The bottom line to selling advertising online and making money doing so is by connecting buyers of advertising with sellers of advertising.



Basically what that means is that there are a large number of individuals and companies online who want to advertise, and there are a large number of individuals or companies on the web who are willing to provide advertising space. However, the market is very large, and it is inefficient for the advertisers and the providers of space to individually meet and negotiate contracts.

So the individual or firm wishing to advertise will generally contact an advertising firm which has many contacts with companies willing to provide the advertising venue, and place advertising with many of the venues at the same time.

So to start an advertising business online, you first need to gather a collection of firms or web sites that are willing to show adverting on their web sites. These web sites are preferably high-traffic web sites, with a considerable amount of monthly traffic, or visitors.

Once you have collected the initial “stable” of advertising venues, you can begin to solicit advertising clients. These advertisers will pay a price for the advertising which is commensurate with their exposure of advertising.

So, for example, if you have contracted with 10 web sites that each receive 100,000 visitors per month, you can sell up to 1,000,000 exposures of advertising per month to each advertiser. If you have negotiated 10 advertising ‘spots' on each of the websites, then you can sell up to the equivalent of 10 advertising customers 1,000,000 exposures per month. For example, if one advertiser only buys 500,000 exposures, you can sell the additional 500,000 exposures for a total of 11 advertisers.

You will have a pricing structure that creates a spread between the amount you charge the advertiser for the exposures, and the price you have agreed to pay the high-traffic sites for showing the advertising.

So what types of advertising can you sell?

You can sell banner ads, pay-per-click impressions, sponsorship ads, pop-up or pop-under ads, or you can provide services that approximate advertising such as search engine optimization or viral marketing campaigns.

A brief synopsis of these types of advertising:

Banner ads: Banner ads are generally pictorial ads that are viewed on the high traffic web site, and contain a link back to the advertiser's web site. These ads are generally priced per some amount of ads shown. For example, these ads might be sold in lots of 100,000 impressions each.

Pay-per-click ads: Pay-per-click ads are similar to banner ads, except they are priced by the number of visitors generated by the ads (click-throughs). Made popular by search engine giants Yahoo and Google, they are often perceived as text ads rather than pictorial, although pictorial (or even banner) ads can be sold on a pay-per-click basis.

Sponsorship ads: These are generally larger ads than banner or pay-per-click ads and may contain a considerable amount of text. These ads are generally placed in high traffic areas such as online newsletters, or ezines, or in the delivery of online books and magazines. These are generally priced by the ad and that price is generally linked to the number of readers of the publication in which the ad is placed.

Pop-up ads are ads that are designed to ‘pop-up' into the viewers' eyeshot as they are viewing a web page. These ads are generally priced by the impression. Pop-up ads are much less popular because of their nuisance factor, and as a result are blocked by many internet browsers, and are thus less effective today than in the early days of the internet.

Pop-under ads are generally less intrusive than pop-ups, although they utilize a similar concept. The primary difference here is that the pop-under ad does just that---it pops under the current screen so it does not interrupt the web reader. When the reader closes the current web page, they see the new pop-under screen and can view it at that time.

Search engine optimization, although not strictly advertising, works in much the same way. Search engine optimization involves maximizing a web site or associated campaign in such a way that the particular web site being optimized has a higher search engine ranking, and thus a higher probability of being visited by a search engine visitor.

Viral marketing campaigns are campaigns that utilize either advertising or current traffic visitor streams and create a viral, or logarithmic, increase in visitor traffic through primarily referral programs. These campaigns might suggest to current visitors that they let three of their friends know about the web site, and might use tell-a-friend scripts to make that easy. These campaigns also might provide easy-to-deliver electronic giveaways which tend to be given away multiple times after they are initially downloaded, thereby creating a viral effect.