Top Money Makers - Part 1 at SEO Moola

Top Money Makers - Part 1

Posted by johan October 24, 2006

These days publishers, including bloggers, have a wide variety of income generating options available. The solution that almost everyone is familiar with is Google’s AdSense program. Although it is clearly a popular solution with pretty good baseline revenue potential for publishers, there are some strong contenders that are worth considering.

In fact, in certain instances, you may be able to combine contextual advertising like that of Google AdSense with other money-making solutions. But, be sure to review each outlet’s policies on mixing contextual ads of different advertising outlets, as there may be restrictions in some cases.

The top money makers that SEO Moola recommends include primarily contextual advertising, direct ad sales, as well as affiliate and referral programs. Together these basic revenue streams can help you increase and maintain a strong and steady cash flow month after month.

This is the first part of a SEO Moola several articles that will cover key cash generating techniques for content publishers.

Text Links Ads

Text Links Ads works slightly different than the common contextual ad model. By categorizing your site and associating keywords with it, you can sell ad positions for your site to advertisers. Depending on a variety of factors regarding your site including your Alex ranking, the selling price will vary.

They also have a new, interesting feature that integrates ads into your feeds. You need to use Wordpress 2.0+ for this feature, however.

Text Links Ads offers an affiliate program in addition to their traditional ads. It’s a really nice program, as they give you $25 for every person that signs up through your referral. It can be a great way of adding some extra cash in your pocket, especially if your site targets other bloggers or advertisers.

Google AdSense

Google AdSense is one of the pioneers in the contextual ads industry. As SEO Moola covered recently, there are people out there, who make upwards of $300,000 a month using Google AdSense. Google AdSense is simple to get started with and gives you a flexible, revenue-generating way of publishing relevant (text, image, or video) ads on your site.

Google also has a pretty good referral program for five of its services: Google AdSense, Google AdWords, Firefox plus Google Toolbar, Google Pack, and Picasa. The referral earnings vary, so you’re best off reading the Google help to learn more about them. If you haven’t signed up for Google AdSense, you can do so by clicking on the button below.

Adbrite

Adbrite offers a similar system to that of Text Links Ads.

Adbrite also offers a referral program, which is quite generous, especially if you manage to attract high-spend advertisers or top revenue generating publishers. Basically, you earn a percentage of the buying or selling activity that the referred Adbrite customer (publisher or advertiser) generates over a period of time. More specifically,

50% of AdBrite’s profits for the first 3 months
10% of AdBrite’s profit for the next 9 months

This can quickly add up if you have good referrals. In fact, if you share your SEO and SEM knowledge with your readers on your blog, your readers will most likely be able to be more effective with their publishing sites, and consequently you make more money–provided that you referred them, of course.

I really like Adbrite, and I recommend that you give them a try.

Kontera

An interesting solution called ContentLink which embeds ads dynamically into your existing textual content is offered by Kontera. SEO Moola’s keyword news pages currently use Kontera’s technology. If you wish to control where Kontera’s ads appear in your site, you can easily do so by defining special div elements, otherwise Kontera will seek out to add ads, where relevant, throughout your pages.

Unfortunately, Kontera does not appear to offer a referral program at the time of the writing of this post.

I’ve added these top money makers to the SEO Moola top money makers page. In Part 2 of the Top Money Makers series, we will take a closer look at referral programs.

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