There are several ways to sell advertising, including different networks and formats. Here are some solutions you will want to investigate:
Google Adsense/DoubleClick - Adsense is in a class of its own and has supported many bloggers and startups in their quest for revenues. The pluses are that you can set up instantly and begin earning literally within minutes. You can choose to show text ads only, image ads only, or a combination of both.
The negatives are that not only does Adsense not earn much in general, it can also make a site feel cheap thanks to negative perception of text ads and a general low quality to the image ads. It's not a bad place to start and you will likely end up using Adsense for spaces you don't know what to do with, but it's unlikely to make up your entire long-term advertising strategy.
More recently Google has been integrating DoubleClick's Ad Exchange into Adsense. DoubleClick was a purely display ad company that Google acquired in 2008. The integration promises to lift the quality of banner ads through Adsense, so this may be good news for publishers.
Display Ad Networks - There are a huge number of display ad networks around. These usually take applications to join and will have requirements on how much traffic and what spots you are selling. Famous networks include Casale, Burst, TechnoratiMedia, and TribalFusion. Speak to a rep to find out what sort of returns you can expect. Anecdotal evidence in blog comments suggests you can expect around USD 1 CPM, but that even this can take time to build up to.
Display ad networks also vary wildly in the quality of ads they show. You can often switch on and off certain campaigns from the back-end though and this can help ensure you don't dilute your product with ads that are downright awful.
Niche Ad Networks - Specialty ad networks often yield better results than the more generalized ones due to their niche targeting; however, they are also harder to get into. Examples of such ad networks include Glam, which specializes in female-oriented sites, TheDeck, and FusionAds for web/tech sites and FederatedMedia with a bias towards new media. Rates on some niche networks can be relatively high; FederatedMedia for example charges USD 10–USD 30 CPM for most ads, however keep in mind that publishers only receive half of this as earnings and it's hard to know how many of these ads actually sell, so the eCPM will be much lower.
Researching your own niche and asking bloggers in the same area is the best way to find out who might be appropriate for your blog. Also recently the Adify platform has been used to build a lot of niche ad networks and browsing their site can be a good way to locate networks that relate to your site.
Direct Sales - Selling direct to advertisers has the benefit of cutting out the middleman. Given that networks charge anywhere from 10% to 50% of the ad sale, this can be a major saving. However, it also entails a lot more hassle in managing the ads yourself and unless you are out selling your own ads, you will really be relying on advertisers finding you, though that may be the case with some ad networks as well!
If you're taking this route you will want to take a look at OpenX, which provides free ad server software that you can use to manage those direct ad sales. This allows you to give advertisers statistics as well, track ad expiries, and generally manage the ins and outs of swapping ads and setting their timelines.
Self-Serve Ad Marketplaces - A variety of self-serve ad marketplaces exist where you can list your site and have the ad buying process automated. These sites will take a cut of the ad revenue, but because they are a bit more passive the cut tends to be smaller.
Examples of self-serve ad marketplaces include AdBrite, which offers a variety of formats varying from text ads to interstitial ads, AdEngage, which does a lot of CPC ads, BlogAds, which specializes in serving ads for blogs in general, and BuySellAds, which mostly caters to the creative/tech niche. Note that Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are also basically offering self-serve ad marketplaces, but given their size they are really a different category.
Advertising on Screencasts - Many of the big video sites like Blip.tv and YouTube offer their own advertising services that you can apply for. Alternately you can also join independent video advertising networks like BrightRoll and AdBrite. Video advertising tends to come in many forms including text ad overlays, pre-, mid-, and even post-roll ads.
Inline Text Adverts - Kontera and Linkworth both offer inline text ad services that turn ordinary words in a post into rollover ads. These types of ads are generally considered extremely spammy and off-putting for readers, so it's probably best to stay well away unless you are sure you know what you are doing.
Rich Media Adverts - VideoEgg is a company specializing in Rich Media advertising, which includes Flash/video-based ads that begin playing on rollover. For what they are, the ads look relatively unobtrusive and can provide a decent return when there is inventory.
Advertising on Images - A slightly novel, and not necessarily effective, idea is to place advertising on images. The best known service in this area is AdBrite's BritePic service. This service might be useful if you were running a blog which was very much about the images.
Advertising on RSS Feeds - Since Google purchased Feedburne some years ago, publishers have had access to publishing Adsense ads on their RSS feeds. Unfortunately, conversions tend to be pretty low so unless you have a large readership, this is unlikely to contribute any really significant earnings and risks cheapening your feeds if you generally avoid Adsense on your site anyway.
An alternative is to sell your own ads on your RSS feed, though like all direct sales this has its own sales management issues. You can implement RSS ads on a WordPress blog using the Feed Footer plugin.
SEO-Optimized Text Link Ads - Once very popular, services like Text-Link-Ads and LinkWorth provide a different type of text ad to Adsense and its ilk. These text ads are delivered in a hard-coded PHP/HTML way so that they help advertisers rank on search engines. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago Google started cracking down and penalizing sites that sold text link ads and since then the networks have been much less extensively used. You should only use this type of ad with caution as it may end up shooting you in the foot if you lose out on vital search traffic.
Social Ads - A new company putting together a social/interactive twist on advertising is SocialMedia.com. The ads they serve are small interactive areas where users can participate in some sort of way. This concept is still in its infancy, but it could be a developing area in the future.
Podcast Advertising - If your blog publishes podcasts you should be able to find an ad network to help monetize the podcasts. The best known appears to be PodTrac.
Product Ads - Product ad networks showcase a variety of products in a single ad spot or widget. CPMs for these types of ads can be quite good, particularly on blog topics that relate to the products where the ads are extremely well targeted. Well known companies in this space include Shopzilla, Widgetbucks, and Chitika.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Ethan C. Moore at 02172011
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