We’ve previously seen some of the changes that could happen in the world of online marketing in the year 2012. While it’s good to know about what will be new in online marketing, it’s even better to know how you can apply this in a more practical context, as in your own online marketing efforts. If you want to establish some better online marketing habits for this year, there are certain things that you should do. Of course, not all of these tips will apply to you as some might be specific to local businesses, e-commerce websites or affiliate websites. What you should do is to think about what will make sense in your own situation and how you can integrate it within your business. Of course, you should also develop your own methods, strategies and ideas if you’ve resolved to have better success with internet marketing during 2012.

• Establish a Plan

This is how you should start, no matter how simple your goals are. There’s no need to buy $1000 software that creates fancy graphs and flowcharts either. A simple plan drawn up with a pen and paper is sufficient. List your goals, as well as the methods that you intend to use in order to achieve them. Also, list some backup options or side goals that you would want to use if your main objectives don’t work out for whatever reason, or have already been achieved and you would like to do something more.

• Keep Track of Changes in the Online World

Anyone that does online marketing, whether as a primary occupation, a side job, a hobby or as an alternate to other means of marketing (print, radio ads, etc) should stay on top of the new things in the online world. This is because you could find some opportunities to take advantage of that you otherwise wouldn’t have even known existed! By reading online marketing related blogs, forums and news sites you can see if there’s something that could be useful for you, such as a new advertising network which has a unique business concept, an up and coming social networking site that is starting to grow, etc.

• Cut Costs Whenever You Can

Now this doesn’t mean that you should go for whatever is cheapest without regard to quality, but there are many ways that you can cut your business expenses online. For example, if you’re using a web host that charges you $25 a month for just 1 website and domain, you could find other hosting companies that can provide you with unlimited website hosting for just $5 a month and still be of high quality. The bottom line is that you need to look at the services that you’re using or are planning to use. Think about whether it would be possible to get the same functionality and quality for a less expensive price. This can be done by contacting your existing partners and providers to negotiate better rates, or comparing other companies online to see if they have something that would be right for your business.

As a website owner you have definitely heard of many different ways to monetize your site and its content. Some ways include running ads for affiliate products, CPA offers, or publishing pay per click ads. The latter is very popular with a lot of webmasters as it doesn’t actually require you to sell or promote anything. You get paid simply for users clicking on the ads and won’t have to worry about whether the click will convert on the advertisers side.

Any webmaster has probably already heard of using Google Adsense to monetize their site. Sure, they are the most commonly heard of name in the pay per click publishing industry, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t have any competition. Many other advertising networks are in operation right now and other competitors are sprouting up on a regular basis.

One advertising network that has proven to be reliable and innovative is Chitika. Generally speaking, they operate in a way that is similar to Adwords and the majority of advertising networks out there: you publish ads on your site and get paid every time a visitor clicks on them. But they also have a unique delivery option called Chitika Premium. It uses a concept called “behavioral targeting”, which means showing ads to visitors based on things that they are interesting in. This is accomplished by their service seeing which search terms visitors have used in order to locate your website or blog. Then, this keyword is displayed to the user, in addition to relevant ads specially targeted to that keyword. So if the user typed in the keyword “hotels”, they would see “Are you looking for hotels?” in the ad box, together with ads that would best fit this keyword. One small drawback of the premium service is that it only works for traffic that comes from search engines and is coming from the United States or Canada. If you have other types of traffic to your site, or international traffic, don’t worry though. Chitika will still display “regular” ads to these users, so you won’t lose out.

Payments are made on a NET 30 basis, which means that, for example, earnings that you have accumulated for the month of March will be paid at the end of the month of April. This is pretty much standard procedure among pay per click advertising networks and most CPA networks. One advantage of dealing with Chitika is that they support payment by PayPal. You just need to have earned over $10 for the month in question. You can also opt to receive payment by check, however in that case you would need to have earned a minimum amount of $50 in your Chitika account.

If you have a lot of search traffic that is coming from the US or Canada, then Chitika offers you a good way to get better CTR on your ads and it is definitely something worth trying.

Sometimes, publishing pay per click ads on your website or blog is a very good way to monetize your site. It has the obvious advantage that you simply get paid to send traffic to advertisers. Unlike with CPA or affiliate offers, there is no need to worry about whether the click converts or how many sales you will get. Of course, it is a known fact that Adsense is the leader for publishers who want to put PPC ads on their site or blog. But there are other companies out there, some big ones and some smaller ones too, which function pretty much the same way.

Teaming up with a network other than Adsense to publish PPC ads can be very rewarding, but you need to choose that network wisely. After all, you are doing this to earn money from your site, so it is important that you sign up for a quality network that will be honest and fair, in addition to allowing you to earn a decent amount of money.

One alternative to Adsense is called Bidvertiser. They are a smaller advertising network that is growing in popularity and their ads are seen millions of times each day.

One of their main advantages is that they offer more flexibility in terms of payment options. You can choose to either get paid by check or by Paypal. If you select Paypal as a payment option, the minimum payout amount is only $10. If you would rather be paid by check, then it is $50. The Paypal payment option makes it more convenient for webmasters who are outside of North America to get their payment. Payments are done on a NET 30 basis, which means that you get paid 30 days after the end of the month during which you earned money. This means that earnings made during the month of April will be processed at the beginning of the month of June.

You can select from many templates of ads that you want to run on your site. These templates include skyscrapers, banners, inline ads, etc. All of this makes it easy for you to better integrate the ads in the content of your site. The amount that you will get for each click will vary. However, you have the option of selecting a minimum bid amount with regards to the ads that you want to display on your site. So, let’s say you don’t want to show advertisers who have bid less than $0.30 per click. You may select this in your account settings after you sign up.

The only drawback is that since the network is not as popular as Adsense, the amount that you earn per click will typically be less than what you would get with Adsense. However, Bidvertiser is growing in popularity and can be a very profitable option if your site has a decent amount of traffic.

If you are a webmaster interested in publishing pay per click ads on your site, its obvious that you have already heard of Adsense. Sure, they are the most popular name around and have the largest share of the market, but this doesn’t mean everyone wants to use them. Some people have been previously banned by Adsense. Some have had their site rejected by them. And certain webmasters simply don’t want to deal with them for whatever reasons.

But there are of course, certain alternatives that you can use. One of them is called AdBrite. Basically, it is a smaller advertising network that offers you some interesting features that you would not find in Adwords.

First, you are free to determine the type of ads that you want to publish on your site. You can choose from intersitials (full page ads), cost per mille impressions (CPM) banners, cost per click (CPC) banners, CPC text & banners (content ads), CPC text inline (ads are targeted towards the keywords on your page), as well as video ads.

You also get a lot more control as to which ads are displayed on your site. You can select them to be shown automatically, that way advertisers can choose to run their ad based on the topic of your site and it will automatically be accepted. You can also select to have more control and approve ads on your site manually.

Of course, if you are publishing ads, you will be interested in knowing how much you will get paid depending on which types of ads to show. While some other networks could have only pay per click (PPC) ads available, with AdBrite there are various pricing options. You can either sell ad space for a fixed period of time, such as a day, a week or a month. This is recommended if you have an established site that receives a lot of traffic. You can also sell ads on a CPM or CPC basis as well.

There are a few drawbacks to using AdBrite, however. Most of the room for improvement with their network lies in the way that payments to webmasters are handled. Payments to publishers are issued on a Net 60 basis, which means that they mature 60 days after the end of the payment period. Therefore, earnings for the month of December will be sent out at the beginning of the month of March. This could be an inconvenience to some, as you will have to wait a longer time before receiving your earnings than on other networks, which usually are on a Net 30 basis.

Also, payments are only issued by check in US Dollars. This is fine for those in the US and Canada, but those in foreign countries may find that cashing a US check could take a few weeks to clear and certain banks charge service fees in order to cash a check from the USA. However, AdBrite says that they will be introducing other payment methods in the future.

If you have a blog or a website and are looking for a way to make money from it then i recommend joining upto Googles partnership program called Google Adsense.  Google adsense is a partnership opportunity that you will allow Google to show their adverts on your website and whenever a customer of yours clicks on their adverts you earn a commission instantly

The commission you earn depends on your content, some adverts can earn you upto $5 and some 0.20c depending on how much the advertiser has paid Google.  Google then spilts the revenue with you for placing the add on your website.  From the advertisers point of view this is called PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising via the Google Adwords network.

The great thing about Google adsense adverts is that you can easily intregrate them into your website or blog either as text or banners.  You can change the look and colour of the text to match your content which makes your reader want to click on the adverts as they will think they are part of your website so you earn commission very easily.

There is a very good plugin for wordpress that you can upload and activate and allow Google adsense to show up in your articles on pages.  Just run a search on Google for the plugin.  Installation is very easy.