template file until you find the following code: