photo by j0nn

For many bloggers and website owners, finding a method to monetize their sites in the beginning can be a challenge.

Low traffic means commonly used ‘Pay per Click’ adverts like AdSense can give poor or no earning potential. Another possibility is payment for a 1000 displays, again this can be difficult to achieve or gives a poor reward.

But there are alternatives, how about monthly payments for a space on your blog/website? You might be thinking I’m talking about trying to obtain private adverts. But no, there are companies willing to buy space on your blog/website for a fixed price and no conditions on volume of traffic. What?! Yeah exactly what I thought, I’m not sure where the logic is or how to explain why they would be interested.

You maybe aware of my use of Money4Banners, who offer £10 to each new publisher who signs up and £5 per domain for the placement of three 468*60 banners. You may sign up as many domains as you like. The catch, well ‘get rich quick sites’ are not allowed, for some reason MMS falls into that category. Not sure the word ‘quick’ applies here! Otherwise I have had generally no problems, I have used some of my other sites instead. Payment is by PayPal.

A new service I have tried over the last month is matched.co.uk, who offer £5 to each new publisher who signs up and £3 per advert, up to 5 per domain and up to 5 domains. So the potential for £75 per month. The adverts range in size but I suspect the most usable is the 125*125 advert, which appears in the sidebar of this blog. The catch, adverts are matched to your page (hence there name), but if an advert can not be matched you will not earn anything from that page. For example I have 7/10 for 2 domains which earned me £21 last month. Also one further drawback. Payment is for the first whole months worth of display from the 15th. So if your ads are allocated after the 15th, you wont earn anything for that period up to the next 15th. Which was rather disappointingly. But I found the service good, I only started once PayPal was in use, previously a UK bank account was needed. Which didn’t encourage me to try it.

So if you have some free unused space why not give them a go.

Best of luck,

Martyn

P.S. I will write a post in the next week on how I and how you can serve matched.co.uk ads effectively using a self hosted wordpress blog.