I keep wondering about putting advertising on my site.
There are some ads I would never use - pop-ups; obnoxious banner ads (eg - shoot the monkey and win $25); phoney “you are the 1 millionth visitor” etc.
I was wondering if there are some ads that are more like sponsorships. Do any companies pay to advertise on a webpage just to have a logo and/or small commercial message there? That (to me) would be the least obnoxious form of 'Net advertising.
What about becoming an Amazon Affiliate? That seems like a fairly inoffensive way to bring in revenue with your website.
Spoiler Virgin
I appreciate the suggestion, particularly because you are the only one to respond to this posting so far.
Personally, I’m not too enthused about being an affiliate of any company but you are right in that it is pretty non-offensive and doesn’t cheapen a website as opposed to pop-ups and so on.
Yes, there are some, but you usually have to have the traffic to make them want to advertise on your site. Affiliate programs are about the only way to go if you’re just getting started with advertising.
GMRyujin
Actually, I’d like to learn more about the sponsorships. My site gets over a million hits per year. (Yes, I know some sites get a million hits per day but I’m just giving you a rough idea of the traffic at my site).
Any more details about sponsorships would be appreciated.
When I was running my site, I’d usually get emails from smaller companies looking to advertise, but I mainly did the Amazon affiliate thing. At the site I write for now, our advertising person gets those and she also goes out seeking advertisers by emailing companies that’d be in our field (video games) and seeing if they want to advertise.
As a visitor to websites, the ads that I do NOT find annoying are those that are closely related to the topic of the website.
For example, if I’m at an IBM Mainframe programmer website, banners advertising magazines related to mainframe programming, banners for books about programming, related software packages, etc. are not annoying. In fact, they are often interesting to me and I will click on them to read about the item.
That’s probably a good deal for the advertiser, too, since they get a group of people likely to be interested.
And, of course, the ads must be non-intrusive (no pop-ups (I never see them anyway, due to Mozilla pop-up killer), no flashing, rotating, or constantly-changing banners, etc.
I don’t know how successful they are, but some people put “Please support us by supporting the people who have provided us with advertising” under all your banner ads.