It takes fair amount of skill to sell advertising online. If you are using an ad broker, Adsense, or just about any other method to create advertising income from your site, chances are you aren’t making as much as you could be.
Most of those ad brokers are taking huge percent to their selves. Maybe that doesn’t bother you, but it bothers me. I believe that private advertising is the best way to monetize your web site without sacrificing the user experience. People that are selling their own ads are making a lot more money than the people that aren’t.
To sell advertising on your page you have to give the advertisers an offer they can not refuse. You have to think like an advertiser and figure out what are they looking for. If it’s too hard for you to discover that, I will help you with some suggestions.
Which info do advertisers need?
They will first look for some basic things like:
- Alexa ranking
- Page rank
- Number of backlinks
- Age of your web site
If they are satisfied with that they will seek some more detailed stuff like:
- Number of unique month visitors
- Number of impressions a month
- Your rank in search engines for content you serve of for content they would like to advertise
- Quality of your content
- Qualification of your visitors (leads)
- Update frequency
And the last but not least things they will look for:
- Positions of ads on your site
- Size of the ads
- Price of the ads
- How do you sell them – in time limits (ex. for a month), by impressions or by number of clicks
And that’s about it. If you want to sell advertising online, you need to have answers to all questions above.
How to become irresistible to advertisers?
There are few tricks and some simple rules that you need to follow if you want to sell your advertising space really quick.
Basic rules:
- Put your advertising space high on your web page (the lower the ad is the lower the price is)
- Make room for your ads and get some up before you try to make sales
- Set your prizes
- Create a solid advertising page
Some tricks:
- Don’t wait for advertisers to contact you – you contact them first
- Contact your competitors – find out what prices they have and than set yours a little bit cheaper
- Offer multi-month discounts – good for starters
- Seek for advertisers on forums like Digital Point – let everyone know that you are looking for advertisers
- Show your advertisers that you value them – contact them once a month and thank them for support
- Selling a few spots at a huge discount – Find some premium advertiser in you industry and offer them an ad spot for $1 a month. That will look great on your site and luckily attract new advertisers.
Most usual ways of advertising
These days the most popular way of advertising is banner advertisement. Where ever you look you will see banners. It doesn’t matter if they are static, dynamic, floating, big or small, they are everywhere and everyone uses them.
The most popular banners are 468x60px and 125x125px big. But there are no rules; you can use whatever sizes you want. But if you use the sizes above you can’t go wrong.
Besides selling banner ads, you can also sell link ads. They are a little bit cheaper but they cover a smaller part of your web site.
The best thing to do is to try both types of advertisements. When you see which one is more effective you can transfer to just one type or not. Test it and than decide.
Conclusion
Selling your own advertising can result in very big profit for your online business. To do that you will have to be better than your competitors. Create great, valuable and useful content, try to get good PR, high amount of traffic, targeted and loyal visitors. Add some luck to all that and success is guaranteed.
Just remember, if you give them what they need they will come (both visitors and advertisers).
