Monetizing a Web Site
In my last post, I told you about my new site 1 Eyed Jack’s, a blog about casino gambling. The idea was that I could supply plenty of relevant content to bring in traffic, and monetize that traffic on the way out. There are many ways to make money from a visit to your web site, with out selling a thing yourself, but I chose contextual ads and affiliate ads.
Affiliate ads can be little more that a link to another site with whom you have an affiliate relationship. Any referral you provide that completes a specified action earns you a commission from the site owner. The great thing about gambling affiliates, as I mentioned in my last post, is that you can choose to be paid a percentage of the houses take on that new user. Over time, that can really ad up!
What I really wanted to talk about was contextual ads. Contextual ads take the content of the page and supply contextually relevant ads. The most popular system for contextual ads is Google’s own Adsense. Adsense provides all the quality and ease of use you’d expect from Google, in a system that can help you turn your blog, zine, portal, etc. into a source of income. It works by taking Adwords campaigns and publishing ads with keyword sets that are relevant to a page’s content. Google and the site publisher split the CPC for each ad click.
There are drawbacks, however, to the Adsense system. The main being that Google’s sometimes strict rules can get in the way of what a web site publisher has in mind for their site. In my case, since Google doesn’t allow promotion of gambling sites through Adwords, there were precious few ads that had much to do with my site’s content. There might be one or two for an ebook about winning at slots and then some about buying property in New Mexico. If an ad isn’t relevant, it won’t get clicked very often, if ever. This forced me to look elsewhere for an ad serving system, which brought me to Miva.
For anyone who has worked in the PPC field, the very mention of the word Miva may cause a shudder. The system is well known for having a serious issue with click fraud. Click fraud is ads that are clicked for the purpose of either draining an advertiser’s budget, or filling the pockets of the ad publisher. Either way, it’s not nice. Miva gets much of its distribution through ad publishing, and if they’re so lenient about click fraud, they might just publish some gambling ads as well. They’re pretty much the seedy bar of PPC. You wanna play some poker? Find a hot porn site? C’mon on in!
So I’ve signed up with Miva to place some gambling ads on 1 Eyed Jack’s. I’m currently being “reviewed”, so my ads should be up sometime tomorrow. I’m setting my expectations pretty low. Besides, my focus there is to have people sign up for a gambling site, not click ads. I’ll be reporting on the performance of these ads in the coming weeks, but until then, blow on the dice for this crap shoot. Daddy needs a new pair of shoes!
