Curtis Carmichael

First, as a caveat (and despite all the hype of CMS’s), unless you are a major corporation with thousands of employees requiring the ability to create/maintain web content on-the-fly, the benefits of implementing a static or semi-dynamic web site may outweigh the advantages of a bona-fide Content Management System.

You should ask yourself whether or not you require a site-wide CMS. Publishers for instance may only need a news/article publishing system vs. having the ability to maintain their entire web content collection via the web. Such systems mimic the capability of popular blog systems such as Wordpress (www.wordpress.org) and Movable Type (www.movabletype.org) — both very powerful programs.

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Not to be confused with Google AdWords, the Internet giant’s service placing ads on Google.com search pages, AdSense (when properly configured) automatically places relevant AdWords advertisements on web pages. The service is open to everyone and Google pays you every time someone clicks on one of their ads on your web site. (Be careful however of testing/clicking on one of these ads placed on your web site as that is considered click-fraud and Google has been known to crack down on these cases, suspending and/or terminating AdSense accounts and voiding any revenue generated from qualified clicks.) In case you may not already be aware, AdSense is a pay-per-click program falling under the contextual advertising area.

I personally have heard of one case where a publisher has made as much as $60,000+/year on AdSense revenue and one even shared at an industry conference his company pulls in $300,000/year on qualified AdSense click-throughs. Although these accounts are unverified, I do not see how this would not be possible per personal experience integrating AdSense on various web sites and watching this revenue grow over time. Bloggers for instance are notorious for using AdSense as their primary source of income, allowing many to function as independent, full time/professional bloggers. Google has published a few interesting case studies on this topic, which may be viewed at https://www.google.com/adsense/success. You may also be interested in reviewing Google’s official AdSense Blog. If your site (or sites) pull more than ~50,000 pageviews per month, you may be surprised to see how well this program can perform.

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Functioning similarly to Google’s popular AdSense ad serving program, Kontera’s ContentLink system places ads within the context of your web pages by automatically linking keywords/phrases to various advertisements.

For example, you may view an article and see a double-underlined phrase and when you point your mouse over the link, a ‘bubble’ appears (such as the conversational bubbles you see in newspaper comic strips) displaying an ad relevant to that specific phrase. These ads appear in a variety of different formats, embedding text and/or static graphic ads or even dynamic flash video ads. Interestingly enough, ContentLink ads bypass built-in pop-up blockers in at least Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox so implementing this could prove to be a valuable enhancement to your web site, if practical.

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