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Different Ads-Different Opportunities To Make Money

Gadget Ads - Gadget ads are mini-sites that run ads on Adsense. If you're lucky to have these ads on your site, it definitely will get visitors to stick around your site a little longer. That’s what ever webmaster should want. Making their site sticky. 

The ads may be engaging, but how do you make your web page or website ready for gadget ads? You need to opt-in for images for Adsense, and let the good times rolls. Well, maybe. There are no guarantees that you will see a gadget ad on your site. But you can increase the possibility of seeing gadget ads on your site if you use the following formats.


1. Rectangle (medium and large)
2. Wide skyscraper 
3. Leaderboard

Personal note: I've tried using images several times on my site, and it seems that people are almost blind to the image ads. Gadget ads may help to eliminate this blindness, as well as offer a unique opportunity to entertain and sell. But the big question is, will they be accessible on my site? That you have to wait and see.

Referral Ads- Referral Ads offer an opportunity for you to make money on their site, without having to sign up for the different programs. It’s really similar to such affiliate brokerage companies like Commission Junction or Linkshare, but without the rejection and sign-up. There are different size and shapes of ads within the referral ads program, with some “text only” and others offering either “text or image”. Many feared that Google would be taking away from the other Affiliate Brokerage Firms. My personal opinion- I really don’t think so. Why? Comfort level will be one of the main issues. Another issue possibly is the rotation of the ads. I’ll explain. 

Sometimes when I’m focused on an article, I’m well, focused on an article. But sometimes I see an ad that catches my attention. So I make a mental note of it, knowing that I will flip back to the ad once I’m done doing my research. However, if you have a rotation of ads put in place, the visitor, more times than not, will click back to the ad only to find a different ad in it’s place. The webmaster has just lost a possible sale.

Mobile Ads – Mobile Ads are directed to the cell phone and ipod. To even get mobile ads on your site, you must have a mobile compliant site. What is a mobile compliant site? It is a site that uses the mobile mark up language XHTML, WML or CHTML, with a layout that properly displays the information specific for the cell phone. 

One additional thing that you must do to make your site mobile ready-you will need to make sure that your website is developed using server-side scripting such as PHP or ASP. Many web hosting services do provide support for PHP or ASP-but I would contact your web hosting provider to verify the availability. If they do, you’ll just simply need to ad a snippet of Adsense PHP code to your web page and change the .htm or .html extension to the PHP extension. In addition, I would do a preview of your web page before pulling it to your website, to make sure it doesn’t blow up on you.

Adsense for Search – I utilize Adsense for Web Search + Site Search. It was really a hard decision – my first thought of course was, “visitors will leave my site”. But then again, if they didn’t find what they were looking for, can you really hold them? Of course not! So, I compromised and but on site search. Site search gives visitors the opportunity to search my site for the product, service or even article they are interested in, and if they don’t find what they are looking for-they have the option to search the web. It makes your site visitor-friendly and helpful, and if they click on an ad that is relevant to the keyword they put in the search box, your pain if diminished by collecting a little money on their search words. It may not happen often, but hey, a little money here and there can grow your monthly income.

As you can see, Adsense has opened up different opportunities for the webmaster to make money. Some may work better than others. I guess that is left to you, the webmaster, to experiment and find out what works best on your own site.

Links to Advertising Tools