As a webmaster you are probably aware of Google’s Adsense and Adwords Programs. These are probably the most recognised form of text based advertising on the internet. There are now many more different forms of text advertising you can use to either make money from your site or to promote your site.
More people click on text
Before text became mainstream the main form of advertising on the internet was graphical banners. Banner advertising is still in use today but are considered to have a lower click through rate due to banner blindness, users have simply gotten used to seeing banner ads and ignore them.
Text is now considered to be the preferred medium for presenting advertising messages because people do not consider them to be advertising and therefore tend to be more clickable.
Using text you can also ad your recommendations within the body of your content more easily. This is known as contextual advertising, the ad becomes part of the content and the user is not interrupted from their flow.
Contextual advertising and recommendations
Due to the fact that a text link can be embedded within the text of a web page it can make it difficult to determine whether or not a link is just a link or an advert. For example I recommend Text Link ads because it is a good hands off way to manage your text ad inventory on your site.
The link I used is an affiliate link which means that if you used the service I was recommending I would get a commission. This is a typical contextual affiliate link. There is some debate on whether it is ethical, others see no problem with it.
