Make Money from Your Website
May.30.2008 
INSTA Host gives it’s customers a helping hand to make money online from advertising by allowing you to easily install an ad server from our CGI script library onto your website. OpenAds is a feature rich advertisement suite allowing webmasters to easily incorporate banner advertisements onto your website with minimal effort.
Below is a helpful guide on ways you can make money from your website through advertising.
Direct Banner Advertising
Graphical banner advertisements tend to be very effective and as a result a great source of revenue. As you will be in complete control of who is advertising, you essentially eliminate the middle-man allowing you to keep 100% of the profits. It’s not as easy as using Advertising Programs such as Google Adsense, who take care of the selling for you, it’s completely down to you to contact potential advertisers and convince them why they should advertise on your website. When approaching advertisers it’s a good idea to present to them reasons why they should advertise on your website. Good traffic statistics, including page views and unique visitors, will help your cause. Try and give as much positive information as you can. It’s also worth adding an “Advertise” link on your website, allowing people to easily enquire about advertising rates, opening up the opportunity to make a sale.
The following is a list of the most popular banner sizes used:
Horizontal:
Leader board: 728 x 90 pixels
Full Banner: 468 x 60 pixels
Half Banner: 234 x 60 pixels
Vertical:
Skyscraper: 120 x 600 pixels
Wide Skyscraper: 160 x 600 pixels
Rectangle:
Standard Rectangle: 180 x 150 pixels
Large Rectangle: 336 x 280 pixels
CPC (Cost-Per-Click) Advertising Programs
There are many CPC advertising programs available on the internet, the most popular is Google Adsense (http://www.google.com/adsense/). Adsense serves advertisements onto your website that are targeted to the content of each page, having relevant ads will result in a higher click-through rate. It’s good practice to have ads that blend into the content of your website as they will appear more natural and increase the chances of visitors clicking them. Google Adsense allows you to customise the ads to your needs – including the size and format, e.g. text, image or video and link colours. Should you get unwanted advertisements appearing on your website, Adsense has a competitive ad filter so you can block certain sites from showing. Adsense is a very easy way to make money from your website as it requires minimal effort to setup and it takes care of displaying relevant advertisements for you.
Affiliate Schemes
You can also make money from your website by joining an affiliate program where you can earn commissions by referring visitors to a website where they perform certain actions, e.g. purchase a product. INSTA Host offers an affiliate program allowing you to earn a 10% commission on all domain and hosting sales that where referred from your website.
OpenAds Support
Should you need any help with your installation of OpenAds please visit the official support site
Support Page:
http://www.openx.org/support
Forum:
http://forum.openx.org/
Which Domain Extension
We are often asked about what domain extensions are available, and there’s actually a lot more of them than you might imagine. Although some have some specific uses, such as .travel for tourism related websites and .biz domains for businesses, the vast majority of domain extensions are country related, such as .uk for the United Kingdom and .ie for Ireland.
In the same way that the countries of the world change over time, so do domain extensions, with Yugoslav (.yu) domains being largely replaced with domain extensions for the newly created countries which were formed from the break-up of Yugoslavia such as .si for Slovenia and the upcoming .me extension for Montenegro. Then there are extensions which are just created as the need arises such as the .eu extension for the European Union which has been live for a few years. A complete list of the domain extensions currently approved by ICANN along with links to the various registry sites is available at:
http://www.norid.no/domeneregistrering/index.en.html
Many domain registries have specific rules on who can register a certain domain and sometimes restrictions on what type of site it must be, or in the case of .mobi domains how the site should be visible to users and on what type of devices. Some registries issue domains rather than allow them to be registered at all such as .mil for US Military websites, and some will only allow the person who wishes to own the domain to register it directly with the registry. Others insist you are a resident of the country involved before you can register a domain with them. In essence, each domain registry is free to make up its own rules and regulations on what can be registered and who can register them.
As you can see that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for us to be able to register some domain extensions, but that does not mean that we cannot host them. Providing customers can register the domain involved themselves and have it placed onto our nameservers, we can host any domain extension with the use of a domain reference on any paid-for hosting account and the nameservers to use are listed in our Support Database.
What is Web 2.0?
We have customers often ask us “can we use Web 2.0 on your system?” so we thought we would put together a post explaining what Web 2.0 is all about.
Web 2.0 is not a specific technology but a term used to describe the modern way in which websites are designed, developed, how the information on the site is used and how the user interacts with it. Many successful Web 2.0 websites share many similarities, one of which is social interaction. Some of the most popular Web 2.0 applications include Flickr, Facebook, Digg and del.icio.us to name a few and are all built around user generated content. Though social interaction is a major part of Web 2.0, it’s not the only defining factor, below is a breakdown of some of the technologies and practices used in today’s Web 2.0 websites and applications.
Design and Coding
Modern websites now tend to be built with standards-compliant code with semantically valid XHTML and HTML mark-up. Websites are styled using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Using a single CSS allows the developer to make site wide design changes very quickly. You will also notice with Web 2.0 sites that the designs share common characteristics including drop shadows, rounded corners and subtle gradients.
Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
Using technologies, such as Ajax, Adobe Flash, Java, Flex etc., allows developers to enhance the user experience on a web page. These powerful technologies can not only improve the usability but also the design and the way the user interacts with the page. Developers can now create an interactive website that is similar to the way a computer application works, e.g. a drag and drop interface or perhaps updating information on a site without having to reload the page.
Social Interaction
User-created data is a large contributor towards Web 2.0. You will find that a common characteristic with most of today’s successful websites is allowing users to interact and participate with them. The most popular interaction methods include Blogging, Tagging content, maintaining a Wiki and Podcasting.
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
SOA is the way in which a website provides and permits the use of its data, allowing developers the freedom to use this information to create a richer user experience on their own website. The distribution of this data is commonly found in the following formats: RSS, Feeds and API’s. A related Web 2.0 term that utilises multiple data sources, such as API’s, to create a single integrated application is a Mashup. Some good examples of Hybrid websites utilising some of the most popular API’s are as follows:
A combination of Flash and the Google Maps API to create a flight simulator:
http://www.isoma.net/games/goggles.html
Utilising Flash and the Flickr API to create this slick-looking gallery application:
http://www.bcdef.org/flappr/
