Depending on the type of website you run, you may at some point have to include advertising on your site as part of your income stream.

In many cases, online advertising follows a formula that visitors have become very used to and therefore have adapted to effortlessly screening them out of their view.

If you are in the position to have a direct relationship with your advertisers, as is often the case with some small web site owners, see this as an opportunity to provide advertising that steps out of the mould and is interesting in its own right. Small adverts created specifically for your site or a small set of web sites are likely to be highly relevant and catch your visitor’s eye creating a win-win scenario for all parties.

Ad Manager is a free service provided by Google that lets you manage advertising on your web site or entire range of web sites. It first appeared in March 2008 after Google acquired the DoubleClick.

Ad Manager can be used on any size of web site with and volume of traffic. A web site owner decides which ad slots are available on their site and the size of these ads placements. (more…)

Pre-roll refers to a short section of video shown before the main video. It is typically 5 to 15 seconds long.

This isn't a new term, but because of the increase in the use of video on websites, it is now more commonly heard in web design circles.

A  still image that remains at the end of an online video is oftem called a leave-behind banner.

Many web sites and blogs carry advertising. Advertising brokers such as Google's AdSense make it easy for anyone who runs a web site to add advertising to their web site without having to build individual relationships with advertisers.

The advertising is known as contextual because a small piece of code is placed on each page of the web site and whenever the page is shown, advertisements which are relevant to the content of the page are displayed. This is seemingly magical process is achieved by the advertising broker using software to analyse the subject matter of a page and match up a relevant advertisement.

Web site owners that display the advertisements usually earn money when a visitor to the web site clicks on one of the advertiements and is taken through to the advertisers web site. Other advertising brokers may pay web site owners based on the number of times the advertisement is viewed.

AdSense is an advertising system provided by Google that enables web site owners to easily display advertisements on their web site.

Once the website owner has signed up for an AdSense account they copy and paste some code into their web pages and advertisements appear each time a visitor comes to their web site.

The web site owner does not need to build relationships with advertisers as advertisements are automatically displayed based on the content of the web page.

The web site owner earns money each time a visitor clicks on one of the advertisements to visit the advertisers web site.

AdSense is a very easy to set up and low maintenance means of generating income from a website.