COMMISSION JUNCTION
Text link ads used to be very helpful. These days they’ve largely been overtaken by contextual ad systems like AdSense or Chitika. When you’re just starting out, those companies will serve up relevant ads very easily. And when you’re established enough to have the sort of page rank that makes selling links worthwhile, you’ll want to think carefully about doing so. You’ll be linking to the most important sites, anyway, so any link you receive is likely to be a relatively minor site. You might find that it’s just not worth the fee.
That doesn’t mean you should never do it. You’ll just want to weigh the benefits of an additional couple of hundred bucks against the costs of placing links to a site that your users might find disappointing.
More traditional—and more useful—are cost-per-action (CPA) ads. While CPC ads pay solely for a click, and CPM ads pay only tiny amounts every time the page is loaded, CPA ads pay when the user does something the advertiser considers valuable, such as completing a form and becoming a lead or making a purchase.
If that sounds like affiliate advertising, then the idea is exactly the same. I’m going to talk in detail about earning affiliate income later in this book, but there is one vital difference between affiliate advertising and CPA advertising with the help of an agency.
Sign up with a CPA ad agency and you’ll have no idea which ads you’ll be serving. While it’s true that you’ll always have some measure of control—you should be able to block companies you don’t want, and you might be able to pick categories of products you prefer to advertise-the real benefit of using an agency is that you don’t have to do any of that stuff. Once you’ve signed up, you’re making your site available for advertisers to choose you.
Figure 3.13Commission Junction is among the heavy hitters of CPA advertising.
The fees vary tremendously, but because CPA ads are popular with some very big companies that tend to pick large sites for their distribution, if you can deliver the traffic—and the action—they can give you a pretty nice KaChing.
Lots of different agencies can send CPA ads your way, but one of the most reliable is Commission Junction (www.cj.com) (Figure 3.13). The company now forms part of Value Click, which bought it for $58 million in 2003. (I always said online advertising pays.)
Commission Junction has some nicely detailed stats and some very big names in its advertising networks. You could find that your site is advertising Dell, Yahoo!, Expedia, or HP Those are the kinds of companies that make your site look good—and win clicks from curious users.
That’s a big advantage.
For top-earning publishers—those making more than $10,000 a month from their Commission Junction ads—the company offers a special service with a dedicated account manager. For advertisers, Commission Junction offers different levels of participation (including appearing in search results), which makes it a good place to start, as well as to build a large-scale campaign.
It should be clear that once you’ve created your content, there are lots of different kinds of ads that you can place around it. Contextualized CPC ad networks like AdSense, YPN, and Microsoft’s Content Match, will “read” your pages, serve ads that match the subject, and pay you fees that range from a few cents to tens of dollars for each click the ads receive. Other CPC networks, like Kontera and Chitika, offer additional ways to do the same thing, blending their ads neatly into your page and increasing the chances that you’ll win those clicks.
CPM ads, like those supplied by AdsDaq will pay for your traffic regardless of what your users do, while CPA networks will give you larger amounts, provided your users actually do something. You can even sell text links directly, either by yourself or through a network like LinkAdage.
If that sounds complicated, understand that in practice it’s very simple. Start by placing AdSense on your site. Add Kontera, and if you think it will suit your content, Chitika, too, using AdSense as the alternate. Take the time to optimize and track your AdSense results, and while you’re doing that, also build up your traffic so that when you place CPM ads, you’re making decent money.
Over time, you’ll find yourself discovering which ad formats deliver the most clicks. You’ll come to see which topics deliver the most value. And you’ll start to build up the kind of traffic that makes banner ads worthwhile.
Again, this won’t happen overnight. While you should be able to see some income right away, it might take several months before that income is enough to repay you for the time and effort you’re putting in. But if you’re persistent and determined, if you’re prepared to learn, experiment, and adapt, you’ll get there. Your web site will be generating up to a dozen different types of KaChing from content alone.
But content delivered for free on a web site and supported by ads isn’t the only way to make money with the knowledge you possess. In Chapter 4 I explain how to earn the full value of your expertise ... by selling information products.
4
Information Products—Seeing Your Knowledge
All of the methods that I’ve described so far have been based on the idea that the knowledge you possess has value. Whether you’ve picked up that knowledge from years of practicing your profession or learned it by indulging in your passion, if other people want to know what you know, you have an opportunity to make money.
Everyone has knowledge like that. Everyone can now build a web site to display that knowledge. As we saw in Chapter 3, there are now plenty of different ways to surround that knowledge with advertisements, giving you a steady stream of revenue. You don’t even have to go out and track down the
