AD TECH INSIGHTS
Posted on Jan 2, 2024

Make Money Posting Ads With SmartHub’s Tips

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In this article, we will talk about the main type of monetization for website owners in e-commerce — advertising. We aim to explain how to make money selling ads in detail and consider all the possible nuances. 

The primary ads type we will discuss is programmatic advertising. When sales happen automatically in a split second, each website visitor sees their unique ads. This way, users get an improved experience of interacting with the resource. This is the option where you make money posting ads to benefit users and earn money from your website with a high optimization level, positively affecting reputation and revenues.  

We will also focus on sponsored and affiliate promotions. These are also ad strategies with potential high profits. At the same time, the red thread of the story will be tips from the SmartHub marketing team on how to get paid to advertise. Advice gained through experience and heartwarming deposits to the account.

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Understanding the Basics

We should take a few minutes to study the programmatic ads framework and determine how to make money selling ads on your website through a specific platform. And, of course, establish what role SmartHub plays in this process.

Earlier, when we reviewed the programmatic advertising ecosystem without 3rd party data, we provided a simplified framework scheme. Please see the image below.  

As you can see, publishers who own websites, most often online media or blogs, use SSPs to get paid for advertising. After placing their ad slots on SPPs, they only have to connect to the proper ad exchange, set the price, and wait for the revenue. 

SmartHub white-label platform is the ad exchange that profitably monetizes publishers’ efforts. Website owners pay a one-time fee for connecting to the platforms (SSPs, ad exchange) and then pay a percentage from the purchased ad slots. Otherwise, they do not bear additional expenses and only make money with ads, nothing else. All costs are borne by advertisers that operate through DSPs, but we won’t dive deep into this topic.

If you don’t have your own SSP, we can quickly advise you on supply-side integrations on SmartHub.

Key Success Factor Behind Programmatic Advertising

Posting ads to make money effectively, you need to perform two fundamental actions. 

  1. Understand your niche. A specific business environment in which your resource meets a particular demand. 
  2. Understand your target audience. Within the identified business niche, the content on your website attracts specific groups of people. If you run a website about the latest in the automobile industry and want to earn money from your blog, you should assume that your site visitors own cars: this tells you something about their needs, habits, financial status, etc. 

So, the niche and the target audience. You could begin posting ads for money when you have defined them and started building further actions based on this knowledge. However, different advertising models are determined by the type of payment: what exactly the advertiser pays the publisher for. Let’s examine their differences and purposes. 

CPM: Cost Per Mille

This is one of the leading payment types for programmatic, where the advertiser pays for each thousand ad impressions, depending on the resource traffic. 

  • Calculation example: (cost of placement / website traffic) * 1000 = CPM.
  • CPM example = ($150 / 50 000) * 1000 = $3.
  • In this example, on a website with traffic of 50 thousand unique users for the selected period and $150 of placement cost, a CPM is $3.

The CPM model is ideal for beginners who have only started to discover how to make money selling ads online. Impressions may not convert into clicks and purchases, which is natural, but it is the cheapest way to test a particular campaign and draw necessary conclusions for adjusting activity. 

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CPC: Cost Per Click

As the name implies, publishers get payment whenever the user clicks on the ad and visits the landing page with the advertised object. Many beginners may think CPC is more profitable than CPM, but they serve different purposes. 

  1. CPC is usually more expensive than paying for thousands of impressions. 
  2. The CPC model is used mainly in contextual targeting, which not all platforms support. 
  3. Anti-fraud mechanisms that protect advertisers’ money and publishers’ reputations are essential in this model. We advise you to pay close attention to this issue when working with the CPC payment agreement.

It is also worth remembering that an effective CPC model must be finely tuned and calibrated for each company. This means that you are unlikely to achieve the desired results with the initial settings, but over time, with the right approach, you will be successful. 

CPA: Cost Per Action

The last of the basic models is optimal for those who feel confident in the programmatic and have already figured out how to make money posting ads. The main difference between pay-per-action and other advertising payments is a certain degree of trust between the parties, which is determined by the reputation level. 

If you decided to earn money from your blog some time ago and your resource has shown decent results, we recommend switching to the pay-per-action model. Since, in this case, targeting should be even more precise. Beginners in CPA can broadcast ads for a long time without any benefit if they cannot calibrate targeting correctly.

How to Post Ads for Money on Your Blog or Website

We will come back to programmatic advertising in the following sections. Now, consider other options for how to make money with ads. This is a partial list, but enough to get you started. 

Sponsored Posts

It is one of the popular ways to promote products and services in the premium segment. It’s not just when you post ads for money. It’s about investing in highly engaging content to attract visitors’ attention and persuade them to follow the links provided. 

Let’s say you promote ads through slots placed on blog pages. This system is sound, but there are options to make it even better with a sponsored post. Let’s go back to the example of the car website. 

  1. Your PR managers find an interested advertiser, for example, who offers car alarms.
  2. You agree to a sponsored post: who writes it, who approves it, the amount of payment, the period of stay on the website (temporary, permanent), and other points. 
  3. The copywriter creates the post, which is approved and posted on the website. For instance, an article about the importance of protecting cars in the first years after purchase provides statistics on thefts of cars without alarms and cars with alarms. In addition to being useful, the article natively advertises your partner’s service.  
  4. After publication, you get paid: usually, it is a one-time payment. 

Depending on your agreement, a sponsored post may or may not have additional ad slots to maximize revenue. Posting ads for money, you shouldn’t forget that too many ads, even well-targeted ones, can be tiring for users. 

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing works on the same principle as a sponsored promotion. The main difference is the following: 

  • the website owner usually promotes the partner’s product or service not with a single blog post but with a series of posts supported by landing pages;
  • to get paid for advertising, website visitors have to buy a product or order a service from the partner by clicking on an affiliate link from your website, and the reward is a percentage of the transaction amount;
  • this type of interaction between the parties is more long-term and close and often develops into official dealership or similar promotion options.

You can make money posting ads efficiently by combining affiliate marketing with programmatic advertising. At the same time, you should always choose the dominant type of monetization to improve the users’ experience without overwhelming them with offers. 

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Ad Exchange

Programmatic exchanges are the core of the ad tech ecosystem. They connect publishers and advertisers in split seconds, optimizing yield management. Unlike affiliate and sponsored promotion, an ad exchange is a multichannel investment route where website owners earn from individual advertisers and demand aggregators with the most precise targeting and control through filtering.

In one of our articles, we covered the difference between ad networks and the ad exchanges that have replaced them with real-time bidding technology and algorithmic sales. 

Here are the advantages of using an ad exchange over other ways to earn money from your website: 

  • precision targeting thanks to multichannel data integration; 
  • ability to connect any supply and demand partners you want to work with;
  • support for all ad environments and formats;
  • automatic workload optimization;
  • detailed settings for connected channels (custom filters, blacklists, blocked categories, and others).

If you decide to use an ad exchange, the good news is that you may also monetize the platform itself. With SmartHub, you can make money posting ads and increase your income by referring additional publishers to your exchange. Since the platform is deployed under your brand, you could set up the integrations and try referral engagement. The SmartHub team will help you provide such services and scale them. 

Launching your ad exchange is a decisive step towards building a highly optimized advertising business. SmartHub white-label ad exchange can become a core tool for selling ad space on your website and providing referral ad services. You will make money with ads and gradually grow your platform into a passive profit.

If you want to get paid to advertise but have not yet fully understood all the nuances, we invite you to contact us for a consultation, where you will get answers to your questions.  

Make Money Selling Ads with SmartHub’s Pro Strategies

Below, we will give you general tips to help you make money with ads, regardless of the payment type and promotion model you choose. 

Calibrate Ad Slots for Advertisers’ Needs

Our general advice is as follows: strive to improve the advertising experience of users. To achieve this, you should implement ad formats seamlessly integrated into the content and not interfere with the browsing experience. 

You can research the most effective mobile ad formats for your advertising campaign and draw conclusions based on them to develop ad formats on other devices (desktop, in-app, CTV, etc.). At the same time, it is still better to perform mobile-first promotion because today, smartphones are the primary tool for researching websites worldwide. Since the third quarter of 2019, the share of mobile devices in total traffic has been over 50%

Optimize Ad Inventory 

When considering different ways of how to make money selling ads on your website, be sure to pay attention to the option of researching statistics. The better you can evaluate the processes you run and their results, the more accurate adjustments you will be able to make in the future. 

Regularly analyze the results of your campaigns, correlate them with the progress achieved, and implement a policy of “small, regular changes” to improve performance. 

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Keep Smart Pricing Strategies

Our experience shows that, very often, the key element of interaction between the parties at the initial stages is the price alone. When newcomers to programmatic advertising with poor reputations websites try to get high fees straight from the start, this can lead to unsatisfactory performance. 

Therefore, consider starting to make money posting ads with small amounts, gradually exploring this issue, and developing new options for interaction. At the same time, you can promote partner materials and affiliate objects through human-assisted agreements.  

Cultivate Lasting Relationships With Advertisers

In addition to the steps mentioned above, you also need to invest in the security aspects. Posting ads to make money, you take on the responsibility to regularly investigate the quality and safety of the content displayed on your pages.

Make sure you know what security mechanisms are used by the platforms in your sales chain. They should comply with the latest security and privacy standards, such as GDPR, TCF 2.0, CCPA, COPPA, and Sellers.json.

Invest in Quality Content for Your Website

Monetization is significant, and we know how getting decent compensation for your efforts feels. However, we urge you to remember that your website visitors do not come to you because of ads. They come for the content of the pages, so let the development of quality content be the first priority and monetization of user traffic the second.

Regularly compare sales revenue to your blog and content development costs. Discover how marketing officers can help you improve future promotion results. 

How SmartHub Can Skyrocket Your Revenue

During the article, we have repeatedly mentioned that SmartHub can become your reliable partner in monetizing website traffic. We offer white-label technology, which provides businesses with many integrative opportunities to improve yield management. 

You can explore our case studies to verify the positive results and see their precise measurements. 

Of course, an ad exchange is only one element of a programmatic framework, but our experts will help you choose related platforms and customize them to meet your business needs. Before implementation, we will discuss all the components in detail to develop a plan for further steps. 

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Conclusions

There are many ways to make money posting ads, but they all have common features: 

  • a high level of customer focus;
  • the need to constantly improve privacy and security mechanisms; 
  • demand for calibration of settings based on statistical measurements;
  • simultaneous involvement of many parties in media trading;
  • the trend of seamless ad integrations into the customer journey.

Since the SmartHub team’s expertise is in programmatic advertising, we have mainly considered this option in the article. Automated inventory management is the future. Even premium market players have a significant share in automated buying and selling today. And if you decide that it’s time to invest in this area, we are always ready to lend a helping hand. What is beneficial to you is in our immediate interest. We invite you to partner with SmartHub! 

FAQ

Can I choose specific categories for posting ads and target a particular audience?
Yes. For website owners, all customizations come through the supply-side platforms (SSPs). You can make money by posting ads and closely controlling this process: select specific traffic categories and improve targeting of user groups based on available data.
Can I track the performance of my ads and analyze their impact on revenue?
Again, yes. Depending on your chosen platform, you will have some analytics to track the campaigns’ performance. You can get more statistics by customizing the data collection and processing framework if necessary.
What are the key benefits of choosing SmartHub for selling ads and getting paid to advertise?
The SmartHub team will help you make money with ads at every stage. We are interested in helping you to develop your business towards high revenue volumes by efficiently scaling the processes. SmartHub supports all ad formats for traffic monetization, and our account managers are ready to provide advanced consultations on customizing the entire advertising ecosystem.
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