I believe that gearing your website exclusively around one advertiser, for most it’s Google Adsense, is a huge mistake. Diversification into multiple types of ad systems is the best way to go for most websites. As the saying goes, do not put all your eggs in one basket. The same is true for website advertising.

One reason why you don’t want to rely on one advertiser, is what will you do if you are banned or the ad network goes belly up? Let’s say your site is exclusively Google adsense. Your making a lot of money and feeling real good. You are ready to retire from your old 9-5 and become a career blogger. And then it happens…. you get the e-mail saying you been banned from Google Adsense for “invalid clicks”. Google bans users for click fraud all the time, even if it isn’t you who did it. All Google has to do is suspect you are the one doing the click fraud(with no proof) and you are banned for life.

If you use multiple ad streams on your site, it will increase the chance that a visitor to your website will attracted to one of your ads. A visitor might not be interested in paying attention to a banner affiliate ad on your blog, but a Adsense ad blended in the content they are reading, might catch their eye and they click on it. When writing a review of a product put a affiliate link inside it. A user might click on your affiliate link, where otherwise they wouldn’t have clicked on any ads on your site. If you sell text link ads, you can sneak in a few more ads and make good money without cluttering your website. Sponsored posts is another great way to get even more money earned on a blog.

I consider these major categories for different types of advertising on a website. Preferably your website should contain at least 2 of the 3 categories of advertising for diversification purposes.

1) Direct advertising: This is where someone purchases a text link ad or banner ad or pays you to write a sponsored post on your blog about their product. These can be very profitable. Advertisers are hard to find that are willing to do this, unless you go through a advertiser pool rich network like Text Link Ads or a sponsored post network like SponsoredReviews.com

2)Pay per click: The most common Pay per click advertising used by publishers are Google adsense. Many use Google adsense as their only source of income because they don’t know how to monetize their site better. I highly recommend in addition to adsense you use another network called Exitjunction.com that shows pay per click ads ONLY after a visitor leaves your site via the back button after landing on your site from the search engine. This is a great way to boost your income from visitors who normally would just leave your site without clicking ads. Sign up to Exit Junction

3) Affiliate: Affiliate banners or text links that pay you per sale through that link. These may or may not be more profitable then PPC network, depending on the ad and your website. Some just put them as banner ads on their site, others write reviews and put the affiliate link inside the review. The trick is to find affiliate programs that you believe are good and will target specifically your web traffic.

How to set it up:

Every site is going to have a balance of what types of advertising work best for it. As an example for this site Dollars blog, I find that a variety of types of advertising all work well. I could put up affiliate ads, do sponsored posts through SponsoredReviews.com, sell text link ads through a text link ad broker like Text Link Ads, and then Adsense. If you don’t have a blog, you can make good money without the sponsored posts and with just Adsense, affiliate banners, and text link ad brokers.