Internet marketing experts tend to go back and forth on the effectiveness of banner advertising all the while entrepreneurs are making good money with this marketing tactic. And, it’s still a reliable way to make money on your website. Here are a few ideas on how to make money with banner advertising on your website.

#1 Sell ad space. One of the easiest ways to make money with banner advertising on your website is to sell ad space. The rates you charge will depend largely on the amount of traffic you have and the size of the space. Even if you do not have a tremendous amount of traffic just yet, it may make sense to place banner ads on your website so that when your traffic volume increases you don’t have to redesign your website to make room for ads, which brings us to the number two way to make money with banner advertising.

#2 Affiliate ads. If you plan on eventually selling ad space on your website you can make great use of the space with banner ads for affiliate products or services. You can join an affiliate network and sign up to represent relevant and complimentary companies on your website. The networks will provide the banner link code for you and all you have to do is put it into your website. You’ll make money every time someone clicks through from your ad to the affiliate company and makes a purchase.

#3 Join a banner network. A banner network is the third popular option to make money on your website with banner ads. They work by introducing a middleman, or middle woman, so to speak who inserts relevant banner ads on your website in a pre-designated space. They sell banner ads to advertisers and pay for displaying the ads on your website. You’re not getting paid per click or per sale but rather for space on your website and you don’t have to go through the hassle of selling ad space yourself, someone else does it for you.

With any banner advertising setup you’ll want to make sure the location of your banner advertisements is prominent enough that people will want to pay you to place their ad. You’ll also want to make sure they look good on your website, lined up and in proportion to each other. And you’ll want to make sure if you’re selling advertising space on your site that there’s an information link that’s easy to find. Continue to work to increase your website traffic and you can increase your advertising rates.

Banner advertisements are still a great way to promote a product or service and they’re an excellent way for website owners to make a profit.

PayPerClick or PPC is a way to advertise to a specific group of people who are searching for your information using keywords or a keyword phrase. It’s called Pay Per Click because you, as a business owner, only pay for the advertisement when someone clicks on it.

The clicks are good because they’re clicking on your URL and heading on over to your website where you can close the sale and make a profit.

There are different PPC programs through various search engines and companies however the most popular PPC service is Google AdWords.

It’s free to participate in AdWords however, before you head over to Google to sign up there are a few questions you’ll want to answer including:

1. How many people are looking for your products or services? Keyword tools will help you find this information and it’s key to creating an effective PPC campaign.

2. How much will your click’s cost? Google’s traffic estimator will tell you how much it’ll cost you each time someone clicks on your ad. This is important because you can quickly spend thousands of dollars and if that’s not in your budget you need to design your campaign carefully.

3. Who are your competitors? Using Google, search for your keywords and pay attention to the ads that pop up in the right hand column of your search results. These are your competition. Study them carefully. Scan through the first couple of pages. When you see an ad that’s a repeat, you’ve gone through your competition. If there are more than 50 ads, you may want to reconsider a PPC campaign with those keywords.

Setting Up Your First Ad

Once you’ve determined the keywords you want to include in your ad, it’s time to write your first PPC ad. AdWords has a strict character limit. You get 25 keywords for your headline, 35 each for the next two lines of text, and then your URL. This means it’s time to get creative. You want a headline that captures attention and hopefully promises a benefit and then two sentences that inspire curiosity, evoke emotion, and motivate clicks through to your website.

Each PPC ad you create will be optimized for keywords and should thus send readers to a relevant web page. If, for example, you have a PPC ad selling a dog training eBook and people who click through land on a page that sells dog care information you’re not going to have the same conversion rate as if you sent them directly to a sales page for that dog training eBook.

Once your ad is written, the rest is easy. Simply log onto or create your Google AdWords account and follow the steps. Set your budget low, you can always adjust it, create your ad, enter your billing information and you’re good to go. Oh, one final thing. Track the success of your PPC ads. You can fine tune them for optimal results, delete them and start over or add to your campaign.

Twitter has become not only a great site for connecting with people around the world, it’s become a favorite tool of internet marketers because:

• They can offer tidbits of valuable information to a huge audience.
• They can connect with prospects and customers on a personal level
• They can glean market and industry information from tweets

The trick is to know if your tweets are having a direct effect on your profits. The trick, is to track your tweets. Fortunately, because developers know how important Twitter is to marketers, they’ve developed several tools to track tweets. Here are just a few ways to track your tweets:

#1 A standard calendar and an analytics program. The most basic way to track tweets is to record when and what you tweet on a calendar. You can of course use a print calendar however, you can also track them on a calendar like Outlook or Google. Once a week, compare your tweets to your analytics data to see which tweets generated traffic. This way you can determine to a reasonable degree, which tweets make the biggest impact and what days or times of the day are more effective. You can also link to unique web pages in your tweets to make sure you’re evaluating the right information.

#2 Twistory – Puts your twitter feed into a calendar so you can see your twitter history. It essentially automates what you’re doing in #1.

#3 TweetEffect tracks what tweets gain followers for you and what tweets essentially cost you followers.

#4 Tweetie is an iPhone application that lets you track your tweets. You can view and respond to the tweets you follow, post your own tweets, and search for tweets by keyword just like you would from your computer only better because you can do it on the go.

#5 Twitoaster is a service that monitors twitter conversations. It works by simply aggregating the conversations and publishing relevant statistics.

#6 Viralheat. Viralheat is a paid service with membership levels based on your needs. Starting at $9.99 a month,“Viralheat allows you to monitor, analyze and glean insights at blazing speeds.”

#7 Of course there are dozens of other twitter tracking services including sites like TweetLater and HootSuite that let you schedule posts and track mentions and followers.

Finding the service or software that’s right for you may take a little trial and error. Of course, if you’re looking to simply track your tweets and the positive effect they have on your business, the five mentioned above are a good place to start.

So you have a list of subscribers and now it’s time to launch your newsletter. Your goal…to make money, right? How do you accomplish that with a newsletter? Here are five ways to create a moneymaking newsletter.

1. Sell ad space. In addition to selling advertisement space on your website, you can sell ad space on your newsletter. In fact, if you have a high circulation, lots of subscribers, then many businesses will likely be more interested in buying ad space in your newsletter than on your website.

Why? Because they can match their ad to fit your content rather than placing a banner ad on a site and hoping for the best. If, for example, you’re featuring a newsletter with the top 25 best hotels for dogs, then hotels for dogs can buy ad space in that newsletter and find the perfect audience.

2. Fill in the gaps in ad space with your own affiliate ads. Even if you’re not an affiliate marketer by trade, you can promote a few relevant products and fill your empty ad space with affiliate ads. This way you have the opportunity to earn a commission on a sale until someone purchases that ad space.

3. Speaking of affiliate marketing, your newsletter is a great place to write product or service reviews for companies you promote. And of course inserting a few carefully placed affiliate links will earn click-throughs and commissions.

4. Promote and sell your own products. Tread lightly here. You can use your newsletter to promote your own products or services; however, the general rule of thumb for newsletter content is 80% informative content and 20% promotion. If your newsletter looks like a walking billboard, it’s going to turn off readers and subscribers.

5. Increase your subscribers. The more subscribers you have, the more money you’ll be able to make from your newsletter. Each of the above methods works better with more subscribers. Advertisers will pay top dollar to gain a placement in a newsletter that reaches thousands of people in their target audience.

You’ll get more money in commissions on those affiliate ads and click-throughs, and of course when you do promote your own products and services, you’ll be marketing to a larger audience.

When creating your moneymaking newsletter, there are a few things to keep in mind. The first is to make sure you’re sending out a quality, informative, and hopefully entertaining newsletter that people look forward to, open, read and forward to friends and associates.

It’s also important to choose an editorial schedule and stick to it. If you say you’re going to publish weekly, then that is what you need to do. This means it’s important to be realistic about your time before you commit.

Finally, do what you can to test and track open rates. For whatever reason, your audience may be much more inclined to open your newsletter at 9:00 on a Monday morning than they are at 9:30 on a Wednesday morning. This information is important to know.

Creating a moneymaking newsletter isn’t difficult, but like anything that’s worthwhile, it takes careful planning, dedication and the willingness to adapt and grow when circumstances require it. To your success!

Website traffic is good; in fact for many business owners, driving traffic to their website is their primary business-building traffic. And while traffic may be all well and good, what you really want is targeted website traffic. You want the people visiting your website to be potential prospects. You want them to be future customers, not tire kickers or looky loos.

Here are seven effective strategies to guarantee targeted website traffic.

#1 PPC ads. Of course, not all PPC ad campaigns generate targeted traffic. You have to study your prospects and design keyword-specific ads that send traffic to a web page related to the ad. For a website about dog training where they have to dig to find your potty training information, you’re not sending the right kind of targeted website traffic to the right place. Send them directly to your potty training product page.

#2 Classified advertisements. Use the same advice and strategy as with PPC ads above.

#3 A squeeze page, opt-in list and targeted email messages. A squeeze page is essentially a way to capture the email addresses of people who are actually interested in receiving your information. True, they may be after your giveaway but that’s okay – they’re still a qualified prospect. Once you have their email address, you can begin sending them informative, entertaining and slightly promotional messages, all of which are designed to send them directly to your website – targeted website traffic.

#4 Article marketing. Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate targeted website traffic. When you publish quality content, and it gets published online on article directories and republished on other websites, you’re reaching a wider audience. The link(s) in your article and in your bio box can all send targeted traffic right back to your website. The more articles you publish, the more targeted traffic you generate. It’s a simple equation.

#5 Blog and guest blog. Use the same advice and strategy as with article marketing above.

#6 Social networking. Social networking can send tons of traffic to your website simply because people are curious about you and your business. However, if you’re strategic about your social networking strategy you will occasionally include links to your website with attention-grabbing posts or headlines. The result: targeted traffic.

#7 Comment on blogs and forums. On most forums and blogs when you participate and comment you can post a link to your website in your signature. This does generate curious folks who just want to know “who said that?!” However, when you participate in forums and blogs that are relevant to your website and industry niche, you’re sending targeted traffic to your website.

You can also try unique approaches like posting reviews on websites and directories for products related to your industry and include a link to your website in your review profile, for example reviewing on Amazon.com. You can post answers on Yahoo! Answers and you can post videos or Podcasts on directories and drive traffic to your site much like you would with article marketing.

There are a number of creative ways to drive targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic is where the money is. Analyze your traffic-generating strategies and tactics to ensure you’re sending the right kind of traffic to your website.