Monetise! Top Five Types of Online Advertising

How Your websites Can Make Money
[from THC Zine v.02]

by: COMMANDER ENTERPRISE

What makes the online world go round? Advertising. Yes money figures into it, but you need ways to make it using your website. No matter how great the content, the multimedia, the social media interaction or whatever it is people want and need online, they’re all powered by advertising.

It’s the sheer number of people who go to all sites that activate it, to the point that advertising comes clanging on their doors. The huge revenue funds all these websites to keep them going.

Advertisers give their money for some prime online advertising real estate to sell their products and services and brands to the very wide global audience, and effectively. There are also different techniques and engineered advertising and marketing formats involved.

Top Five Website Advertising Money-Making Methods

Blogs and SEO
Search Engine Optimisation is one way of generating traffic to intended sites. It uses carefully selected keywords and phrases from online searches that tell what information the user is looking for or interested in. They are embedded in the website pages, allowing them to rank in Google searches. The traffic translates to ad revenue, leads, and sales.

Articles and blogs with useful and or entertaining information all pop up on search engines and become “associated” or related links online more frequently. This pulls in visits and clicks to that site. The site, usually with blogs or online articles, carries eye catching links, ads and content directly related to the interests or terms being looked for by online audiences.

Affiliate Advertising

This type of online advertising provides “related” content: direct links to check out after one has read a news tidbit, a blog, or an article. Anyone reading the content about a product, store, or service visits these links, leading to sales and traffic. It could be a review or feature that attracts the reader, which offers direct links to purchase the item or service.

The content is designed to make readers want to buy through these affiliated links, which drives advertising and direct sales. Websites build an advertising chain by trading with their affiliates’ links. Not only does it expose it to new markets and audiences, it also helps groups of advertisers and websites get online traffic and cash together.

Email and/or Spam

Probably one of the most longest-running types of internet advertising, virtually anything that has customer’s emails (given with permission of course) can generate direct advertising.

Many websites will have landing pages that ask you to sign up in exchange for exclusive content, downloads, or access to specific sites. Some will ask your email when you express interest in a product or services. Some will ask you to subscribe. You become one of many people in their mailing list who receives first-hand news, offers, newsletters, content and other exclusive info.

Email is more personal and more direct, as evidenced in the way it is written and presented and the type of content used. It is also not as intrusive, since people can open it on their free time. People don’t have to be regular browsers; However, be very wary of spam (and beware of giving out personal emails to advertisers and READ the terms first).

People who join mailing lists or give their emails with permission for future offers or advertising will usually get email ads from such groups. They can be from record labels, food companies, restaurants, specialty shops, special offer sites, favorite clothing brands, and frequently visited shops, among many others.

Email ads are a direct way to talk to the target audience with something that they are already interested in or have agreed to sign up for, and generates more guaranteed leads and sales without bombarding or the risk of over-exposing the customer. It’s also a way of granting discount codes, exclusive promos or offers only to their loyal customers or followers.

Recommended Links/Content

Direct recommendation links are a way to push other sites or even internal pages to an existing audience. It provides more of what the online visitors want, after reading their content.

If we love a site enough to trust its recommendations, then that is another form of indirect advertising online. It already has the trust of their audience and will generate more clicks just by (correct) association alone.

Bigger and more established companies or businesses also have the power to recommend and help out smaller websites by endorsing and recommending them to their already-considerable sized fanbase. Like affiliate marketing, both can benefit from the shared linking and traffic.

Sponsored Content / Ad Sponsors

A lot of these types of advertising are present on social media. They thrive on instant, viral and attention-grabbing content, incorporating their sponsors in it. Influencers put the product or service directly in their content, much like how product placement works. Some advertisers send their goods for reviews, generating instant buzz from a celebrity or a popular website, or social media page.

Some advertisers will hand-pick content and present them cleverly as sponsored content, which is more or less related to their brand or product. They garner instant interest and site visits as a result. For many newer sites and advertisers, this is currently one of the more effective types of online advertising using social media and the viral, instant buzz technique.