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It sounds like a great idea. You build a website of original content, mostly for your own satisfaction, and someone suggests that you create ad space so that you can make some money at the same time. Your expectations are low as all you want to do is basically pay for overhead on your website.

It quickly becomes evident that there are a lot of choices these days to monetize your website. And there isn't a reliable way to choose between them besides advertising products and services that will most directly appeal to your visitors. Eventually you implement a handful and wait for the revenue to stream in.

This, of course, is when the fallacy of the whole concept is exposed. For those of us who start out with low ambitions, just to break even really, generating ad revenue is an excruciating process. AdSense barely pulls in $10 a month. Amazon links never result in sales. AuctionAds seem to pay off (who doesn't have an eBay account?) but in such small commissions that your monthly income is insubstantial. And so on. And even if over time, those amounts creep up incrementally, it would take years or millions of unique hits to really get any momentum behind your income stream.

When I hit that wall myself, rather than be discouraged, my reaction was to try to punch through the wall. But nothing I did, from optimizing my site design to buying traffic to adding 10 new articles a day, produced any significant development in my income. It was time to reassess my strategy.

What is the purpose of my site?

Ad hosting serves two distinct purposes, whether or not your site is a personal endeavor or a professional one. First, it gives you a stream of income with which to support your overhead costs (for personal websites primarily hosting and domain registration.) Second, it can give your site a professional look.

Neither of these purposes is subordinate to the other. Ad hosting of any kind gives your regular visitors an opportunity to express their support for your site by either purchasing products they would have bought anyway, or by clicking on ads of interest to them. It is not lost on most internet users that this is the purpose of advertising, and because the ads are usually relevant to their interests, they can derive a benefit in the act of supporting your work.

Ad space on websites generally give the impression of a professional design, whether or not the site itself is intended as a business per se. If, for instance, you are designing a portfolio of your art, you can incorporate ads to give the site both an aesthetic appeal and an air of competence.

Establishing the purpose of your site first is important because it affects how the ads are placed. In no way should the ads distract from the primary purpose of your site unless it is the primary purpose. For practical purposes, that means if you are monetizing a blog, the body of your post should be uncluttered and clearly distinguished. (By the way, this does not mean you should not design the look of your ads to match your website - something you will read in every book about AdSense and it's good advice. But it does mean that if your website is showcasing your writing, then your writing needs to be clearly identifiable and accessible to your visitors. If your website is just showcasing the advertisements, and everything else is subsidiary, then that is a completely different consideration.)

Is my traffic supporting my expectations of income?

This is an important point. 500 unique visitors a week is not going to sustain elevated levels of profit, no matter how your website is monetized. It's just not going to happen. Aside from brand name websites, only very few personal homepages and other niche sites are going to drive enough organic traffic to sustain a full time income. If your site is indexed, if you update regularly with new content, and if your traffic is relatively constant, then you have can reasonably assume that your monthly income is going to be constant as well.

Am I utilizing the right advertising?

This is something that you may have to reevaluate cyclically because every program has its benefits and downsides. Adsense, for instance, is paid per click; you could ostensibly be paid without your customers ever purchasing anything at the other end. Affiliate links require your visitor to take action, purchase a product or sign up for something before you receive a commission (and commissions, depending on the program, can range drastically.) That's a lot of steps before you get paid.

The other thing to consider is whether or not you can establish a relationship directly with advertisers and run the ad campaigns yourself. Or stick to selling your own products. Because in either case, you are keeping 100% of the profits yourself and that can lead to higher income (though the trade off is a lot more work.)

Whatever you decide to do, once you decide to monetize your site, the process is ongoing. The variety of ad programs is constantly growing, technology for running your own ads is becoming more accessible, and optimization techniques are always being refined. The one thing you should not do is just set up your ad space once and leave it alone. That approach, at least, will guarantee your income level lingers well below your expectations.

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