So you have tried the banner exchanges, the affiliate programmes and getting a 3rd party to sell your advertising for you and its not working? Perhaps its time to sell your own advertising, which may be more work but offers more rewards too.

Let's start with the disadvantages - and I am not going to lie to you, there are plenty of them. First of all you can't just insert some code into your page as the code needs to be yours anyway so you need a whole backend system. An easy solution to this is to use a readily available script such as phpAdsNew as long as you're on PHP.

The second is that you have to find people to buy the advertising. People will only generally search for big sites if they are looking for targeted advertising so unless you are a large site you are probably going to have to find them. A good start is to make some posts on forums such as www.sitepointforums.com and www.webmastertalk.com.

In order to get people to buy into your advertisements at first, so consider selling the space for as little as $0.10-$0.20 CPM. Some banner exchanges are doing it this cheap so to beat the competition you will need to price this low. Once you get your first campaigns going, you will have some statistics and hopefully a high CTR so you can charge more from advertising from then on.

Thirdly you have to deal directly with your advertisers. Make a set of rules such as minimum spend on a campaign and maximum file size of the advert. 15-20k it a good value for paid advertisement banners. The good news is, if you impress your client they are likely to keep coming back to you.

As for the advantages there are a few also. The most important being that you get to keep all the money from your advertisements; none of this 35% commission of the 3rd party company eating into your profits. It also means you can put your advertisements on any pages of any content you want without your advertising company wanting to take a look at the pages first. And if you are running a site which they do not accept such as an adult site, you can still sell advertising.

Selling your own ad space is difficult but if you have plenty of space to sell and enough time to do it, it will bring you higher profits in the end.