One of the main income streams from your web sites or blogs will be advertising revenue.

You can sell the ad space on your web site or blog. There are various ways advertisers prefer to pay for your ads space. The easiest way is to charge a fixed monthly rate but most advertisers do not like this way of paying unless they know your web site receives a lot of traffic. I think the biggest problem with “per period” advertising is that there is no way the advertisers knows what traffic your web site gets, they have to rely on the information you send them.

Most advertisers prefer to pay you for successful traffic. That way it will not matter to them if your web site receive a 1,000 or 100,000 visits per month, their “risk” remains the same. Some of the options they use is to pay you Per Sale, Per Click or Per Thousand Impressions.

It is important that you know the terminology of these ads:

CPC – Cost per Click – How much will it cost the advertiser each time a visitor to your site clicks on his ad.

PPC – Pay Per Click – This is the other side of the coin. How much will you pay each time a visitor clicks on your ad on somebody else’s web site

CPA – Cost per Action or also called Cost per Acquisition – Basically this means that you will get paid each time an action was taken by the client which you refered to the advertiser. Advertisers seek different outcomes or actions. Some would pay you each time a client buys his product, some will pay you each time a client registeres on his site. Ons some of the Forex sites the requirement is that the client registeres for the service  and make a first deposit. The action varies from advertiser to advertiser. The only thing that remains constant is that you get paid for a successful action.

CTR – Click Through Rate – This number is normally presented as a percentage. It refers to the number of clicks and ad or baner received in relation to the number of times it has been displayed. If the banner was displayed 1,000 times and during those 1,000 displayes it was clicked on 100 times, it will have a CTR of 10%

CPM – Cost per Thousand – You normally get this with banner ads. It is the amount of money the advertiser will pay you for every 1,000 times his ad has been displayed.

URL – Uniform Relay Link – also kown as “the link”, “the web site address” or “affiliate link” . This is the address of the web site which visitors use to find your web site. The URL of this web site is http://www.pietpetoors.com . If you are placing affiliate ads on your web site you will get a unique URL which will track the visitors from your site to the advertiser’s site. This unique URL will normally not make sense and it is better to hide it rather thanuse it as it is. An example of a unique URL is http://passivein.lmtformula.hop.clickbank.net . You can hide it in the text like; “Click here to go there now”

I personally prefer to always let an adveriser’s link open in a new window as I would love to keep my readers on my own web site as long as possible.

Obviously if you want to charge for CPM or CPC ads you will have some kind of software to keep the statistics.  For my banner ads I use AdMan which can manage banner ads, text ads or rich content ads (like java or flash). You can also choose between “per time”, CPC or CPM campaigns and you can setup any size of banner area. It also allows your users to register, manage and pay for their ads themselves which takes the hassle of managing the campaigns out of your hands.

I also use this AdMan software to manage the affiliate banners I add on the site. It allows you to setup “complimentry” campiagns. So when I add a affiliate banner I obviously do not want to pay for it myself in order to activate it. So i just set it up and then mark it as complimentry in order to activate the banners. AdMan makes my banner management a breeze. What is also nice about it is that you buy your licence to install the tracking and management software on one domain, but you are allowed to include the script which displayes your banners on more than one domain.