Did I mention high traffic? Just how HIGH does your traffic need to be? Well,
fastclick.com
requires your site to have 3,000 page views per month. Not an unreasonable amount, and that can be enough to pay your web hosting costs, maybe buy you a 6 pack to go sailing with now and then too! 3,000 page views per month is a good place to start selling ads, and if you continue to make your website useful your traffic (and your income) will grow. That's only 100 per day, so it's not unatainable. An example of making my site useful is the Online Sailboat Classifieds in Texas page. It not only gives you a list of websites in Texas that have sailboat classifieds, but tells something about them. Useful for buying OR selling a sailboat. It took me a lot of time to build that page, and more to keep it current, but people use it every day. Since it is all text it loads fast and doesn't use a lot of bandwidth! It has INFORMATION, that is CURRENT, that is what people want! This is a traffic builder. And it serves two ads each time it is viewed. Some books that relate are listed too.
People leave slow sites! If your page takes more than 8 seconds to load on a dialup modem, you will lose a lot of traffic. If they leave before the ad is loaded you don't get paid. People don't want to wait 8 seconds. Take a look at my Home Page for Sailing Texas. Five pictures, but did you notice how fast they load? They have all been reduced to 7KB in size, tiny files for pictures! If you have a high speed connection, be sure to check your site on a dial up modem and see how fast each page loads, as 4 out of 5 people still use dialup.
CPM versus CPC
CPM is cost per thousand impressions, and CPC is cost per click. Many advertisers are getting away from CPM, as surfers get more accustomed to ignoring banners and not clicking on them they become less effective. There are still some that pay the CPM rate, they may just want their name displayed so they get brand recognition, or they may use such flashy ads that people will click on them anyway. Most are turning to the CPC model, where they only pay when someone clicks through to their website, but they pay a LOT more, usually 20 to 30 cents per click. This isn't a bad system, and somedays I make more on CPC ads than I do on CPM. I run a mix of both, and take off the CPC that don't pay after I try them out for a while.
Fastclick.com
has a nice reporting system so you can see how much you are earning from each ad. If I run a CPC ad and after 1,000 views it has no clicks (and hence no income), I remove it.
Pop Under and Invue Ads
Also at
fastclick.com
you can use pop under ads, they come up under your site and are not shown until the user leaves your site. More effective and I'm sure you've seen them (and had to click to close them more than once!). Personally, I didn't like using them at first, but they pay 10 TIMES as much CPM as a normal banner ad! The downside is they make your page load slower, as they are loading at the same time your page is. Luckily, fastclick lets me limit the popunders to once every 12 hours, so as not to annoy my users too much. They have many different time options. I put the popunders on almost every page, knowing my users will only get one popunder. I do this because I have lots of pages, and get many visitors to an odd page here or there, and that may be the only page they view. For example, I have a page to sell Sy's dinghy. This page has about 5 pictures and uses a lot of bandwidth, and Sy sold his dinghy long ago. Why do I keep it on my site? Because it shows up in Google and the other search engines, so it is a way for people to find my site. Because it shows two banner ads and one popunder if it's the first page viewed with a popunder. The average income for this page is good, which pays for the bandwidth and more! The pictures and description are information, that is what people want, remember?
Invue ads work well, but I really don't like these! They annoy me, they cover part of my page, and I just don't think my users will like them. Fastclick's system allows me to choose which pages to display which kinds of ads.
That's all there is to it, so sign up with
fastclick.com
, get your traffic up and make some money!
Ok, does this look like an advertisement for Fastclick? It is! If you click on one of the Fastclick links above and actually sign up with them, they will pay me a percentage of what you make. It WILL NOT reduce your earnings, it's just a bonus for me. And then when you are a Fastclick member and someone signs up from your site you will get a percentage of what they make. It's not a pyramid scheme. I won't make a penny from anyone that signs up from your site, it is one level only. I have two referrals, and I make almost a penny a day from them! So far they only use 480X60 banners, I'm hoping they start using popunders soon, lol. So please, if you want to sign up with Fastclick, please come here first and click on a
fastclick.com link
on this page to sign up. If you don't like my site, look around for a fastclick link on a site you do like and let them have the bonus, if you go to Fastclick directly, Fastclick keeps the referral bonus and nobody gets it.
Google Adsense. The best. Adsense ads are text so they load fast, they are pay per click but users do click on them. Today they also do banner and video ads. Google scans your pages and sends ad that actually relate to your page, so people often see something they are interested in. Google lets you block websites that compete with yours if you want. I'm not allowed to say how much I make with Google, but I'm happy. They also have a search function that pays, so you can use both. Read more on the Google Adsense site.
