Just a bit about search engine optimization.

It seems that these days, everyone in the world and their grandmother have a blog or a website. Someone once had this to say about blogging: “Never before had so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.” Yet, within the murky waters of all this useless blabber, there are a few websites out there that manage to actually make decent money.

You’ve seen it yourself: ads on Hulu and Youtube, banners on CNN.com and those annoying popup ads on your favorite college humor website. Someone paid those websites to show you those ads! Wouldn’t it be nice if that someone paid you to annoy visitors to your blog with those ads?

Yeah – you would say – but, I am not CNN.com, my blog consists of news about grandma’s Crohn’s disease and re-posting funny jokes and photos of cute kittens. Maybe, a hundred people a month visit and I have no idea who these ninety-nine fools are, but the hundredth one is grandma. Who in his right mind would ever consider advertising on my blog?

Turns out there are plenty of companies out there who would love to advertise on your website. Well, not your particular website – they don’t really know that you exist and they don’t want to hire a humongous marketing department just so they can cut an exclusive deal with every small-time blogger out there. But, they do want to advertise simultaneously on tens of thousands of these small blogs and websites without having to negotiate with every one of them separately.

To help these companies advertise on many small websites, a whole class of intermediaries came into being – the ad networks. Ad networks bring advertisers and website owners together and they do so automatically – all you have to do is place a few lines of code that the ad network will give you into your webpages. The code will display an ad whenever someone visits your page. At the end of the month, the ad network will tally up the number of times the ads appeared on your page, calculate your earnings and cut you a check.

Some ad networks are easier to get into than others; others don’t accept just anybody – they prefer a certain kind of a website and they lure them by higher payouts. What kind of website? you might ask. Well, unlike what your girlfriend told you, in the world of websites and ad networks size actually does matter – the more visits your website gets, the more likely it is that a higher-paying ad network will accept it. In the industry, those high-paying ad networks are known as “first-tier” ad networks. I will mention a couple of first-tier networks at the end of the article – follow the links and see how many people should visit your site every month before you can get admitted.

So, make your friends and relatives visit your site as often as they can, spam your email contacts and share those jokes with your friends on Facebook – the more people visit your website, the more likely it is that a first-tier network accepts you and the more money you will eventually be making. Think about it – a banner on top, an text-link ad on the bottom and an video ad somewhere in the middle – and, suddenly those cuddly kittens begin paying for themselves. Your grandma would be proud.

As promised, here’s my review of one of the top ad networks. Don’t know how to start? It’s okay – here’s an easy step-by-step overview on how to make money online by creating your own website.