One of the most beautiful things about being an internet marketer is the fact there are so many different revenue streams.  Whether it’s contextual ads, affiliate marketing, advertising deals, you name it, there shouldn’t be any reason you can’t start to make a little bit of money from your websites.

So, how to most people do it?  The answer might surprise you a little bit.

Despite claims of its death and lack of “real” revenue generating power, Adsense is still the preferred way of making money for most website owners.

Here’s how nearly 100 people responded when asked: What is your primary source of online revenue?

• Adsense – 70%
• Affiliate Sales – 15%
• Private Ads – 9%
• Product/Service Sales 6%

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Until recently, I was more than happy to simply have Adsense as my primary revenue generating stream for my websites.  I mean, it’s requires very little work to set up, even less work to maintain and you get paid just for people clicking links that show up on your site.

That being said, the more serious I become at trying to make a little bit of money running websites, the more I would like to become less reliant on Adsense as my primary revenue generator.

The reason being is because Adsense, while simple to use, can be pretty hit or miss, and for many non-niche sites (like all of mine) you pretty much have to generate a lot of traffic in order to generate any substantial amount of money.

Not only that, but despite the fact that I said Adsense was easy to set up and maintain, like anything else, it requires a lot of work to optimize the code for your site, testing different locations on your site to optimize click-thrus, all that fun stuff.

So, recently I decided to start pursuing individual advertising deals for my sites in the hopes of generating recurring monthly income, with the possibility of additional “affiliate” payouts.  Unfortunately, because I’m new at this sort of advertising, I wasn’t really sure where to start.

In order to get the ball rolling, I inserted dedicated advertising pages into my sites’ navigation, essentially to just let people know that I was now accepting private advertising deals for my site.

On these pages I listed out the following information:

• That I was now accepting individual advertising deals. 
• Where on my site I was selling advertising space.
• Prices would be determined by advertising location and type.
• My contact information.

The only information left to be added is my pricing structure for each of the locations, but because I’m relatively new at this, I don’t really know what price to associate with these spaces. 

For the most part, I trust people and believe they’ll offer me a fair and competitive deal.  If they don’t, they’re not worth doing business with.  However, once I get a better grasp of what’s going on and how much to charge, I’ll probably add a pricing structure.

Simple enough, right?

After getting these pages up on my site, I have received several advertising offers that I’m currently mulling over.  And the other day, I accepted my first deal, which is up on Daily Fuel Economy Tip, so that was pretty cool.

Anyway, for people like us who run small-time sites, we shouldn’t expect to fund our retirement with these individual advertising deals.  That being said, if you can get a couple of these up on your site, it’s a great way to supplement any other non-recurring advertising revenue streams (Adsense, Amazon Affiliate) that you might have.