Contextual Advertising How Does It Work ?

How to monetize a blog like The Power Guides Blog
The Power Guides Blog is a purely informational blog and at some time after putting many hours of work into providing free information , most bloggers would like to make some money for all their hard work .

So What are the options for Contextual Advertising


1 Contextual Advertising
To most webmasters who run websites the most obvious one that comes to mind is Google AdSense due to wide range of advertisers fairly good payout and easy to implement.

How Does Contextual Advertising Work

Contextual advertising by Google and the other companies is done using a special program / Bot which looks at all the content on a page to decide what the page is about and tries to match the advertisers to the content on the page.. It is also thought that Google has quite a bit of information about the visitor gained through ( cookies ) plus will know where the visitor is from .

I will try to explain .

Lets say your page is about garden sheds and Google has also decided it is about Garden Sheds ( Due to trust of your site over period of time ) , Also would help if your blog / site was 75% about Gardening.

Possible Stages Prior to delivering Add

1. Page Is about Garden Sheds ( Pick Garden Shed Advertisers )
2. User Is Middle Aged and Goes to lots of Gardening sites implying it is their hobby ( Therefore meaning they are more likely to spend )
3. User ended up at the page when they were searching for information about Garden Sheds.
4. User Lives In Chicago , Illinois ( Easy to find out often through IP but Multiple Options to obtain Geographic Location ) ( If you want to see it in action check out the little Sitemeter icon to find out about where visitors have come from on this blog ( Geographically and which last Site etc. ) and that is know where near the level of sophistication a company like Google has at it's fingertips.
   

OK now Google has the whole story this looks like a possible prospect for an advertiser selling Garden Sheds in Illinois .
So delivers a great add from local advertiser selling Garden Sheds In Illinois.

( This would mean much more likely the Visitor would ( 1 ) click on the ADD and ( 2 ) buy a shed )

Now understanding how much information Google has before it delivers adds will also help to explain why some traffic is not as good as other traffic

Example 1
StumbleUpon , Generally the visitors from StumbleUpon are just flitting through hundreds of sites aimlessly to find something interesting and not that likely to provide a good prospect for an advertiser.

Example 2
A news story about garden sheds being blown down due to a hurricane many miles away is unlikely to mean the reader will be interested in buying a new shed ( he was not affected ) But If Google Comes From The Effected Area they may make a great prospect so will adjust advertising accordingly .

Example 3
A Visitor with no referrer would not be considered as good as a visitor who came from a search query on new garden sheds from Any Search Engine ( maybe would explain why bloggers who go to the same sites every day not the best prospects. )

There are many other examples I could provide but I hope you have a better understanding from the examples above


Google Adsense
Google is open to fairly new sites / blogs with low traffic and is available for publishers in most countries in the World and in multiple languages.

It is easy to implement and in Blogger is even easier once you have applied and been approved for your account.

Payment is not made until you have reached $100.00 in your account and can take up to 3 years for blogs with low traffic.

My Wife has been blogging for over 12 months and I suspect it will another couple of years before she receives her first check ( But when she does she will super chuffed ).

NEVER EVER CLICK ON YOUR OWN ADDS
YOU WILL BE CAUGHT
YOU WILL BE CAUGHT

Google Takes the clicking of your own adds very seriously because it means you are defrauding Google's paying customers THE ADVERTISERS and without those advertisers trusting Google to monitor click fraud the Adsense market would not exist.


It does depend very much on your niche and Google's view of your blog re: providing the advertiser with a ROI ( Return On Investment ) and it can take some time before Google has enough information to decide it is a good fit for specific advertisers in that niche.


As you can see from the above the information Google has to work with provides Google with all the tools to match Advertisers >>> To Prospects and the better the match the more everybody is happy.


contextual advertising KONTERA this is very different from AdSense in that the adds are displayed when a visitor runs the mouse over a word in the text which an advertiser has targeted , As per Yahoo does not have the breadth and number of advertisers of Google Adsense


YPN from Yahoo only available for US advertisers and does not have the number and range of Advertisers of Google Adsense


I will go into detail in a later post some of the great opportunities offered by Affiliate Marketing which can provide as much if not more income than contextual advertising .