This month’s Pro is Kathy Gaster, Web Marketer at OnYourMark, LLC. Kathy discusses the pros and cons of showing advertisements on your website.
When considering placing advertisements on your website, think about the goals and purpose of your website. If your goal is to generate business for your company and promote your products or services, you very likely do not want your potential customers to be distracted from your information with ads for other products or services.
A website that is not selling products or services might want to consider advertising revenue. Informational websites such as WisCrafts.com and blogs are good candidates for advertising. If you decide that advertising on your website is the right course of action, consider affiliate marketing.
With affiliate marketing, you place an ad for a merchant like Amazon, eBay or Best Buy on your website and earn money when a visitor to your site clicks on the merchant’s ad. Each merchant has its own rules for when it pays. Some pay per click, per sale or per lead. Check the reputation and the fine print to make sure you understand how much you will earn and when. Google AdSense is available for website publishers to display relevant Google ads on their content pages and earn money. Commission Junction’s banner advertising programs pay money based on results such as a sale or a lead.
| A sample Commission Junction ad fromWisCrafts.com |
The amount you can earn from placing ads on your website depends on how much traffic you generate. The more people that come to your website, the greater the potential earnings will be. Getting the traffic to your website is an important part of earning advertising revenue. If you build it will they come? Not if they can’t find you. Getting a website to come up on the first page of the search engines and staying there takes money, time and effort.
Ad relevancy is also key. On WisCrafts.com, our Commission Junction ads are geared towards arts and crafts products. Google’s AdSense will analyze the content of your webpages and display ads relevant to the text it finds. If you are using Google AdSense, having keyword-rich, unique content will only help your advertising revenue (and search engine rankings).
The Internet and Internet users are becoming more sophisticated as the World Wide Web ages. When the Internet was younger, flashy ads, banner ads and pop ups were tolerated. Now computers are set up to automatically block pop up ads and people have learned where not to look on a web page if they want to avoid advertisements. Take a critical look at your site when placing ads. Are the ads distracting? Are there too many?
The Online Rules of Successful Companies by Robin Miller, suggests that companies “Stick to Business” and so do we. Remember that your website is there to promote your business and bring in customers, not to advertise other businesses’ products or services.
Advertising plays an important role in on-line marketing and when used correctly can help build brand recognition and bring customers to your website. Your Web Marketing professional at OnYourMark, LLC is an excellent source of information when designing your Internet advertising campaign or improving your position in the search engines. We’re ready and willing, able and eager to help.
What would you like to ask the pro? Email your questions to askthepro@OnYourMark.com!
Links mentioned in this article:
http://ads.Google.com/
http://www.cj.com
The Online Rules of Successful Companies (at theBubbler.com, click on Amazon Store)
