So you have a great website and you want to monetize it? As you might already know, there are tons of different ways to do this. For many people, however, advertising can be one of the easiest and fastest ways to start making money off of your great content.
So how exactly do you get paid for posting ads on your website? And how much can you expect to make?
Unfortunatly, the long and short of it is that, for most of us, especially if you don't have insane traffic levels (think hundreds of thousands to millions) the amount of ad revenue you're going to earn is going to be significantly less than what you could earn through other revenue streams.
However, ad revenue is the ultimate form of passive income online. You put up the ad spaces, advertisers come, and you watch the money flow in consistently through no extra effort of your own.
Okay, so you're convinced advertising is right for your blog. There's all these crazy metrics out there, like CPC and CPM, what does that mean and how does it affect the money I'm going to earn?
Cost Per Click (CPC) Advertising
Cost per click advertising is likely the most common form of advertising out there on the web. In theory, it's very simple, you put the ad on your website, and everytime someone clicks on that ad you get paid a certain amount. Easy enough right?
So why should you use CPC advertising? Well, one of the biggest reasons is because you might have to... Google AdSense, which is arguably the largest online advertising service almost always pays online websites for CPC ads. Besides just the convinience of being part of AdSense, CPC ads are very effective if you write great content and your audience and the ads shown, are targeted towards the same thing.
Even if you don't have the highest traffic levels if your ads and audience are focused on the same things you're much more likely to see a high click-through-rate (CTR) which results in more conversions for the company advertising and more ad revenue for you!
Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
The second form of advertising we're going to talk about today is CPM ads, or how much money you will make per 1000 impressions on your ads. If you're wondering how the "M" fits in, that's actually the abreviation for "milli" or one thousand. Similarly to CPC, the way you get paid isn't very difficult to understand in theory. You negotiate a rate with your ad provider and you're paid that rate every time there are 1000 views on that ad.
The difficulty is actually in getting the impressions, however. While it might seem like that correlates directly to how many visitors and page views you have, in reality, the use of ad-blockers or simply people not making it far enough around your website can limit the number of ad impressions you can earn and the money you can make.
Conclusion
So now you know a little more about the two most common forms of advertising. CPC and CPM are the backbones of the online advertising industry and they both have their own advantages and disadvantages. Hopefully this bit of knowledge will help you make the most out of your traffic and let you make just a little bit more money by advertising.