The model is very simple:
- Visitor lands on your website
- The visitor browses your site, and some portion will notice and click on the advertisement
- For every click you get paid
Hence, if 1% of your visitors click on an ad, and you earn $0.10 per click, it takes 10 clicks (1000 visitors) to earn $1.
It's generally very simple to add advertising to your website with any of these services.
- Sign up with the service
- Register the website on which you want to run advertising
- Create one or more advertising units
- For each, the service will give you an HTML snippet. The website platform you use will offer a method to put stuff in the sidebars, so simply paste the HTML snippet into a sidebar widget.
- Sit back and watch the money roll in. Supposedly.
Bidvertiser
Bidvertiser is a free PPC advertising system. It's easy to join, and once you join it's easy to sign up new websites with the service. Adding new advertising blocks is a curious system where you "Add New BidVertiser Center" then configure that Center before you can get the ad code. The choices of ad unit sizes is limited.
I installed this service to try it out - and found it doing things I don't like, such as making popunder windows. Google put up a warning that this site had malware - while I don't know if Google thought Bidvertiser was the malware, I've since removed it. Hence - study this program carefully before signing up
Chitika
Chitika is one of the oldest alternatives to Google Adsense. It's free for anybody to sign up, and the system is simple/straightforward to use. You don't get lost in a dizzying array of advertising unit types, for example.
Clicksor
Clicksor is an advertising network that's a good alternative to Adsense. It's free for anybody to sign up, and the system is simple/straightforward to use. You can add as many sites as you like to their network. Once you've added a site, you create ad blocks, configure each, and they give you an HTML snippet to paste into your site.
Among the styles of advertising available through Clicksor is full page adverts like popunders and interstitials. A Popunder is when the site creates a background window that you'll find sometime later and wonder where it came from. I very much dislike popunders. Fortunately you don't have to use the code which creates popunders. Interstitials are where a full screen advert pops up in front of your viewer, blocking your content. These are less egregious and I have fewer considerations about interstitials. However, interstitials are implemented using the same code which creates the popunders and it's not clear whether you can get interstitials without getting popunders.
Basically - to create an ad unit you click on the "Get Code" link, and fiddle around with the dialog box that appears. The box has multiple tabs - Full Screen Ads - In Page Banners - Layer Banners - Text Link Ads. It's the Full Screen Ads that offers the popunders and interstitials. The In Page Banners are the traditional sort of banner advert that we know from everywhere. I'm not sure what a Layer Banner is. A Text Link Ad of course scans for text with useful keywords on which to put a link.
Google Adsense
Google Adsense is the grand-daddy of PPC Advertising services. Highly recommended. It's free for anybody to sign up. They have a list of requirements you must follow, or else your account will be canned.
Infolinks
Infolinks is a text-link advertising system that inserts links into your content.
Kontera (Amobee)
Kontera is a text-link advertising system that inserts links into your content. It's free to sign up. You'll be instructed to paste some HTML code into your site just before the closing BODY tag. When active, it selects phrases on which to insert links. You get paid when visitors click on the links.
Skimlinks
Skimlinks is meant for discussion forum sites. It has two methods for monetizing your content. One is to rewrite links which can be exploited by an affiliate program. The other is to look for key phrases in your content which could serve as the base of an affiliate link. They maintain memberships in 17,000+ affiliate programs making it highly likely a random link to a vendor offering an affiliate program will be monetized by Skimlinks.
Hence, a visitor clicking on a monetized link arrives at the affiliate site with an affiliate code associated with Skimlinks. If that visitor makes a purchase, Skimlinks gets the affiliate fee, and passes a portion of that fee to you.
The reason its best for forum sites is that your users will be posting links, that can then be monetized with affiliate codes.
VigLink
VigLink is almost identical to Skimlinks. VigLink offers the same two abilities - scan for affiliatizable links - scan for text that works as an affiliate link.