If you get considerable traffic to your website, a good way to monetize your site is by displaying contextual ads. Join Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) and you'll be able to show ads relevant to the content of your site to your visitors.

Once you're set up, one of the most important things you can do to optimize your earnings is to track all the results of your advertising. Use Adsense Gold to test and track both AdSense and YPN.

The one investment that every Internet marketer must invest in regularly in order to achieve success is advertising. The old saying, 'Advertising Pays' is as true today as it was when those words were first uttered by a long forgotten marketer of years gone by. It really does pay to advertise. You stand to gain more by advertising than what the advertising costs. That is always a given.

When we talk about advertising and Internet marketing, we are speaking of advertising by a variety of methods that include both free and paid for advertising. All of the methods that we will discuss here are effective ways to advertise.

Some of them will require only an investment of time while others will include an investment of money, as well. Advertising, however, is essential. Advertising should be at the top of the 'to-do' list of every Internet marketer every day of the week.

First, let's discuss paid advertising. The fact is you are going to have to invest some money in advertising your product, your service, your website or, even, your free membership website if you are to have any success at all on the Internet. The Internet is a huge place. There are millions of websites. You are going to have to tell people where to find you in this enormous world of the Internet.

When people are surfing the Internet looking for a particular product, service or just information, they always start that search by plugging the key words about their search into a search engine. Search engines are like keys that open the door to information about where to go on the Internet to find what is being searched for and you (your product, your service or your website) will need to be on the other side of that door when it is opened.

This is where PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising comes in. Your advertising budget needs to include a certain amount for PPC advertising. You can set a budget with search engines and limit the amount you will pay each day for PPC advertising. Set that limit as high as you can to begin with and then increase it as you soon as possible.

Another very effective method of paid advertising is called ezine advertising. An ezine is basically an electronic newsletter. You can buy ads from owners of ezines that are related to the products and services that you sell. There are practically thousands of people who regularly receive ezines in their inboxes about subjects that are near and dear to their hearts.

Most ezine subscribers actually read the ezines that they subscribe to and if you have an advertisement in it, they will see it. Advertising in ezines is a very effective, as well as, cost effective way to advertise.

Usually you can place advertisements in ezines that have a very large subscriber list for $30 or less per mailing. The beautiful part is that you are advertising directly to your best prospects.

Now, let's turn the discussion to some free ways of advertising to build your list. Paying for advertising doesn't take much time but free advertising requires a time investment. You will always pay something for advertising... either money or time both of which are in short supply when you are an Internet marketer.

These free advertising methods that we will discuss are possibly even more valuable than the paid for ones that we have discussed before because they will not only advertise your product, service or website but, in addition, they will help to build your visibility and your credibility in your niche market.

The first method of free advertising is to write articles and ebooks then submit them to article banks and ebook repositories for other website owners or ezine publishers to download and use for free. Articles should never be longer than 300 to 400 words and ebooks don't need to be longer that 10 to 12 pages.

When you submit an article or an ebook, you need to include a resource box that includes your name and a link to your website. A link to your website should be on every page of an ebook. Articles and ebooks need to have attention getting titles that contain key words and the articles and ebooks themselves need to be keyword rich.

The second method of free advertising is to join and post to blogs and forums that are dedicated to topics which relate to the products and services that you sell. Be aware that posting to blogs and forums takes time... and a lot of it. You will probably spend at least one hour per day posting to three or four blogs or forums.

This is, however, time that is well spent. Your signature tag that will be included at the bottom of every post you make should contain your name and a link to your website. This accomplishes three important things: (1) it is advertising for you, (2) it is building credibility for you, and (3) it is adding links for search engine spiders to count, thereby, raising your PageRank in the search engines.

Social bookmarking sites allow you to create a profile and then bookmark your favorite sites. These bookmarks will be shared with other users. When you book mark a site you will give a brief description and then pick a category and add keyword tags to your bookmark.

These keyword tags allow your bookmarked site to show up when a user searches for bookmarked sites for that key word. This of course is the basic explanation of social bookmarking. I prefer to use simple explanations for things over the tech talk explanations because that way everyone no matter what their level of knowledge can dominate the Web 2.0 market for their own marketing needs.

For your use you are going to bookmark your website and your blogs to better enhance your marketing potential. You will need to pick the appropriate category, give a short but precise description of the bookmarked site and then pick the appropriate keywords to tag your bookmark with.

Not all social bookmark sites will have a category that fits your website. Some social bookmarking sites are geared toward a specific theme. Should your website not fall into their theme or any of their topics then do not try to bookmark your website or blog on those social bookmark sites. You will be considered as a spammer. So stick with social bookmarking sites that offer your theme or category for your website.

Keywords should cover what you are bookmarking. Use as many keywords as possible that are relevant to your website or blog. Your account can be terminated by some sites if you are loading your bookmarks with a lot of irrelevant keywords. So refrain from doing this. Do not be afraid to use both singular and plural forms of words or variations of words for your keywords.

In addition to creating a profile some bookmarking sites require that you download an application that will run in your browser bar. The purpose of this is so that when you are on a website and you wish to bookmark it all you have to do is click on their icon in your browser bar and you will be able to bookmark that site. Not all bookmarking sites will require this.

Most bookmarking sites offer you a feature so that you can place their buttons on your website so that your website visitors can bookmark your site themselves. Now while you are going to bookmark your site yourself, it is still a benefit to have these buttons on your site. Your site visitors who wish to bookmark your site will click one of these buttons and discover that it has already been bookmarked, now they have the option of voting on it. Since they were going to bookmark it themselves the chances are they will go ahead and take the time to vote it up. This means that you are moving up in the ranks with no extra work on your part.

To increase your review on these social bookmarking sites you should also bookmark other quality websites or articles that you find on the internet. Now you are probably wondering why I am telling you to bookmark other people. The reason is that if you are seen as a contributor who contributes quality bookmarks then your other bookmarks that you are bookmarking to promote yourself will also get good reviews.

Therefore, bookmark things that are of quality that are informative, useful and you will gain a reputation and thus increase your own traffic. In fact some social bookmarking sites will terminate your account if they feel you are spamming their site with your own promotions. While it is okay to promote your own website and such, you do not want to give the impression of spamming.

You need to understand that a lot of traffic can come about as a result of bookmarking your website on one of these social bookmarking sites. Digg is one of them that if your content is good other users will "digg" your post and thus moving you up the ranks.

As you rise up you will be hit with more and more traffic to your website, therefore make sure you have a server that can handle this possible traffic overload. While this does not happen to everyone there is still that chance that users on the social bookmarking site will love your content and thus your traffic increases. Reddit is another social bookmarking site that can drive a nice amount of traffic to your website.

While you can end up with more traffic than you know what to do with, remember that this can take time to happen. As mentioned in this chapter you will need to have your website placed in the right category, use lot of relevant keywords and offer a good description. When you apply all of this you will have a better chance of getting known and rising in the ranks on these social bookmarking sites. This is all needed to see the huge amount of traffic that these sites are capable of delivering to your website.