Chewing Pencils

While your website is a showcase for your work and a main point of contact for potential clients, it can also generate some additional income for you in the form of advertising. You might have noticed that over the life time of Chewing Pencils I have experimented with a number of different advertisers, with varying levels of success. The terms and conditions of the advertising programs state that I am not allowed to divulge how much I earn through the advertising, but I can say that it more than pays for my domain registration, web hosting and internet access with a bit of spending money left over. I’ll never make a living out of it, but it’s a nice earner on the side.

Some people tend to find advertising on your site plain annoying, particularly if it is obtrusive and makes the main content difficult to find. That’s why it is important to make your advertising ‘blend’ in and appear to be integrated into everything else.

Some people worry that context sensitive advertising, or ads that relate to what your site is about, may send potential paying clients in the direction of other cartoonists. There is potential for this to occur, but if your style is not what a publisher is after, they are going to leave your site anyway – why not make a little money out of them when they click on one of your ads?!

There are new forms of advertising appearing all the time, but at the moment, there appears to be three main forms:

Pay Per Click - This is where you a paid every time somebody simply clicks on one of the ads displayed on your site

Affiliate Programs – This is where you advertise somebody else’s product and get a commission for everybody that signs up as a result of the add on your site.

Paid Advertising – Somebody pays you to display and advert on your site.

Generally advertising will only work if you have decent amounts of traffic heading your way, so you’ll need to be working on increasing your exposure as well as experimenting with advertising programs.

Here are some affiliate links to the programs that I have found most effective:

Google Adsense is a well known and well used advertiser that has numerous options for displaying ads on your site. Click on the button to the right for info.

Chikita is a product based advertiser. Click here to sign up.

Text Link Ads sell advertising space on your site. Sign up here.

They all have some fairly rigourous terms and conditions, so do your homework properly. Use the advice given by the pro’s and then sit back and see what happens!