How To Make Money With Contextual Advertising
Author: Danny Wirken

Introduction to Contextual Advertising

Recently, advertisers have come to realize the large potential
of the Internet as a media when it comes to advertisements.
Advertisers are especially interested in using contextual
advertising since it delivers targeted ads to a more receptive
target audience.

Contextual advertising is a type of online advertising used
mostly for content-based websites. With contextual advertising
a program or system automatically scans a webpage's content for
specific keywords or search strings and based on the results
then returns targeted ads based on the page's content.

Types of Contextual Advertising

There are three types of contextual advertising: the pop-up or
pop-under ads, in-text contextual advertising, and inline
contextual advertising. Many are familiar with pop-up ads
because they have been around for quite sometime. Gator
actually uses this kind of contextual advertising wherein a
window with relevant a relevant ad for some product or service
pops up while a user is reading a webpage. Pop-up ads are
however considered to be not that effective for advertising
since most users find them very irritating and so make use of
pop-up blockers to disable the ads. The ads therefore don't get
seen by people and in cases where they get through pop-up
blockers they are usually simply closed without really being
noticed. In-text contextual advertising, offered by companies
like VibrantMedia, is considered to be less irritating. They
are ads that appear as special hyperlinks linking to actual
contextual ads and are found throughout the entire article
being read. They are not ostentatious at all since they are
completely user activated and leaves to the users the choice of
whether to click on the links to view the entire ads or not. The
third kind of contextual advertising is called inline
advertising. This type of advertising is the one used by
Google's AdSense and Overture's ContentMatch. With inline
advertising targeted ads are placed on the right side of the
page under the label "Sponsored Links". This type of
advertising isn't intrusive and webpage owners get paid on a
per click basis. Advertisers who want to be top of the list
need only to pay at a higher per click rate to be on top.

Contextual Advertising in its Early Days

Although it was only recently made popular by Google's AdSense,
contextual advertising has been around for a longer time. It has
actually been around since 2001 when eZula released its TopText
product. Gator also had a king of contextual advertising going
on for a long time. Publishers and other website owners,
however, were not happy with eZula and Gator's model for
contextual advertising since eZula and Gator reaped the profits
without the publishers earning anything from the ads. The
release of Google AdSense, however, changed all that when they
offered webpage owners a percentage of what the advertiser's
paid them. Advertisers on the other were happy as well since
they only had to pay Google depending on the number of clicks
made on their ads. This is very beneficial for advertisers
since they only have to pay for the actual traffic routed to
their site by the advertisements.

Another issue surrounding contextual advertising that sparked
the ire of web surfers this time is the software that came with
the contextual ads. The software used to be able to search for
specific search strings were actually installed locally on the
surfers' computers without their consent or even their
knowledge. Such software, called spyware, not only violated the
surfers' sense of privacy but caused their computers to behave
erratically as well or at least slowed down the computers'
performance since the programs ran on the background without
the surfers' knowledge.

Although there were contextual advertisers that drew the ire of
both publishers and surfers alike there were also some like
Industry Brains, http://About.com, and Applied Semantics who
had their own models of contextual ads, which were viable and
sparked no controversy. They have actually been around for
sometime now their model seems to be working for them. Google,
although relatively new compared to these companies who deal
with contextual advertising, actually gained popularity faster
and was able to spread the concept of contextual advertising to
the world due to its stature as the number one search engine in
web search at the moment. Because of Google's AdSense
contextual advertising boomed and more and more people are
getting into it and are reaping the benefits.

Who Can Benefit from Contextual Advertising

As mentioned earlier, publishers and web page owners who were
once unhappy with eZula's model for contextual advertising
became more receptive towards contextual advertising when
Google's AdSense came out. Google's Adsense, Overture's Content
Match, and other second tier search engines like FindWhat and
Kanoodle offer pay per click contextual advertising that
benefit both webpage owners and advertisers alike.

Contextual advertising is very beneficial for all kinds of
content-based sites like news and publisher sites as well as
sites of small businesses and even personal blogs. However for
your website to maximize your profit from the contextual ads on
your site your site's content should be of good quality, meaning
that it should be rich, relevant, and updated on a regular
basis. A site with poor content and that uses contextual ads
would most likely point its target audience to another site
that is of better quality. If this happens then your visitors
will most likely return to your competitor's site rather than
your own site causing you to lose profit. News sites and
publishers would most probably have no problem in delivering
relevant and updated content but this can be a challenge to
small businesses and personal websites. The use of content
management systems (CMS) could help such cases, but even with a
good CMS extra effort is required to ensure that the content is
of good quality.

A good way you to increase the can of earning money from
contextual advertising is by having a search engine in your
site. Google's Adsense and Overture both list contextual ads on
their search results page. With a search engine in your site the
chance of visitors clicking on an ad will increase and so will
your profit.


About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net