How best to monetize my website?

How do I monetize with ads on my website?

• In other words, if I have a site that gets 100,000 views per month how much should I expect to make in ad revenue, is there a general rule of thumb for page views converted to ad revenue? What are the different types of ads that I can sell, and what ways do you recommend to go in finding advertisers? (AdWords, etc)

• Answer:

  Display advertising is bought and sold on a cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM basis). CPMs range anywhere from pennies to $10 and even higher. A high CPM, however, will only be obtained from direct-to-advertiser negotiations which occur after you've established yourself as a well-know publisher in your niche with a reputation for quality and performance. This takes times (years and years potentially). In the meantime, you can set yourself up for AdSense (AdSense may payout between a $0.25 and $2.50 CPM)  and other ad networks. Overall, you'll want to establish a 'waterfall' so-to-speak to maximize your advertising inventory. To get setup for banner advertising of any kind, you'll first need to delegate space on your website within which to serve ads. If your site is built using Wordpress, you can do this via the custom sidebar widget. Second, you'll need to get setup with an AdSense account. Third, you'll need to implement an ad management system. I suggest DoubleClick for Publishers. DoubleClick for Publishers is free up to 90 million impression per month, which is A LOT of impressions and a very hard number to reach, so you should be fine. Next, within DFP, you'll have to build your inventory. In selecting your ad sizes to create, I suggest implementing the most common sizes because there will be more advertisers able to bid on your inventory if you do. Specifically, I suggest implementing 300x250 and 728x90 banner ads. Although slightly less common, I also suggest implementing 300x600 ad units because this size performs well due to its larger size– the better an ad performs, the more people will pay for it. If you have video on your site, you could also serve pre-roll advertising, which commands a higher CPM than banner advertising (pre-roll advertising is a little more complicated to set-up than banner advertising, however). After you have determined the ad sizes you'd like to host, you'll next have to decide how to categorize the ads. You can either group all ads together, pasting the same code for each ad size throughout your website, or you can decide to group your ads by topic or even by individual page. It all depends on the content of your site and how diverse it is. If you have content about a variety of disparate topics, you should groups ads similarly by topic. On the other hand, if your site is focusing on one topic only, then creating one set of ad tags for each ad unit size is your best option. Overall, this aspect of advertising setup relates to the advertiser's ability to target ads; if your site has content about cooking and about parenting and you set up your ad tags into cooking and parenting groups, advertisers will be able to select whether they want to target your cooking content only, your parenting content only, or both types of content together. On the other hand, if you setup ads with the same group of tags, then advertisers won't have this ability. If it makes sense and it is easy for you to segment your ad placements by topic, I would recommend doing so, as better targeting correlates to better revenue as advertisers always want their ads to be as targeted as possible. After setting up the framework for advertising in DFP, you'll install the code on your website in the appropriate locations. Once you've finished this and once you've determined everything is working properly, you should see AdSense ads serving on your site. Congratulations! You're now making money via advertising sales. In order to make even more money, you can start to look into other ad networks relevant to your niche to help you sell your ads for a higher price. Once you identify the most appropriate networks to partner with, you'll implement their tags into DFP, and when they have ads available, these ads will be served on your site. If not, AdSense ads will appear. Then, in addition to ad networks, you can also put you ad inventory on ad exchanges, which sell ads via real-time-bidding. Lastly, you can also try to sell your advertising directly to advertisers, which will command the highest CPM, but is also time-consuming and hard to do because advertisers get barraged from publishers. Regardless, you'll want to check your DFP analytics often to see what ad inventory partners are performing the best, which sizes do well, what types of ads (static, animated, pre-roll etc.) do well, etc. and optimize continually. Good luck!