Monetize your web content using ad Networks.

How do ad Networks Work?
Advertising on an advertisement network involves three parties or people; the advertiser (the person wishing to advertise),the network, and the publisher (the website or blog owner who is ready to publish advertisements on his/her website). The advertiser submits all his advertisement material, such as banners and links to the network and pays it the the money to advertise. The network passes this advertisement to publishers that join the network and then shares the advertisement profit with the publishers according to the performance of each one of them.

This system provides the advertiser with instant reach to a massive number of publishers on the web. Leading advertising networks like Google AdSense also offer advertisers powerful controls over where and how the advertisement is displayed, such controls include geographical targeting, specific website targeting, and date and time scheduling features. Publishers also benefit from almost unlimited flow of advertisements waiting to be published, they are saved the hassle of looking for advertisers and are guaranteed to have their payments made to them from the network.

Payment Conventions:
The cost of advertising through a network is calculated using a performance convention. This is unlike the traditional and more basic approach in which the advertiser risks the payment of a certain amount of money for displaying ads on a website for a specified period of time without taking into regard the actual performance of the advertisement in that period.

Nowadays, the networks charge advertisers and pay the publishers according to the performance of the ads without taking regard to time. The performance is measured by either the number of times the ad is displayed (Cost Per Thousand (Mega) Impressions- CPM), the number of times somebody clicks on the ads (Cost Per Click- CPC), or the number of times the advertisement made the the visitor take the action intended by the advertiser (Cost Per Action- CPA). Depending on the payment convention of the ads, the publisher would be required to implement them in a different manner on his website to optimize their performance.

Publishers of CPM ads will get paid for the mere display of ad banners on their websites without the need to have the visitor click on the ad or buy the advertised product. This sort of payment convention requires the publisher to have a significant amount of traffic for the advertising campaign to become commercially successful, but the publisher is not required to put any effort into optimizing these ads in terms of layout or content placement. All he needs to do is just have them displayed on his website!

On the other hand, publishers of CPC ads ill only get paid when a visitor clicks on the ad. The number of times the ad is displayed is usually irrelevant to the question of whether the advertiser should be charged. Utilizing this sort of ad requires more effort than CPM advertising as the publisher will have to integrate the ad in a manner that allows the ad to get noticed by the visitor in the hope that he clicks on it, while at the same time making sure that the ad does not obscure the actual original content of the website. This could involve a redesign exercise that takes advantage of the 'hot spots' in the page layout and the visitor's navigation approach, which is not an easy task to do due to the vulnerability (new word learnt at school=)) of repeated visitors to advertisement blindness.

The last type of payment convention is Cost Per Action (CPA). In this case, for which the publisher only gets paid when the visitor clicks on the ad and then makes the intended action, (e.g. Purchase a product, download a program, or register for a service). This is a more challenging form of advertising that requires the publisher to have a certain level of persuasion skills and it usually works best at websites with very specific content and very well targeted traffic.

The distinction between the different conventions for ad payment make s some of them more appropriate than others for different websites depending on the nature of the content served, the size of the website, and the amount and type of the traffic received by the website. It is also natural for publishers to use a combination of these ad types in different sections of a website to optimize their performance.

Contextual and Non-Contextual Advertising:
In addition to the distinction between ads on the basis of the payment convention, ads can be categorized on the basis on which aspects of the content is selected. Contextual advertising is a mechanism by which ads are automatically served to match the content of the page displaying the ad. Networks that serve this sort of ad provide the publisher with a code script to implement in his website so that each time a page is displayed the network searches the content of the page looking for keywords that match the ones the advertiser attached to his ad. For example, a web page that has textual content containing the word 'music' could trigger a contextual advertising unit to display any ad that had been tagged with the word 'music', for example, one of the advertising 'sale of concert tickets' if the advertiser tagged it with the keyword 'music'. This could be compared to a non-contextual advertising program under which the publisher choose before hand a certain category of products to be displayed in the ad units published on his website. The ease of use and flexibility of contextual advertising makes it the primary option to go for when looking for advertising solutions on the web. But the system is not totally free from faults, as the contextual nature of the keyword scan in a page containing a lot of different keywords could lead the ad unit to display a totally irrelevant ad. However, experienced publishers can minimise the chances of error by repeating more relevant keywords or emphasising by using various techniques to insure that they are picked when selecting the ad.

How Do I Get Paid?
When you've been accepted by an ad network or program, put up the ad and made conversions, the important question is now "How do you get your money?" Depending on the network, different payment options could be available to the publisher. Almost all networks provide a cheque option to be sent by mail, certain networks offer a paypal payment option, and larger ones such as Google offer and Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT) option to publishers holding bank accounts in qualifying countries such as the US, UK and Canada. The payment is usually made on a monthly basis upon the cumulative achievement of a certain amount of profit so that a payment is only made, for example, if the publisher manages to gain $100 or more, otherwise the profit rolls over to the next month and is only sent when the publishers reaches the minimum amount of money required for making the payment.

Disadvantages Of Advertising:
Publishers must always take into consideration the impact of placing ads on the visitors' experience of the website. Improper an excessive implementation of ads could easily render the website messy or confusing in a way that could repel visitors from returning to the website. Rich media ads such as flash and video could also significantly reduce the time required to load the pages and can in extreme cases make your website inaccessible.

Another point that could be raised here is the fact that not all publishers realise instantly that they ate getting paid to redirect traffic from their website into the website of the advertiser. All major networks prohibit the publisher from altering the advertisement code script, which usually forces the advertised link to be opened in the same window, rather than in a new blank window as the majority of publishers will prefer. A possible affect of this is reduction in the number of page views made per visit, as visitors will be leaving the website through the ad. This is an aspect of advertising that publishers need to understand and accept before joining an ad program, as it is their driving traffic that they are getting paid for.

Note: I would like to say that there is no such thing as easy money in the Internet. Creating a website that is capable of generating a steady stream of income will take a great amount of effort and time. To be able to attract the traffic you need , you will have to create new, interesting and original content worth consuming. Monetization through advertising is essentially a reward for those that contribute in enriching the content of the web. Good Luck=).