How To Monetize Your Blog with OpenX – Part I: Hosted Adserver

Many bloggers struggle to make money from their blogs in the first few months and even the first couple of years of their career. There are bloggers who get lucky or find a way to make more money before then. But if you have just set up your blog and haven’t had enough content to get proper exposure on search engines and through the social media, you are going to struggle to make any real money from your ads. Google Adsense is a very good place to start, but it is not as flexible as most people would like. Let’s not forget that services such as Adsense do not exactly let you maximize your profits from your ads either. That’s why serious bloggers need to plan ahead and graduate to an ad server service such as OpenX.

OpenX is an open source ad solution that lets bloggers and portal builders to monetize their work without too much hassle. You set up the system, add your own ads or get others to buy space on your blog, and you are set to go. It’s almost as simple as that. You will need to figure out which type of solution works for your the best and whether you want to sell ads directly or through a market place. Whatever the case, OpenX is there to let you do just that.

OpenX comes in two forms. You can let the company host your ads or you can download the open source solution and host it on your own website. The hosted version is for those who want to outsource the process and take advantage of OpenX’s premium services. You can easily sign up for OpenX service and start working with their team to get your ads live on your blog.

You can always take advantage of the standard package available on OpenX.org to display ads on your blog for free. Unless you own a very popular blog, you should be fine with 100 million impressions that you get for free. Of course, the enterprise edition has more features that you can take advantage of to track and analyze the performance of your ads, but most bloggers should be fine with the standard edition. Regardless of which version you choose, you can always rely on OpenX market to sell ad space and make more money on your blog.

Adding campaigns and your ads to your hosted account is very simple. The interface is so intuitive that anyone with any level of computer knowledge should be able to create campaigns and add ads to them easily. There are a few more advanced ways to control how often your ads are displayed, so when you are ready to take your blog to the next level, you’ll have the tools you’ll need.

Ultimately, if you are tired of playing with services such as Google Adsense, you can’t go wrong with your own ads. You can sell your ads or display affiliate banners on your blog easily with OpenX. Just make sure you don’t overdo it.

Stay tuned for the second part of this series where I will discuss how the self-hosted OpenX service will work.