Making money with your site
Now before you get all excited, let me tell you that most tech
sites don't make that much if any money at all. Some don't even cover their
monthly hosting expenses. Despite what it might seem like, this is not easy
work. It's fun, but not easy. It takes lots of hours and lots of hard work to
build and keep a site going.
Nearly all tech sites make money by selling advertising. A few
spin-off E businesses. An example of an E business spin-off would be
Overclockers.com who
sells heatsinks as well as do reviews. Another is
HardOCP, who does reviews and
sells a mouse pad call the
Ratpadz.
However, banner advertising will be where most tech sites make their money.
Until you can get over 10,000 impressions per month, you'll be
limited to CPC or cost per click banners. These are banners that pay you if a
reader clicks on it and visit the advertiser. You can make about 10 to 25 cents
per click. Because CPC banners are not targeted, the average click rate is less
than 1%. That means out of 10,000 impressions, only about 100 people will click
on the banner, making you $10 to $25. There are many CPC banner companies you
can use to supply your site with this type of banners. Some of the better known
ones are Eads,
Valueclick and
Safe-Audit. There are
others out there but these three should get you going till you're ready to go
with CPM banners.
Once your site does more than 10,000 impressions per month you
can run what is known as CPM banners. CPM stands for Cost Per 1000. Unlike a CPC
banner, CPM banner don't pay based on clicks. Instead they pay based on the
number of times the banner is shown. In other words, if the banner is shown 1000
times you will get paid whether or not the visitor clicks on the banner.
Depending on the size and quality of your site you can make anywhere from $1 to
over $30 per 1000 impressions.
There are not as many companies doing CPM banners. They all have
higher traffic requirements than CPC banner companies.
Burst Media is where
most new tech sites start out because they will take you if your site does just
10,000 impressions per month.
Beyond Burst, there is
Flycast, who will take you
if you do 250,000 impression per month.
DoubleClick and
AdForce requires your site
to run over 1 million impressions per month before they consider you and
24/7 Media requires 2
million. All the CPM banner companies work on a revenue split, giving you 50 to
70% of the banner money.
The rule of thumb is the bigger and more specialized your site
is, the higher CPM you can make. Burst pays the least, 24/7 Media pays the most.
24/7 Media also has the highest traffic requirements. You should check out each
company carefully. Besides traffic, some have other requirements for you to
meet. For example, 24/7 Media requires that you only run 24/7 Media banners and
no one else.
Another thing to look out for is the Paid Ad Vs. Default Ad
ratio. Ideally, every banner served to your site should be paid banners.
However, this is never the case. When a banner company runs out of paid banners
they sub in a default banner that doesn't pay anything or pays when someone does
an action, like signing up for a internet Visa or something. Default ads can run
as high as 50% or more during low advertising periods.
To reduce the defaults you can sign up with two or three banner
companies and rotate them. Both Burst and Flycast let you set which banner to
use when a default banners shows up. You can set it up so if flycast is going to
show a default banner, it goes to Burst to get it, which hopefully will show a
paid banner. If Burst is a going to be a default, you can send it to another
banner company and so on.
Next
page: Joining a network
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