It’s been a busy week here at Perry Internet Consulting.  In addition to the website getting an updated look I also installed a new ad server for my other sites.

As you may know, I publish three literary websites.  One site is on Charles Dickens.  Another website features Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Last but not least is LitQuotes.  That site has quotes from literature and gets thousands of visitors every day.

I earn “passive” income from these websites.  I put the term in quotes because there’s really nothing passive about it.  If the sites aren’t constantly updated then visitors won’t come.  If there are no visitors then there will be no income.  Even if the site is updated there are still income streams to examine and manage.  Am I making money from my Amazon.com aStore?  How are the CafePress sales doing?  And how are the ad networks performing?

I work with two advertising networks or agencies.  These companies match website publishers with companies who want to put ads on websites.  The advertisers, companies like Macy’s, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and others, pay to have their ads on websites.  The advertising agencies take a percentage of that money for their services and the publisher gets the rest.

However there isn’t a direct correlation between the the amount of spaces for ads that website publishers have and the ads that the agencies provide.  For a number of reasons that I won’t go into here there are always more spaces for ads.  That’s why I have two ad agencies.  My website is coded to ask Agency Number One for an ad.  If they can’t provide one then I ask Agency Number Two.  If they don’t have an ad then I go to ads on my ad server. (Did you wonder if I was EVER going to get back to the point of this post?)

My ad server software provides ads when the ad agencies can’t.  I’ve added ads for Amazon.com as well as products at my CafePress store.  My old ad server software hadn’t been updated in years.  It was so old that it was no longer being made.  That’s a SURE sign that it’s time to upgrade!

The software that I installed this week is called OpenX.   The software:

• Provides ads for all of my websites
• Stores loads of different ads
• Provides statistics showing the number of clicks that each ad type receives
• It can even be used to display direct ad sales.  These would be ad placements that don’t involve an advertising agency.

Whew!  It’s been quite a week.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to run reports with my OpenX software.  Those Amazon sales were looking fairly anemic.  Maybe I need to make more CafePress ads.  Hmmmm . . . .

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 6:29 pm and is filed under About Us, Making Money on the Internet, Recommended Products/Companies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.