ads on your website

[curtismchale]

Yeah even on my consultancy site if I talk about a book and link to it there is an affiliate link. If I sold the book personally I would link to the copy I sold.

[HacknStuff]

I have ads on my music blog. All are affiliate programs, some are for event tickets, some iTunes links if I review or promote a new release, and one or two for another of my sites in the same niche.
I don't have any ads within posts or even worse at the begining of a post, before the content, I think that's annoying, but I can understand why people do it, although, some of the links on my blog for additional information, downloads, or tickets are affiliate links.

[Jeffro]

I've had a number of people tell me they would love more exposure and would buy the ad spot if I put a display banner before or within the content. I'm never going to do that because not only does it look ridiculous, but it might confuse people thinking the image is just relevant to the post content or most times, irrelevant.

[Otto]

I do Google and Amazon ads on my site. I implemented them mainly to learn how to do it. A lot of stuff I do on my site falls under the learning experience category. :)

I've never made actual money from the Google ads.

I make quite a bit from the Amazon ones, in the $80 a month range. Not something I can live on, admittedly, but it pays for site hosting and a couple of days of beer. :)

[andrea_r]

I made like a single digit amount from google ads. which will take forever to get sent to me. Or, likely, just not get sent.

$80 / month from amazon would keep me very happy in books. :D

[Otto]

I made like a single digit amount from google ads. which will take forever to get sent to me. Or, likely, just not get sent.

$80 / month from amazon would keep me very happy in books. :D

Yeah, Amazon pays pretty good. Definitely worth being in their affiliate program. You make roughly 6% on most items sold.

Checking through sales records, for example, I see that somebody bought the Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series [Blu-ray] through an automatic link on my site. I made $11.13 from that. Pretty cool for just putting an automatic ad box up.

One thing I don't like though is that payments trail behind sales for 2-3 months, to allow for returned items. So, for example, this month I got paid $95, for the sales actually made in December. That's actually way low, last December I made $210.

Also, they're really late in sending out 1099's. I like to have my tax returns done early, but waiting on them makes that difficult.

A friend of mine makes Amazon storefront type sites, each customized to a specific theme. He pulls in a bit under a thousand a month on that, with 40-ish sites so far.

[andreasnrb]

If you really want to make money don't go with Amazon. You need volumes there.
Try to find very targeted affiliate offers with higher % payouts and low thresholds for purchasing. Also look for offers with recurring payouts. That is people pay a fee every month and you get a % of that.
If you go with more than one offer (which you should) also use a offer switcher so you can see which offers gets most clicks and most payouts on the same amount of pageviews. Showing multiple offers can cause many curiosity clicks.

Jeff should really become an affiliate for some of the products that advertise on his site instead. He would probably get more money then.

[Martin]

I have two 60x468 banner ads on my site on the blog section.

My site uses a Solostream Theme called WP-Launch which was given to me by the Solostream team, so it's a appreciation thing, plus I love their themes and help out on their support forums.

The other banner ad I have is for Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms is used throughout a few pages on my site for support tickets, contact etc.

The only ads I will ever use on my sites is for products/stuff that I have actually used and have been happy with. I will not advertise something I dislike or never tried.

[andrea_r]

This thread is probably a really good example of how it depends on the site you have. :D What works? Trying out different things.

Even in the past, other ads networks I've used that once paid out really well dried up over time.