Using Alternatives to Google Adsense to Monetize Your Website

Image by via CrunchBase

What Are My Choices?

There are plenty of other advertising options if you do
not want to go with Adsense. A search for “Adsense
alternatives” will net you a long list of other advertising
opportunities.

Some work in much the same way as Adsense, others provide inline ads or banners. You should try a few different advertising programs to see which one works the best for your blog.

Some advertising opportunities are similar to Adsense and display text ads; others display
contextual ads, the double underline words in the body of your text, and others work with
graphic ads. Here is a list of other advertising sources for your blog, any of which may be the perfect advertising solution for you.

Some of the most popular choices

Clicksor – This advertising solution serves contextual ads within the body of your blog. These ads are simply words that are underlined twice and when clicked, send users to the sponsor’s website. Clicksor requires that your site gets at least 5000 pageviews per day or 150,000 per month and that you do not have free hosting.

TargetPoint – Cost per click ads that display ads relevant to your content. They claim to pay out 50% of click revenue and offer many customizable features. Which includes Adpoint, Imagepoint, Exitpoint and Underpoint. These are some really cool and innovative options.

Adbrite – They have a few different advertising options including text ads, banner ads, inline ads, and full page ads. There website is extremely user friendly.

AdBrite is the Internet’s Ad Marketplace. The company makes it easy to buy and sell advertising online, giving advertisers and publishers more transparency and control than any other ad network. With banner and text ads, as well as innovative formats like BritePic, InVideo and Full Page Ad, AdBrite has created a simple and more effective advertising marketplace for advertisers and publishers of all sizes.

AdBrite helps advertisers tap into highly targeted demographics across 70,000+ premium and trusted sites, reaching over 85 million unique users every month. AdBrite serve ads on over one billion pages a day.

Chitika – Founded in 2003, Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka), is a full-service on-line advertising network serving over 2 billion monthly impressions across more than 30,000 websites. This advertising option is designed specifically for blogs and there are different
advertising programs to choose from including text ads, inline ads, and graphic ads. Check
out the video for a quick preview.

Kontera – This is another inline advertising source where ads are placed as highlighted words that display a message when they are hovered over. In Text Advertising is online product placement based on the contextual relevancy between an advertiser’s brand and online content, much like product placement in movies and TV programs.

With In-Text contextual advertising, the advertiser’s brand is linked to a relevant keyword appearing in the online content which is matched to the advertiser’s ad.  Kontera’s proprietary technology consists of a series of algorithms which analyze the online content in real-time and select the keywords and topics that are most relevant to the reader.

In addition, Kontera can also provide links to complementary information, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, or other sources of third party content, which enrich the reader’s experience.

Bidvertiser – You only display ads from the highest bidder with this advertising solution and you can block ads that you do not want to appear on your site. The payout level is set
relatively low at just $10.

In order to prevent offensive websites from displaying their ads, they manually review each site. They also monitor sites after they have started displaying BidVertiser ads. If your site was found to violate their policies at any time, they will warn you, suspend you or terminate your account.

The Final Analysis

As you can see, there are plenty of other advertising solutions for your blog, and there are plenty more out there besides the ones mentioned here. You can always sell ad space directly,
to companies or businesses that are related to your blog topic.

There are a few things you should remember before placing ads on your blog, however. Unobtrusive ads will seldom drive traffic away, but too many tacky ads will cause visitors to leave. You want to find a good balance where you can earn income but not chase off visitors. Make sure your ads are relevant and not annoying. Make sure that they do not take up too much space or become the focal point of your blog.

p.s. If you found this post helpful please leave a comment and let me know.

If you did not, please leave a comment and let me why so that I can improve future posts.

How to use the Google Adsense Program to monetize your blog

Image via Wikipedia

What is AdSense?

AdSense is a great advertising concept that was

conceived by Google some time back. Though new

advertising concepts are always coming up, this is

the most well known.

AdSense presents an earning opportunity to bloggers by allowing

Google to post ads on their sites. These ads are either text or image based advertisements.

Of course, you will need to enroll in the AdSense program through Google’s website. It will

be a lot quicker if you already have a Gmail or Adwords account. Signing up with Adsense

is free, but you must provide tax information and report the earnings from all those huge

checks you’ll be getting.

Jeremy “SHOEMONEY” Shoemaker with his famous $132,994.97 Adsense check!

Courtesy of www.Shoemoney.com

How do I get it on my site?

The AdSense program requires you to include a piece of code (a programming script) on

your site. You can add this piece of code anywhere in the html code of your site depending

on where you want to position the ads (however, there are certain rules that you must

follow while pasting this scripting code). This piece of code is what determines the

structure of ads and their content (and this is what helps Google in floating the

advertisements on your site). When people visit your blog they are able to see these ads.

Your earnings are based on how many Google Ads are displayed on your blog and also

based on how many times your visitors actually click on one of those Ads. The AdSense

system calculates your revenue on per-click (CPC) and per-thousand-Ads-displayed

(CPM) basis. The latter is also known as impressions.

Can I use this program to bring traffic to my blog?

For people who want to advertise their products and services through the AdSense system,

it’s just a matter of signing up through the Adwords program and letting Google know

how much they want to spend towards advertising. These businesses can specify the limit

and Google’s AdSense system will accordingly serve their ads so as to ensure that the specified

limit is not crossed. Google AdSense increases the visibility of their business/ services and

also increases traffic to their site; hence fulfilling their purpose of advertising.

Other Advertising Options.

There are plenty of other advertising options if you do not want to go with Adsense. A search

for “Adsense alternatives” will net you a long list of other advertising opportunities. Some

work in much the same way as Adsense, others provide inline ads or banners. You should try

a few different programs to see which one works the best for your blog.

Next time we’ll take a look at some of the other programs out there, stay tuned.