Much has been written about creating income through your website or blog, and, as many posts on my blog prove, scammers profit heavily from the desire to earn money through the Internet. After all, almost everybody has a high-speed Internet connection and creating your own website or blog is easy.

Just a fair warning upfront: Creating sufficient income through advertisement on your website or blog is virtually impossible!

I personally run a number of blogs and websites filled with advertisement through several affiliate programs, and I still don’t make enough money to cover my monthly grocery bill. I have heard of one blogger in Singapore who is very successful by making roughly $800 per month, but he got there through very hard work and he got there after years of creating websites.

The boom of making money through websites or blogs is over! Click rates are declining, i.e. readers are more and more reluctant to click on online ads.

Note: Google is still very successful, but not necessarily based on a few, very effective websites. Their success comes through volume, i.e. the vast number of not-so-effective websites producing a few clicks per month.

One of the Affiliate programs I had joined mentioned that you need a minimum of 30,000 unique visitors a month to create sufficient income, which is very difficult to achieve on a long-term basis, i.e you need to maintain that level through frequent updating of your website(s).

Let’s apply some realistic numbers based on my experience with Google Ads: CTR – Click Through Rate = 0.5% and $0.50 per click. Assuming 30,000 unique visitors per month, you will create 150 clicks per month and create an income of $75 per month.

Yes, you can increase the income by adding advertisement from other Affiliate programs, but 1. creating 30,000 unique visitors per month requires extraordinary work, and 2. excessive use of online ads may have a negative impact on your website’s acceptance.

The following represents my personal experience with a number of Affiliate systems:

• Google Adsense - Click Through Rate (CTR) is roughly 0.5% with roughly $0.50 per click. These numbers will vary from website to website depending on content and value to the Internet community. Needless to say, their ads are usually of good quality and are clearly adjusted to the website’s content. Payment options are very flexible, and they pay quickly. Over all my rating is “Good.”
• Infolinks – CTR = 2+% with roughly $0.12 per click. It seems that visitors are much more inclined to click on “inline” advertisement, but the downside is a lower income per click. In the end, Infolinks evens out with Google. Advantage: You can easily mix Google and Infolinks on your website, and it doesn’t look cluttered. The ads are not well adjusted to the web page content; I assume their variety of ads is limited compared to Google. What I don’t like is their payment policy. They don’t offer direct deposits into your bank account. Payments per direct deposit require a minimum of $400(!); PayPal $50; Recommended payment is per prepaid MasterCard. Also, you have to apply to add more websites, which is more or less a formality, but takes up to two days. Nevertheless, I am very satisfied with the daily income created through them. My rating: “Good.”
• Kontera – No data available; I only tested them briefly and discarded them quickly. Their pitch is that they’re better than Infolinks due to better “inline” ads, a statement that does not match my experience. Their ads are very limited and are by far not relevant to the website’s content. They allow only three inline ads per page, and they load very slowly (Infolinks shows a lot more ads without looking intrusive). Their payment options are very flexible, and you don’t need to apply to add more websites; you just add their code to any website you run. My rating: “Don’t bother.”
• Amazon.Com – Tough to compare with Google or others, since Amazon doesn’t pay per click. They pay a percentage of an actual sales made through the online ad, which can be up to several Dollars. Amazon provides a great number of different ads and different products, but they require more work to set up than other programs. This month I managed to create more than 300 clicks, but created only one sale (which is not typical). My rating: “Okay.”
• AdBrite – To say it upfront, I removed all AdBrite ads from my websites. CTR was 0.13%, and they paid in average $0.06 per click. You can choose between two levels of advertisement, the better one being the “family-friendly” version. “Family-Friendly” means you get ads from, for instance, Toyota or Porsche, which are promoted as high-quality, but in reality nobody clicks on their ads. The non-family-friendly version allows ads of the worst kind, including weight loss programs and other questionable services (to put it diplomatically). If you don’t care much about reputation, you can use them as a Google alternative. My rating: “Two thumbs down!”
• ClickBank – Terrible! Terrible! They work on the same principle as Amazon; they pay you per actual sales, which is acceptable. However, the quality of the product and service ads represents the lowest level I have experienced so far. First, they only provide you a link to the actual product page, which also includes your specific ID. You, as the ad publisher, are responsible to create a dedicated page for the product and include the hyperlink, meaning there is quite some effort involved. They offer a great number of products you can write about, but most of the product pages are  maintained by what I consider to be scammers. The web pages are longer than my arm, filled with all kinds of success slogans, and you can’t leave the website without specifically clicking on the “Okay” button. My rating: “Stay away from Clickbank!”

I wish I could report two other services that seem to be the best when it comes to creating income:

• Text Link Ads – They rejected my website within 24 hours. Apparently, they have very high standards in regards to the website traffic you create. My 400,000+ web site hits per month didn’t do it for them.
• Chitika – The response from Chitika – four weeks after I applied-  was especially interesting:
  “We would like to apologize for the delay in your Chitika application review for account.  As we prepare to transition to a new upgraded version of Chitika, we are temporarily holding off on approving new domains and accounts. Note: We are currently running an exclusive beta test on the new upgraded Chitika ads for large/ComScore 500 domains.  If you are earning more than $10,000 USD per month from advertising on your domain (with AdSense, direct advertisers, etc.), please send us an email, or give us a call to speak with a Chitika team member.”