By Iryna Kozirevych
The modern world is extremely digital, so it is no surprise that marketers prefer digital advertising over traditional methods. It provides many more opportunities to draw the attention of the target audience and increase sales. However, while advertisers strive to create effective ads and drive conversions, what about website owners?
In short, they can get paid to post ads, and, when everything is done in the right way, website monetization can bring stable and sufficient revenue. Programmatic is the most popular option to make money advertising for companies, but it is not the only approach. In this article, we will explore diverse ways to monetize your website, as well as provide some actionable recommendations. Keep reading to learn more!
How to Get Paid for Advertising on Your Blog or Website
Before we start, let's take a few minutes to study the aspects of programmatic monetization.
Publishers who own websites, most often online media or blogs, use SSPs (supply-side platforms) to get paid for advertising. After placing their ad slots on SPPs, they only have to set the price and wait for the revenue. In turn, advertisers use demand-side platforms (DSPs) to launch and optimize their marketing campaigns.
Website owners usually pay a one-time fee for connecting to the platforms and then pay a percentage from the purchased ad slots. Otherwise, they do not bear additional expenses and only make money with ads, nothing else. All costs are borne by advertisers that operate through DSPs.
Key Success Factor Behind Programmatic Advertising
To get paid to advertise on your website, you need to perform two fundamental actions.
Understand your niche. That is a specific business environment in which your resource meets a particular demand.
Understand your target audience. Within the identified business niche, the content on your website attracts specific groups of people. For instance, if you run a website about the latest news in the automobile industry and want to earn money from your blog, you should assume that your site visitors own cars: this tells you something about their needs, habits, financial status, etc.
So, the niche and the target audience. You could begin posting ads for money when you have defined them and started building further actions based on this knowledge. However, different advertising models are determined by the type of payment: what exactly the advertiser pays the publisher for. Let’s examine their differences and purposes.
CPM: Cost Per Mille
This is one of the leading payment types for programmatic, where the advertiser pays for each thousand ad impressions, depending on the resource traffic.
Calculation example: (cost of placement/website traffic) * 1000 = CPM.
CPM example = ($150 / 50 000) * 1000 = $3.
In this example, on a website with traffic of 50 thousand unique users for the selected period and $150 of placement cost, a CPM is $3.
The CPM model is ideal for beginners who have only started to discover how to make money selling ads online. Impressions may not convert into clicks and purchases, which is natural, but it is the cheapest way to test a particular campaign and draw necessary conclusions for adjusting activity.
CPC: Cost Per Click
As the name implies, publishers get payment whenever the user clicks on the ad and visits the landing page with the advertised object. Many beginners may think CPC is more profitable than CPM, but they serve different purposes.
CPC is usually more expensive than paying for thousands of impressions.
The CPC model is used mainly in contextual targeting, which not all platforms support.
Anti-fraud mechanisms that protect advertisers’ money and publishers’ reputations are essential in this model. We advise you to pay close attention to this issue when working with the CPC payment agreement.
It is also worth remembering that an effective CPC model must be finely tuned and calibrated for each company. This means that you are unlikely to achieve the desired results with the initial settings, but over time, with the right approach, you will be successful.
CPA: Cost Per Action
The last of the basic models is optimal for those who feel confident in the programmatic and have already figured out how to make money posting ads. The main difference between pay-per-action and other advertising payments is a certain degree of trust between the parties, which is determined by the reputation level.
If you decided to earn money from your blog some time ago and your resource has shown decent results, we recommend switching to the pay-per-action model. Since, in this case, targeting should be even more precise. Beginners in CPA can broadcast ads for a long time without any benefit if they cannot calibrate targeting correctly.
How to Post Ads for Money on Your Blog or Website
We will come back to programmatic advertising in the following sections. Now, consider other options for how to make money with ads. This is a partial list, but enough to get you started.
Sponsored Posts
It is one of the popular ways to promote products and services in the premium segment. It’s not just when you get paid to make ads. It’s about investing in highly engaging content to attract visitors’ attention and persuade them to follow the links provided.
Let’s say you promote ads through slots placed on blog pages. This system is sound, but there are options to make it even better with a sponsored post. Let’s go back to the example of the car website.
Your PR managers find an interested advertiser, for example, who offers car alarms.
You agree to a sponsored post: who writes it, who approves it, the amount of payment, the period of stay on the website (temporary, permanent), and other points.
The copywriter creates the post, which is approved and posted on the website. For instance, an article about the importance of protecting cars in the first years after purchase provides statistics on thefts of cars without alarms and cars with alarms. In addition to being useful, the article natively advertises your partner’s service.
After publication, you get paid: usually, it is a one-time payment.
Depending on your agreement, a sponsored post may or may not have additional ad slots to maximize revenue. Posting ads for money, you shouldn’t forget that too many ads, even well-targeted ones, can be tiring for users.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing works on the same principle as a sponsored promotion. The main difference is the following:
The website owner usually promotes the partner’s product or service not with a single blog post but with a series of posts supported by landing pages;
To get paid for advertising, website visitors have to buy a product or order a service from the partner by clicking on an affiliate link from your website, and the reward is a percentage of the transaction amount;
This type of interaction between the parties is more long-term and close and often develops into official dealerships or similar promotion options.
You can make money posting ads efficiently by combining affiliate marketing with programmatic advertising. At the same time, you should always choose the dominant type of monetization to improve the users’ experience without overwhelming them with offers.
Ad Exchange
Programmatic exchanges are the core of the AdTech ecosystem. They connect publishers and advertisers in split seconds, optimizing yield management. Unlike affiliate and sponsored promotion, an ad exchange is a multichannel investment route where website owners earn from individual advertisers and demand aggregators with the most precise targeting and control through filtering. Here is how things work:
Here are the advantages of using an ad exchange over other ways to earn money from your website:
Precision targeting thanks to multichannel data integration;
Ability to connect any supply and demand partners you want to work with;
Support for all ad environments and formats;
Automatic workload optimization;
Detailed settings for connected channels (custom filters, blacklists, blocked categories, and others).
If you decide to use an ad exchange, the good news is that you may also monetize the platform itself. With Attekmi, you can make money posting ads and increase your income by referring additional publishers to your exchange.
Launching your ad exchange is a decisive step towards building a highly optimized advertising business. Attekmi solutions can become a core tool for selling ad space on your website and providing referral ad services. You will make money with ads and gradually grow your platform into a passive profit.
8 Ways to Make Money Posting Ads with Attekmi’s Pro Strategies
So, how to put ads on my website and get paid? Below, we will give you general tips to help you make money with ads, regardless of the payment type and promotion model you choose.
1. Choose the Right Solution
If you decide to monetize your inventory programmatically (which is among the most effective and popular options), you will have to select a supply-side platform first. There are loads of them available in the market, so, before making a choice, examine the features of every option carefully. Besides, pay attention to the reviews and check if your potential platform is updated regularly. If not, this may be a bad sign.
2. Calibrate Ad Slots for Advertisers’ Needs
Our general advice is as follows: strive to improve the advertising experience of users. To achieve this, you should implement ad formats seamlessly integrated into the content and not interfere with the browsing experience.
You can research the most effective mobile ad formats for your advertising campaign and draw conclusions based on them to develop ad formats on other devices (desktop, in-app, CTV, etc.). At the same time, it is still better to perform mobile-first promotion because today, smartphones are the primary tool for researching websites worldwide. Since the third quarter of 2019, the share of mobile devices in total traffic has been over 50%.
3. Optimize Ad Inventory
When considering different ways of how to make money selling ads on your website, be sure to pay attention to the option of researching statistics. The better you can evaluate the processes you run and their results, the more accurate adjustments you will be able to make in the future.
Regularly analyze the results of your campaigns, correlate them with the progress achieved, and implement a policy of “small, regular changes” to improve performance.
4. Keep Smart Pricing Strategies
Our experience shows that, very often, the key element of interaction between the parties at the initial stages is the price alone. When newcomers to programmatic advertising with poor reputations websites try to get high fees straight from the start, this can lead to unsatisfactory performance.
Therefore, consider starting to make money by posting ads with small amounts, gradually exploring this issue, and developing new options for interaction. At the same time, you can promote partner materials and affiliate objects through human-assisted agreements.
5. Pay Attention to Security and Compliance
In addition to the steps mentioned above, you also need to invest in the security aspects. Posting ads to make money, you take on the responsibility to regularly investigate the quality and safety of the content displayed on your pages.
Make sure you know what security mechanisms are used by the platforms in your sales chain. They should comply with the latest security and privacy standards, such as GDPR, TCF 2.0, CCPA, COPPA, and Sellers.json.
6. Invest in Quality Content for Your Website
Monetization is significant, and we know how getting decent compensation for your efforts feels. However, we urge you to remember that your website visitors do not come to you because of ads. They come for the content of the pages, so let the development of quality content be the first priority and monetization of user traffic the second.
Regularly compare sales revenue to your blog and content development costs. Discover how marketing officers can help you improve future promotion results.
7. Build Direct Relationships With Advertisers
Programmatic is not only about real-time and header bidding auctions. You can also experiment with so-called direct programmatic, which includes guaranteed and preferred deals.
These options require some preliminary negotiations, but they can help you build more lasting relationships with marketers. Besides, you will not have to worry that some inappropriate ads will appear on your website – you will know for sure what kind of content to expect.
To select the right advertisers, analyze the performance of the campaigns thoroughly – choose the ones that bring you the highest income while still delivering relevant experience to your visitors.
8. Keep an Eye On the Trends
How to make money advertising? Above, we have listed a set of actionable strategies. However, it is essential to remember that the evolution of programmatic advertising (and digital marketing in general) does not stand still. Therefore, to monetize your inventory effectively, you need to monitor trends and be ready to adopt those that can help you increase income. For instance, audio ads are currently on the rise, and if you offer such an opportunity to your advertisers, you will provide them with greater flexibility.
How Attekmi Solutions Can Skyrocket Your Revenue
During the article, we have repeatedly mentioned that Attekmi can become your reliable partner in monetizing website traffic. We offer ad exchange solutions that provide businesses with many integrative opportunities to improve yield management. A white-label option gets fully customized according to your needs: from UI personalization to on-request custom feature development.
You can explore our case studies to verify the positive results and see their precise measurements.
Conclusions
Nowadays, there are multiple ways for website owners to monetize their inventory. Programmatic technology enables automation and greater efficiency, which makes it the most popular method – if you have not considered it yet, we highly recommend you to do this.
However, the first thing is to make sure that your website offers high-quality content and drives a sufficient number of visitors. This way, it will be attractive for advertisers, which will help you drive income. Besides, many supply-side platforms have certain requirements for publishers, so check this when choosing your specific solution.
Note that apart from offering a wide range of ad exchange solutions, we also provide Ad Ops training and outstaffing services. Therefore, it you need a helping hand, just reach out to us.
Does Attekmi seem to be the right partner? Let’s get in touch.
FAQ
Can I choose specific categories for posting ads and target a particular audience?
Yes. For website owners, all customizations come through the supply-side platforms (SSPs). You can make money by posting ads and closely controlling this process: select specific traffic categories and improve targeting of user groups based on available data.
Can I track the performance of my ads and analyze their impact on revenue?
Again, yes. Depending on your chosen platform, you will have some analytics to track the campaigns’ performance. You can get more statistics by customizing the data collection and processing framework if necessary.
What are the key benefits of choosing Attekmi’s ad exchange solutions?
Our ad exchange solutions have all the features you need: diverse ad formats and traffic types, advanced targeting and filtering settings, cross-integration bidding capabilities, and so on. Additionally, our support team guides you all the way through.
