A lot of people running content sites think the only revenue options are Adsense or affiliate programs. Although both can do a great job in monetising content, if you’re looking to truly round out your revenue streams you really should be looking at paid search feeds as well.

An example of a paid search feed is shown in the screen shot here. This is from one of our sites. A user has gone to the site and done a web search for the term “wine rack”. As you can see 10 results have been returned, just like if you’d done a search on Google, Yahoo or MSN.

These results are actually provided via XML from Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) and are paid results backfilled where necessary with organic results.

They work much in the same way as Adsense for Search, however are much more powerful in a number of ways. Some of these are:

• Since they are delivered via XML they can be customised to fit in with the look and feel of your site exactly, as seen in this example.
• You can see up your own additional tracking on the serve URLs to track multiple variables, such as keyword/key phrase searched and clicked on, position on that click, as well as a myriad of bits of information about the user. At it’s simplest this can be done through a free tool such as Google Analytics by tagging the paid URLs as outbound links using javascript.
• As well as searches done via search boxes, you can hardcode links to particular searches on the site with many providers. If you go to www.interwine.co.uk you can see some of these “featured” links on the Top 10 box on the right. These link directly to paid results that are particularly relevant or useful for your visitors.
• You can use a feed to show “Sponsored Results” at the top of your own site search. If you go to InterWine.co.uk and do a site search, you will see a Sponsored Results box above the internal search results.
• Unlike Adsense you can choose to open results in a new window, leaving your site in the background for when they finish with the advertisers site.

I’ll take in details about some of the larger providers such as YSM in future posts as well as information about getting a feed. If you’re a large content provider and you’re only relying on Adsense and/or Adsense for Search for your revenue streams, you may well be missing out on a very valuable source of extra income.

In this third part I’ll be addressing some of the most frequent questions about monetisation and revenue generation on the Inter Sites.

Q. Do the Inter Sites make money?

A. Yes of course! Although we try and make advertising as unobtrusive as possible (no popups, popunders, overlays etc) the Inter Sites is a commercial network and makes money via advertising.

Q. How do you make money?

A. In a number of different ways, largely via contextual advertising, search feeds, display advertising, affiliate sales and site sponsorship.

Q. Which companies do you recommend for advertising?

A. This would largely depend on what kind of site you have and it’s audience. To give you an example we currently use Google Adsense as our contextual provider, Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) and Search123 for our search feeds and AdJug and Adviva as backfill for display advertising. We use a variety of affiliate networks such as Affiliate Future, Affilinet and Buy.at on different sites. I’ll talk about each of these in more detail in later posts.

Q. How much money do you make a day/month/year?

A. LOL, nice try but obviously no way I’d reveal that. I have no desire to go down that road of sounding like I’m boasting.

Q. I would like to advertise my **** site on  your network.

A. We’re always happy to look at new potential advertisers depending on the site. Contact me via the contact page and I’ll see what we can do.