Tips/Resources

If you're looking to monetize your blog or website by carrying advertising, you'll find that there is Google's Adsense and a dizzying array of alternatives.

Here's an overview of what's out there in the way of ad networks and services.

Services from the major search engines:
Google Adsense
Yahoo! Publisher Network
Microsoft Advertising

Ad networks:
Adify
Advertising.com
Adversal.com
Burst Media
Casale Media
Chitika
Clicksor
MediaMind
MediaPlex
Performancing Ads
Point Roll
Say Media

These ad networks are for content publishers
with lots of traffic or strong niches:
Federated Media
Gorilla Nation
Technorati Media
Tribal Fusion

These services broker your ad space across multiple ad
networks and manage and optimize your ad selling:
adBrite
Doubleclick for Publishers
PubMatic
Rubicon Project
Yieldbuild

These ad networks only deal in text link ads –
ads that are short strings of linked text:
Bidvertiser
Text Link Ads
TextLinkBrokers.com

Pheedo is an ad network for putting ads in your RSS feed.

Some ad networks offer the option of in-text ads. These are the double-underlined words you sometimes see in a website's content. You'll want to be careful with this intrusive ad format because it can annoy your visitors. Make sure you don't do more harm than good. Likewise with ads that pop up new windows under your visitors' browsers.

In-text-only services:
Infolinks
Kontera

Pop-under ads:
AdvertisingZ.com

The key to making the most of any kind of advertising on your site is closely tracking performance using the ad provider's tools and keeping track of traffic statistics using tools like Google Analytics.

When you start out you'll want to experiment to find the best ad formats and placements, but once you get going you'll want to avoid regularly making wholesale changes. Think of it as tuning a machine rather than rebuilding it.

Here are some useful ad network guides:
Understanding Online Ad Networks: A Web Publishers Guide
Publishers Guide to Ad networks
PublisherSpot.com

Many websites offer to send you e-mail when they update their information and most news sites offer e-mail headlines. These services save you the trouble of going to the sites, but if you have more than a few they can quickly fill your inbox.

What’s more useful is getting alerts from search engines. You can have Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing regularly send you the results of keyword searches on news and other sources.

This saves time by pushing information to you that you’d otherwise have to search for. In essence you can set up your own free content monitoring service. You can track legislation, competitors, industry trends or the goings-on in your hometown.

Bing News alerts, Yahoo Alerts and Google Alerts let you receive e-mail alerts for keyword news searches. You can also get Yahoo Alerts via text message and Google Alerts via RSS feed.

Google Alerts are particularly useful because you can set keyword searches for different sources: news, blogs, webpage updates, video, discussions in Google Groups, or all of the above. You could use this to, for example, set two alerts for the same keyword, one on news and the other on blogs. This would let you separately track events and what people are saying about them.

If your focus is news, you can also create custom sections in Google News. This is useful because it lets you see headlines from several alerts at once.

Make sure to set an alert for your company name.