ADVERTISING YOUR SITE

This article is designed to give the 'beginner/budget' webmaster an insight into various advertising systems available on the net today (for not very much £$) Traditional banner advertising is usually too expensive for most websites - (it is fine for large corporations who get their logo and company name distributed far and wide using their million dollar adverting budgets...)

BANNER EXCHANGE SCHEMES - FREE ADVERTISING
These schemes operate on a banner exchange system i.e. you display a banner on your site and your banners are displayed on other sites. These schemes often involve a ratio for example 2:1, in this case for every two banner 'impressions' on your site you get one free 'impression' on another site. An impression occurs when a user visits a site and a banner is loaded on the screen. If you have several pages with banners on and a visitor views say, 6 pages, you will get 6 impressions (i.e. 3 free impression of your banner on another site with at 2:1 ratio)

This type of scheme is much maligned, but we at free images have found it to be quite useful. Although you may have to accumulate 200 or more banner impression on your site to attract a visitor (e.g. 200 impressions and 0.5% click through - on average your banner will be displayed at least 100 times before someone clicks on it!) this is still VERY valuable. Your banner will be displayed websites that you otherwise would not be able to advertise on.

You will be able to attract visitors who did not search for your keywords - i.e. visitors on a related site with a similar subject. Look for schemes that allow you to target the sites your banner will be displayed on, this will increase the click through rate.

PAY PER CLICK
Pay per click is a becoming very popular as it allows you to 'buy' visitors for your site for as little as 1 cent. You are able to bid on keywords and phrases that are appropriate to your site. Visitors to sites such as goto and sprinks perform a search (just as you would on yahoo etc). Say for example you want to attract visitors who are interested in the starwars movies; you would be able bid on keywords such as 'starwars' 'star wars' 'empire strikes back' etc. You can bid on these words for as little as 1 cent (sometimes less).

However, there are other webmasters who also want visitors! They can also bid on these words. They may bid 2 and 3 cents for the same keywords as you. Your site would then be listed below their sites - hence you would get less visitors (but a less cost per visitor) A really popular keyword such as 'movie' or 'films' may have people bidding in excess of 1 dollar to get their site at the top of the page.

If you have never spent any money on advertising on your site yet then you may balk at having to pay some money for a visitor (I did!). But you will soon see that you really can get quality, target visitors to come to your site for 1 cent. The more you bid the more visitors you can get. You can change your bids at any time to reflect your budget, adding and removing keywords as required. You also get access to detailed daily reports. The amount you spend depends on the amount of money you make on your site - even if you don't sell anything each visitor may be bringing you say 2 cents using banner schemes and affiliate click etc. Getting extra visitors at 2 cents means you will break even, with the advantage of extra traffic!

ADVERTISING ON YOUR SITE
Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website owners of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money. The system work very well because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site, or matched to the characteristics and interests of the visitors your content attracts (their country location etc.). It's also a way for website publishers to provide Google web and site search to their visitors, and to earn money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages. Click the button below for more information on this scheme and sign-up for adsense as a publisher or an advertiser