We have been looking at various options to monetise your website. Google Adsense continues to be the most popular among the webmasters. No doubt Adsense is a very good revenue generator but as a serious entrepreneur, one must take care to ensure that all the eggs are not put in the same basket. We come across so many Adsense publishers getting banned, some of them for no fault of theirs. As a webmaster who looks at his site not just as a hobby, it is important to ensure that his risks are distributed. Other ways to monetise, like CPM advertising, direct advertising, affiliate marketing and text ads must also be explored. Also with the change in Adsense TOS, you can put other contextual ads on the same page as Adsense.

If you are looking for other contextual advertising networks look at YPN after Adsense. YPN currently accepts publishers only from the US and that too with predominantly US traffic. Other contextual networks that you can give a try are MIVA, Adbrite and Advertistic.

Affiliate programs are also a very good source of revenue for the right type of sites. Most often these sites pay you per action performed. You would also be interested in this story where we describe how affiliate programs can be used as content too.

If your site gets large amount of traffic and has a decent PR, you may want to sell text ads directly on your site. If finding an advertiser, billing them and ensuring that they renew look like too much of a hassle then you could always outsource these activities to ad brokers.

The overall objective by distributing your income channels is to ensure that your revenue generation does not fluctuate because of external factors. It is just like investing in the equity market. Assess your risk profile and correspondingly make the investments.