If you are a blogger or own a content portal, you have probably had to run ads on your website to monetize it and keep your business going. Many webmasters rely on Google Adsense to get their business going, and there is nothing wrong with that. As long as you know how to play your cards right and use your long-tail keywords to your advantage, there is a decent amount of money that can be earned from Google Adsense. Unfortunately, not all portal owners have the flexibility to play around with their content and change things around. If that is you, you’ve got a decision to make. You can either focus on third-party services such as Google to help you with your business, or you can use an ad-server system to serve your own ads.

Large content networks often partner up with Google and other display media services to sell their advertising space and generate revenue. Smaller websites do not necessarily have that option. Google Adsense does provide them with an easy way to monetize their website, and the fact that Google is working to take its Ad Exchange program to the next level is certainly good news for webmasters.

Google Adsense may be easy to use, and may get you some change on a daily basis, but what it does not do is provide you with too much flexibility. You may have some, but you are still playing Google’s game. It’s not just Google. It’s any advertising network that you work with. There are going to be limitations, and you are going to have to play their game. Services such as OpenX change all that. OpenX is an open source ad serving system that lets you monetize your blog and maximize what you are making on a daily basis by selling ads directly to your advertisers. You’ll have a whole lot of flexibility to go with all that.

By using a service such as OpenX, you can combine your Adsense, Chitika, and affiliate ads together and test them against each other. You can also define how many times you want each ad to show, and even target your visitors based on their referrer and so forth. So you can do a better job targeting and providing your visitors with offers that may be useful to them.

OpenX is not for everyone. It’s a free software that you can install on your server. You can also use OpenX’s hosted service to serve your ads. But you won’t be making money as easily as you would with Google Adsense unless you work hard at it. Getting direct ads on your website can be a bit tougher if you go about it by yourself, but you will have much more flexibility and have more potential to make a full time living out of your site. Besides, you can always run your Adsense ads through OpenX. So it’s a win win as long as you are not afraid of playing with a new piece of software.

Are you using OpenX?