Alternatives to Typical Internet Advertisements

Chances are that if you’ve made it this far, you’ve seen an internet advertisement today. No, wait: you have seen an internet advertisement today.

Look just above this text. Look above the headline. Look to the left of the screen. Look in the navigation bar.

Kenneth has strategically placed advertisements on his site. As Kayvon described in a recent guest post, this is a necessary evil. This has always been the case with creative endeavors.

The recent history of creative media has often centered on subsidies from advertisements.

TV networks need income beyond the fee cable providers pay them. Magazines can’t survive on subscription rates alone. Radio – well, radio pretty much relies solely on advertisements for survival.

The internet has largely been the same way.

As with TV, people already pay a fee to get in. They’re generally unwilling, excepting uncommon cases such as HBO, to pay for additional content. Advertising is what bridges the gap. It’s the only way some websites are able to survive.

Yet the internet opens up some opportunities that weren’t necessarily in the one-way media market. That is, advertisers on TV and in print have scant few ways to track their advertisements. On the internet, though, clicks are currency and advertisers can explore methods beyond simple display spots.

Those display spots still appear, of course, because they’re easiest for both advertiser and publisher. The advertiser creates an ad and determines which types of sites it will appear on.

The publisher then goes through a middleman for easy placement. That’s very little effort on everyone’s part, yet everyone makes money.

That is, the middleman makes money, because he’s dealing with multiple advertisers and even more sites. The advertiser makes money, because presumably those dirt cheap ads to lead to increased sales.

Yet the publisher rarely makes enough to pay the bills on display advertising alone.

There’s a good reason why CPM advertising is referred to as Webmaster Welfare. It might pay the bills to keep the site online, but that’s about it. If publishers want to find ways to increase their incomes, they have to think beyond CPM advertising.

Alternatives to Typical Internet Advertisements

Affiliate Sales

Affiliate sales work on a simple premise. Companies, wanting to increase their sales and reach, allow other companies to sell their products. These products sell for regular price, but the affiliate gets a cut as well.

That is, the company sacrifices a portion of the profits in order to extend its customer base. The idea is that eventually people will start buying direct, giving the company entirely new customers.

Many blogs have taken advantage of affiliate sales, and have turned them into legitimate dollars. Instead of getting paid less than a dollar for every 1,000 visitors to their website, affiliate marketers make actual dollars on every conversion.

Since people rarely buy just one item at an e-commerce outlet, the affiliate has the chance to make a substantial amount off of every sale.

Even if only one out of every 1,000 visitors converts to a sale, chances are you’re marking far more than that measly dollar that AdSense pays.

An affiliate site does require a certain specialization, though, and it may preclude certain bloggers from entry. For instance, people don’t just buy because there’s a link on a site.

The blogger needs to actively focus on the product and, in many cases, ask for the sale. This can come in the form of a review or an article that relates to the product.

But in some way or another, the blogger has to be the salesman here. Since many are uncomfortable with this, affiliate sales are not going to work for everyone.

Direct Sales

While selling an affiliate’s product will net a blogger a portion of the profits, there is a way they can get all of those profits. Instead of hooking on with another company and hoping to convert a small number of users for a decent slice of revenue, bloggers can actually sell their own products.

It might sound like a daunting task, but there are relatively simple and cost-effective ways to sell products directly.

Private Labeling. Believe it or not, there are companies out there that want to make products for you. They want to do the dirty work of assembling and even shipping, while you just handle the marketing and sales. They’ll even put your own private label on the product, so you can market it as your brand.

This is a method employed in many industries — sports supplements are just one prominent example. The manufacturer will still take a cut of each sale, but the amount the blogger brings home is potentially much greater than with affiliate sales.

Information Products. Anyone can create an information product. With a little time, research, and elbow grease, anyone can write a useful information product.

This is one area where a blogger can really leverage his expertise. By compiling important, well-researched information into one easy-to-consume document, a blogger stands to make a few dollars by selling e-books.

There are dozens of ways to market such e-books. Additionally, good information products can lead to additional information products – and with those additional products you’ll already have a customer base that likes your original product.

Direct sales certainly aren’t for everyone, but they are a way to earn more money than CPM ads will ever provide. It takes plenty of effort and even more time, but the payoff can be enormous.

Back To CPM

There is a time and place for CPM ads. In fact, you can continue to implement CPM ads while you’re running campaigns for direct and affiliate sales. They won’t bring in nearly as much money, but they will provide a baseline. If they can pay your web hosting bills, the rest is profit.

Additionally, CPM adds can work well for certain sites. It’s tough to get established in these fields, mainly because people have already figured out that CPM advertising works in these fields.

Yet a moderately high-traffic personal development site stands to make thousands of dollars per month from CPM ads.

For whatever reason, those types of sites generate better responses to ads, and therefore get more, and higher-paying, ones.

The best way to employ CPM ads is to implement them as needed. Think of it like a smart grid, which allows energy companies to send power to the areas that need it most, when they need it.

Your monetization strategy will move as your site needs it. At first you might use CPM ads to pay hosting costs and affiliate sales to add additional revenue. Then, as you start maxing out your affiliate opportunities, you can add direct sales to the fold.

If your traffic increases in this period, you can then start implementing more CPM ads. That might lead to additional niches, and the cycle starts all over again.

Ads are annoying for sure, and for the most part they’re necessary. But they’re not the only way to make a few dollars on the internet. We have many opportunities in front of us. The more we take advantage of them, the better off we’ll be.

Joe Pawlikowski is the editor of Prepaid Reviews, a site that provides news, commentary, and reviews of prepaid wireless services.

Alternatives to Typical Internet Advertisements