A free game

I said in my first post that among other things, I will try to create a website that offers something for free and ask for donations (there are a lot of websites that operate this way).

I chose to offer for free a musical game, which I have already semi-developed in the past.
The concept is that you train your ear whilst playing a game.
So I took the game, fixed it up a bit, created more levels and more creatures and put in on a website, which you can see in this link: MusicGame.

I could have chosen anything to offer for free, I chose the game only because it was half completed (and because I liked it).

I used a free hosting service and wrote the website with pure HTML, which really doesn't require you to know too much (you do need basic HTML knowledge, but the web has plenty of helpful articles).
I used free segments of HTML codes, such as code for the website template, code for the images gallery and code for the guestbook.
I created a sample video of the game using the free software CamStudio, which also gave me html code to show the video on the website.
I uploaded the game files to the server and put a link to download the game, I put a donation button which I got from a free tool by PayPal.

So now that my website was ready, content wise, the next thing in order was to put ads.
I wanted to put different sorts of ads so I could compare between them, and see which ad is the most profitable.

The first ads I chose were Google Adsense, which are by far the most popular at the moment in the web advertising business. Their ads are automatically tuned to be relevant to your website content (context sensitive). You get money when somebody clicks on their ads (with some of the ads, you get money even when somebody views the ads). Also, you can put a custom Google search bar in your website, and you get money if somebody clicks on one of the sponsored ads as a result from a search.

Another major players are AdBrite, you put banners in your website and they select what to put in the banners (you have the ability to refuse specific ads). What I really liked about them is that you can instruct them to use a different ads network for this banner (such as Google Adsense) if the maximum profit they expect you will make is less than a certain amount that you input. There is an agreed measure for expected profit which is named eCPM. Google Adsense updates your eCPM constantly in your account, so you can see your expected profit.
I used this information in the following manner:
First, I put the Google Adsense ads on the website and after a few days I checked the eCPM in my account. I then replaced some of the Google Adsense ads with AdBrite ads, with the instruction to replace those with the Google ads if the AdBrite ads will make less profit than the Google eCPM.
If you'll enter my website, you'll see that for now, the Google Adsense ads are the viewable ads, but this can change if AdBrite will find more profitable ads.

Besides ads that you get paid if anybody views/clicks on them, there are different types of ads that you can put on your website and you will get money only if the person that clicked on the ads ended up buying products from the advertising website. You will get a certain percent commission from that purchase.
In this category, I chose to use Amazon, the famous online store which offers to put their product ads in your website, and if people ending up buying that product, you will get a profit from 4% to 8.5% of that purchase (depends of the number of buyers you referred).
You choose which products to offer on your website, and there is a large variety of products to offer (you also get all the information about the products popularity).
Other ads in this category are ClickBank ads, there is also a large variety of products to choose from and for each one there is a different percentage that you will get for every purchase, and you can easily find products that you will get a 60% and even 70% commission.

Another form of advertising I decided to use (last one), is with UCash, they take your links (the ones that you choose) and turn them to an ad, which you can skip (or wait a few seconds) and only then you will get to the link destination. You can see an example by pressing on this link which will eventually take you to my website. I only used these ads for external links; it seemed too much to use them on internal links.

There are other forms of ads which I chose to avoid using, although they could be more profitable, but I find them too aggressive and I honestly don't like them.

So, as for now, these are the only ads that I put on my website, so the next stage for me is to promote the website in various ways, this is maybe the hardest thing to do in this business, and I will post about my experiments later on. It is definitely a whole new world to explore.