Five Ways to Monetize Your Website - Banner Advertisements
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Whether you're new to searching the World Wide Web or you've been surfing the Internet for years, chances are you've encountered more than your fair share of banner ads. These small, usually rectangular advertisements seem to be one of the most popular forms of advertising online, as you'll encounter them just about everywhere -- from your favorite e-mail provider to any social networking site in existence. Depending on the advertiser, the ads vary considerably in both appearance and subject matter, but they all have one basic function: to lure you in and interest you enough to click on them, which will lead you back to the advertiser's web site.
Banner ads are nothing more than relatively simple pieces of HTML code, but their presence on the web has changed the face of advertising for good and has made an immense impact on Internet-based business -- which is where you come in. You can generate revenue by allowing advertisers to post their banner ads on your website or blog and, depending on the agreement you have with the advertiser, you can get paid in a number of different ways. Here are some of the most common ways by which advertisers will pay webmasters for allowing them to display their banner ads:
Clicks/Click-throughs: Some advertisers will pay webmasters based on the number of visitors that click on the actual banner being displayed. You can choose to sell your space on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.
Page views: This is also known as "page impressions" and it's the number of times a particular web page, meaning the advertiser's website, has been requested from a server, otherwise known as your website. Potential advertisers are interested in page views because it gives them an indication of how many people viewed their banner ad on your site. The number of page views won't really measure the effectiveness of a branding campaign, but they will measure how many visitors were exposed to it. The most common way to sell banner ad space is cost per thousand impressions.
Click-through rate (CTR): This describes the ratio of page views to clicks. It is expressed as the percentage of total visitors to a particular page who actually clicked on the banner ad. The typical click-through-rate is something under 1 percent, and click-through rates significantly higher than that are very rare. Depending on the advertiser, they may choose to pay depending on the click-through rate.
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