In this article, I’ll be reviewing 5 different advertising networks that can help you monetize your traffic. If you’re either a novice webmaster or an ad tycoon, there’s enough for everyone.

Since I started blogging, it soon became clear I could use my articles to generate some income and make my blog pay for itself and cover hosting and domain expenses. So I, as a webmaster, started investigating a bit and try to find the best solution to monetize my content. I’m now sharing some advertising networks I read to be the most common and reliable, also generating some extra pageviews while I’m at it

Text Link Ads: Text Link/In-Link Advertising

This network sells paid text links which are typically placed in sidebars and headers. Major advantages are you don’t need banners, they pay on time and expose earnings in a practical and effective way, and they are generally transparent to your audience. No TLA references whatsoever. The downside to it, from what I’ve read, but not actually verified, is that using TLA can get you penalized in search engines. For small publishers this won’t be a significant issue, but if you depend on a strong positioning in search engines and is critical for your business, this should be a consideration. There’s a plug-in for WordPress if you use it. See it here.

Comission Junction

This company is set on affiliate marketing. In this kind of business, advertisers (online merchants that sell products or services) pay publishers (independent parties that promote the products or services of an advertiser on their Web site) only for results, such as a visitor making a purchase or filling out a form, rather than paying simply to reach a particular audience. The publisher is paid a commission by the respective advertiser when a visitor takes a specific action such as filling out a form, subscribing to a service (both lead examples) or making a purchase (a sale). More info here.

Adsense: Contextual Ad Network

Google’s contextual ads are the most commonly seen ad network on the web. The reason is that they are one size fits all, no matter what your site Google probably has an ad for you. Not only that, their fill rate is superb and they are an easy network to get into. What’s the downside? It’s easy to outgrow them, you will eventually find that Google’s payout for many verticals isn’t as good as you could be making elsewhere. At that point, it might be time to start looking at other providers and using Google as a remnant to fill your unsold inventory. Either way, get informed here.

The Lounge Advertising Network

The Lounge Advertising Network from ZerkMedia is focused on publishers and advertisers that are somehow exclusively targeting Microsoft products and technologies. If your site is all about it and you have at least 8k page views per month get in the boat.

Kontera

Kontera can help you if your site context is textually heavy. The downside is you will have a ton of double underlined ads at random locations in your text. For some readers it can be a nuisance and will sure downgrade the overall quality of your website. The code is simple to install and there’s a plug-in for everyone who use WordPress engine. I’ve tested it and its simple to setup and configure. More info here.