Banners and popunders on your web site? No way, say the experts, gurus and commentators. They just annoy visitors, and give a poor impression of your site, right?

Wrong. Unless you have a precious content-only site so pristine it could never be defiled by advertising, you want your site to make money. Popunders and banners are just another way of monetising your web properties, along with Adsense, affiliate links, datafeeds or whatever else you use. It may come as a surprise to those who started using the web within the last five years, but banners used to be the only way of monetising a site, unless you were selling your own product.

And think of this - you still see banners everywhere, along with their younger siblings: popunders and popovers, skyscrapers, interstitials and all the rest of the modern ad tribe.

Now why would that be? Obviously, because they work at making the merchants or advertisers money. This could be because it is a cheap way of branding, as a way of creating a buzz about a new product, or simply because they generate clicks and sales.

But what about me, the website owner? Why should I put them on my site? Here are six good reasons. By the way, none of this is theory, but the result of long experience with some top class banner and advertising providers.

1. They will make you money. Over the years, we have seen rather ordinary but high traffic sites which make twenty dollars a day from banners and popunders. Just multiply that by 365 days, then think of having ten sites just like that. Gets more interesting, yes?

2. Banners and advertising brighten up your site. People get bored with the look of your articles, feeds and Adsense boxes. Give your visitors something else to look at. You usually get paid per impression anyway.

3. Advertising Banners and other media change constantly, by design, so there is always something fresh on a page even if you don't update it much.

4. It takes very little work: usually pasting some javascript into your page templates is all you need to do. No other site enhancement will be so easy.

5. The advertising providers are usually large, professional organisations which as a matter of course provide you with real-time statistics and graphs. If you are using hosting services whose stats are primitive or delayed, this is a real bonus, because you will see instantly if your site is down, if Yahoo or Google have been kind to you in their new index, and so on.

6. The most important reason of all: it will let you explore areas for new sites you would never have considered before, because there is no affiliate or Adsense money in them. Are you frustrated with the traffic you are able to drive to your health, insurance, loans, software, credit cards or gambling site? Adwords click cost going into the stratosphere? Well make things easy on yourself - make web sites about subjects where there is very little professional competition.

Get a list of popular searches (wordtracker.com will send you the top 500 most searched keywords every week for free) and see what people are looking for. Yes, strangely enough, people mostly don't go online to buy stuff: they want news, pop trivia, gossip about movie stars, song lyrics, golf tips, pictures of models, game reviews, driving directions or a free map of Iraq. It's much easier to get free traffic for 'non-affiliate', unsaturated theme sites in areas like these than to your site selling iPods - where you compete with 10,000 other affiliates. And you can monetize your new, high traffic site with banners and popunders.

There are more than six good reasons for every webmaster to sign up with an ad provider, but I hope a light has gone on by now! Click here to check out the ad provider sites which in our opinion are the best for small to medium sized sites. And start making more money.