Website advertising

[vortex]

Ok, I'm in the proccess of making a website covering game mods (like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat), as well as posting weekly game deals, which I currently do on a lot of forums, and it seems to be very popular. Now I'm wondering, is there any chance I can make some money off of it?

I pretty much have zero knowledge of web advertising. Assuming people go to the site, can I make anything for people just viewing ads? Or do people have to actually buy stuff? What places should I sign up with? I suppose I could do affiliate links with the game deals. Any other stuff a newbie needs to know about?

[nicklfire]

Wow for the last couple years i have been doing
advertising for a couple of different sites.
Most of them are ppc=pay per click or ppv =pay per view ads.

some good sites for making money are www.cj.com

if you just go to yahoo.com and type in affiliate programs.. you will get tons of results... but if your wanting serious money your gonig to have to hae at least 1000 + hits a day.

i'll manage you if you want
shawnappleton@yahoo.ca if your serious email me
only if you get that many hits.
lata

[mjames]

A couple of points here. First of all, this is a bad time to be just getting into the Internet if your goal is to make money. The ad market is really at a low right now. Combined with no knowledge of the field, it really makes your chances of making money low.

Another thing is the topic of your site. Gaming sites are notoriously rejected by most ad networks because of the the large quantity of them on the web as well as the teen demographic they tend to attract. Teens don't usually have credit cards and therefore are of little value to advertisers. Combined with the large number of gaming sites, that is why it is hard to get accepted into an ad network.

All that bad news aside, I wish you the best of luck and am only being realistic. I recommend you read some articles SitePoint.com offers.

[hurtdidit]

In my experience, the days of profitable ad-based sites are pretty much over--gone with the dot com burst.

On the other hand, that should not keep you from selling your own products or services; provided you have an extremely niche target market (i.e. few competitors), the net is still very much a lucrative medium.

[MadCool]

The online ad market is definitely at an all time low. Most ad networks are rejecting sites. You can probably make a little money but not a lot.

[vortex]

Well, I would be happy with anything, I'm not really in it for money, but it seems like that is hard to do as well. Any places that I could try?

[zzpcpzz]

i dont kno, but i would say forget the money. i have seen websites getting 3000 hits perday, drop to 1000 because of big advertises and popups.

but, placing small ads is good i guess.

[mmj]

Originally posted by nicklfire

... but if your wanting serious money your gonig to have to hae at least 1000 + hits a day.

If you're wanting serious money you'd better pray for a lot more than 1000 hits per day! You'd be doing extremely well to get $1 a day with that traffic.

I don't know much about gaming sites and as mjames says, the teen demographics doesn't look too attractive to adverisers.

However, I also know of somebody who makes thousands of dollars a month with his gaming site, so I guess all that means is that - he ignored everybody who told him it couldn't be done.

Take that as you will, but if you're just starting out maybe you could consider the market a bit and pick a more niche topic. It's up to you though, but putting ads on your site isn't going to make any money without considerable investment of your time.

[JonPKibble]

Anyone can make money. You just have to be able to sell things.

[Jeremy W.]

Spoken like someone who doesn't want to really help

I almost want to edit that out for advertising, but anyways, as has already been mentioned, ad rates have fallen through the floor. They will likely go up again as the ad market matures (if it ever does, the increase of invasive advertising may just kill that though), but you aren't likely to see "decent" rates from ad networks for 2-3 years.

You will probably make better money by working the advertising yourself, and supplementing that by Ad Network banners or whatever. On a 30K page view per month site, I was able to make between 75-100$/month off of advertising when I personally signed up advertisers, and 2$/month when I didn't. So, no, Ad Networks won't make your site, but they don't normally hurt (especially if you can pick and choose which ads to show).

[JonPKibble]

I'll be glad to help. You just have to ask the right questions.

The reason ad rates are so horrible is because of the laws of supply and demand. Hence, the rise of performance based "advertising".

Ad networks are great, and so is selling ads yourself, but if you want to maximize profits you really need at least a basic knowledge of affiliate marketing.

I currently earn a living on the 'net and am in the process of purchasing a house with the profits.

[Jeremy W.]

Originally posted by JonPKibble
I currently earn a living on the 'net and am in the process of purchasing a house with the profits.

But even that doesn't make you succesful, or at least any more succesful than our forefathers of the dot-com era.

You could easily be riding a fad just like the previous generation of advertisers do. True "revelation" is either riding the next thing or riding this one until before it crashes.

Besides, many of us make full livings off the net

[vortex]

Can I at least try refferal links for the game deals page? Or do companies require you to have many visitors to have that?

[Duffmann86]

Vortex, what you could do is instead of going with pay per sale affiliate programs try using pay per lead. This way your targetted audience of teenagers doesn't actually have to buy anything for you to earn some commission money, they just need to sign up for free offers through you.

Also pay per lead programs tend to have higher conversion ratios than pay per sale, and you have decent traffic so you might be able to make some money that way.

[vortex]

Well, any site in particular that I can check out? I probably won't end up doing anyways because I don't think I'm going to have a large audience for a while, but I'd still like to take a look at some sites for future knowledge.

[M. Johansson]

Well, the basic formula for on-line asdvertisement success is to find out what you audience is interested in. Then find out how to profit from that, and present it to them in an informative fashion.

For instance, find a REALLY good place that sells the nintendo gamecube cheap and offers an affiliate program, and pimp it like crazy. Not with banners, not with popups, not with animated flash animations, but with a simple box that blends into your design, with a picture of the gamecube and the headline of "Cheap GameCube", and a very short description. The link leads to a page where you explain that the retailer is very good, cheap, and how well you yourself was serviced when you bought the gamecube from them. Or find a place which sells warcraft 3 really cheap.

Or, you can sell stuff yourself, like gamer tshirts: "Born to frag" or something like that.