If your site is a free service, or a blog, then adverts may be your only source of revenue, and that is fair enough, but for commercial sites that sell products and services or ultimately lead to generating you money through potential sales leads they should be avoided.

A common reason for putting adverts on a site is that it isn’t doing as well as you’d hoped, for example if it’s not generating the sales or enquiries you’d like it to, this does not mean you should resort in adding adverts. For starters, if it’s not doing well, it probably isn’t receiving much traffic (visitors), so who would want to advertise if nobody will see or click their advert?

You could get a Google Adsense account, which distributes adverts around the whole web, but there are several flaws with Google Adsense:

1. The pay out from each click can be as low as 1p, and usually average around 2-3p
2. If you don’t get much traffic, you might only get one or two clicks a month
3. Google tries to pick adverts relevant to your site – so you might end up advertising your competitors
4. Usually they are totally irrelevant links, sponsored adverts (like the ones on TechCrunch) seem more like recommendations to visitors and thus work better.

Adverts are distractions away from your content and you can look desperate, people will subconsciously think “well if they need adverts to survive, then they clearly aren’t doing a good job” – all faith will be lost and your site will end up in the dead pool.

What you need to do is incentivise people to visit your site. Is there a good reason for people to visit you over the millions of others out there? If not, you have to figure one out, with interest comes links, with links comes popularity, with popularity (and a good product/service) comes sales and leads. It’s as simple as that.

Photo Credit: Giant PSP Billboard @ Flickr