Everyone who wants to monetize a website, has taken a little time to hop on over to Google and signed up for Adsense. This is normally followed up some random advert placing on a website, and getting to grips with things. Over time, if the person is still motivated to make money online, they will most probably have a look around the Internet for information on correct advert place, advert colours, and the likes. During their search for information, they will most probably come across a myriad of other advertising methods, and those really interested will be eaten up by the vast array of affiliate networks. I, for one, have been caught up before, and have learnt through experience as to what it’s like sitting with 10 different affiliate networks, with adverts spread all over the place, and little revenue to show for it. This brings me to the topic of my post.

Plan your advertising. A few months ago, when I decided to take making money online more seriously, I decided to make a small list of the various affiliate networks, write down some information on each one, and plan an attack strategy. I decided that I would start with Adsense first, as there is so much information on the Internet about it, and I got a few websites up and running with my Adsense adverts. I am currently making over $100/month, which isn’t amazing, but it’s not too bad for just a few months work. About three weeks ago, I cannot remember exactly when, I decided to start pushing on a second affiliate network. I chose Traffic Synergy - Why did I choose them? Well, it was a personal decision based on the fact that they are local (South Africa), and a large quantity of my readers are South African, so I decided this route might be a wise move. I am currently pulling in around R25/day with Traffic Synergy, which is about $4 or so a day. Not bad going for just a couple weeks, and only using two websites to advertise on.

In my opinion, the trick is to take on one affiliate network, build with them, until your earnings are fairly regular, and not fluctuating so much. Once you reach this point, take the time to research your next affiliate network, and once again, repeat the process of carefully finding out as much about them as you can, and then push with the adverts, aiming to achieve a regular income. Keep this going, each time your earnings are set, move onto your next network. Spread the adverts carefully throughout your network, follow your readers demography, and keep your content rich!

Best of luck!

Instead of serving banners or text links from advertising networks,Vizu Answers pays you to display interactive polls on your website . The polls only appear in locations that you specify and are from individuals and organizations that pay you to ask questions of your users

• The polls do not take visitors away from your site
• The polls are encouraging, which increases the usage
• The look and feel of the poll can be adapted to your current look
• The questions asked are related to your content
• This is an easy way to monetize your website

The signp process is simple, and too the point, consiting of three steps

1. Sign up for an account
2. Design the poll template
3. Place the code on your website

It is really as simple as that! There is a great deal of information on their website, here are the topic:

Poll user experience
Monetization and payment
Sample Polls

Take a look, it’s definitely worth looking into if you have a decent reader base!

It really interests me that I have not had a single Traffic Synergy sign up, since I posted an article on their services. I know that a large number, almost 70% of my readers are based in South Africa, and if you are reading my website, the chances are that you have a website/blog and are interested in monetizing your website. So why no signups? Perhaps what I need to do, is be a little more direct and give some proof.

I signed up to Traffic Synergies affilate services at the beginning of May, and have since then posted just a couple of their adverts across two of my websites. I have not had a great deal of time to put effort into it, so what I have made thus far, I think I would be safe saying, is bare minimum. The two sites I have posted their adverts on are Webtrepreneur and iMod. iMod is my personal blog, which does not get too much attension, and the traffic is nothing fantastic. Webtrepreneur gets decent traffic, around several hundred uniques a month, but is still in its very early stages. This being said, I have done bare minimum, with not a great deal of traffic to deal with, and my results are fairly fantastic if you ask me. I have probably spent around one hour setting up the adverts.

Commision Results:

Today: R11.76
Yesterday: R21.36
May: R108.80

Now, if you are into monetizing and know a bit about the scene, you will vouch that these results are pretty good considering the time and traffic I have had to play with. It is not a great deal of money, but R108.80 for an hours work (and I was programming at the same time I was doing it) is a good rate for any work. Besides, I was sitting in my room, drinking coffee, listening to music and playing around online while I was doing it - so yes, R100/hour is fantastic.

If you are more inspired now, give it a bash, spend an hour playing around, get a couple adverts up, and see what happens - that’s what this is all about - trial and error, and personally I am very happy with my R100. Take a look now!

If I had to take an educated guess about which affiliate network is most popular with publishers, it would have to be Google Adsense. I feel that I would be safe in saying that around 8/10 publishers use Adsense on their websites, and perhaps 7/10 people stick with Adsense and only Adsense across their websites. Amogst all the affiliate options available, the wide spread of knowledge and information on Adsense is far greater than any other, and this would be a big contributing factor to its popularity - not to mention that it is a Google service.

When it comes to Adsense, there is always lots of talk with regards to the topic of which colours to use; Should the adverts blend in with the website, or should they stick out? Most people will say that they need to blend with the website, which I don’t disagree with, but at the same time, this is basically a kind of trickery, is it not? This morning I surfed around various niche market websites looking for Adsense blocks, and it got me thinking. If you are running a niche website, which has a very tight topic, why would you want to hide your adverts? Of course, people normally stay away from adverts, but on a niche website, your content will revolve around one set topic, and therefore Adsense blocks will relate to your topic, and the chances are that your readers would actually be interested in seeing the adverts. Not every advert leads to a website which requires people to buy something, many adverts lead to websites with useful information. This being said, why not change the colours of your Adsense blocks to stand out slightly? I don’t mean change them to flaming red backgrounds with yellow fonts on a blue, white and gray website, but perhaps put a bright border around the block - this will make it stand out slightly, but not too much.

Google offers three different techniques on their website, which they feel work most successfully. Before we look at these three techniques, there is a useful table, which can be followed:

1. To blend, make the background and borders of your ads the same color as the background of your page where the ad is placed. If your site has a white background and you don’t want to spend a lot of time choosing ad colors, we recommend using our pre-designed Open Air palette.
2. To complement, use colors that already exist on your site, but don’t match the background and borders exactly where the ads are placed.
3. To contrast, choose colors that stand out against the background of your site. Contrasting is recommended only for sites with dark background, so we suggest using a palette with white background, white borders, and blue titles.

It is important to note whether the people on your website are returning readers or just visitors. This will play a role on your click through chances. If your visitor base consists mostly of returning readers, the chances are that your readers will become blind to your adverts. This will decrease your advert click throughs, and you will need to deal with this to keep your revenues up, there are two techniques to handle this:

1. Change the placement of your advert blocks
2. Change the colour of your adverts

Both of these points are self explanitory, but I have something useful for those of you interested in changing your colours. To reduce reader blindness, Google allows up to 4 colour variations when it comes to adverts. This means that there is code, which you can use, which will randomize the colours of your adverts, each time your website is loaded, without you having to do it manually. I will paste an example below, for you to see what I mean.

google_color_border = [”628098″,”628098″,”000000″,”000000″];
google_color_link = [”000000″,”BBB90C”,”BBB90C”,”628098″];
google_color_url = [”000000″,”628098″,”000000″,”000000″];
google_color_text = [”628098″,”628098″,”000000″,”000000″];

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