5 Things To Keep In Mind While Selling Banner Ads On Your Blog

In Blogging, Selling Ad-Space directly rather than using any 3rd party services like Google Adsense could be a great way to make money blogging. Advertisers love advertising on blogs since the content is keyword rich and generally people trusts bloggers more than any e-commerce sites.

There are many reasons why selling Advertising Space for Banner Ads is a better alternative to Adsense or any other ad-networks. Here are a few of them:

  • You have complete control over who advertises on your site and when.
  • You don’t lose a chunk of your profits to commissions. Ad networks charge anywhere from 20-50% for placing ads automatically on your blog page/s.
  • You can Sell Ad Space based on time and not rely on clicks or impressions to get paid.
  • Since Ad Networks have an oversupply of inventory (Ad Space) to sell, they discount your space to advertisers up to 90% according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. That means less revenue in your pocket.

But there are 5 Crucial Factors which one should keep in mind when making their blogs available for private banner advertising.

advertise_here

1. Searching Advertisers

Are You Confused How are you going to find sponsors/advertisers for your blog? You can either carry out this task yourself or can place your Advertising Space for sale on other websites.

Finding advertisers yourself:

  • Probably you will get advertisers whose products, services etc. directly corresponds to your target audience;
  • The sites that are advertising with your blog competitors or related blogs are a good start to get advertisers. You can contact sites that are advertising on these sites and ask them if they wish to advertise on your blog.
  • You will need to contact each potential advertiser, one by one with a professional looking e-mail asking if they are interested in buying advertising space on your blog. The email must include an attachment or link to a page which includes analysis (statistics), prices, testimonials, a description of your blog etc.
  • Personalize the email stating where you found the website and why you believe they would wish to advertise with your blog. You won’t get a favorable response to a a standard and impersonal email.
  • Keep a record of who you’ve contacted and their response.
  • Remember to follow up on an email and offer some great deals to get noticed.

Advertising Space For Sale:

  • Sell Ad Space at an auction website to save yourself from the trouble of searching individual advertisers, one by one;
  • Such kind of websites enables you to list your ad-space together with details of your blog and analytics. You can either set a specific buy-out amount or put the Ad Space up for auction.
  • Potential buyers are able to contact you directly and can make you offers.
  • You can create a page which displays all the Advertising Space your  blog has, standard information about your blog, your acceptance policies and ad specifications in short Terms & Conditions, analytics, testimonials and anything else you desire.

Here, I would like you to read my article Selling Advertising Space On Your Blog = Huge Income in which I reviewed some popular banner auction sites.

2. Positioning, Quality & Quantity

Mostly advertisers look for:

  • Ad-Positions above the fold i.e where their Banner Ad will be displayed without viewers needing to scroll down to see it.
  • Larger Banners (the bigger, the more you can charge for it).
  • Wider Ads like 768×90 px or 468×60 px are more readable and tend to perform better than vertical Banners which take too much space and people need to scroll more for it.
  • Not too many competing Advertisements on the same page (large area of space taken up by other advertisers on your blog takes away their quality).
  • Your traffic is only one indicator of the value for money when advertising on your blog. Many advertisers looking to reach a specific target audience in their niche would rather advertise on a directly related site than a site with huge traffic but irrelevant to their product which is a kind of obvious thing.

3. Ad Specifications

Before placing the Advertising Space for sale, you should consider the advertisement requirements and creative specifications, including:

  • Ad dimensions;
  • Maximum file size;
  • Preferred/allowed format(like: jpg, png, gif ;
  • Animation restrictions (example: loop maximum, maximum animation time,maximum number of frames);
  • Flash requirements;
  • Appropriateness of content (example: no adult and illegal material).

4. Costing Method

How should you charge? Below are the method of how to charge for Ad Space:

  • Pay Per Click (PPC) – the advertiser pays you the agreed amount each time a viewer clicks on their advertisement(popular bloggers like Darren Rowse provides such kind of advertising on his blog);
  • Cost Per Time – this is the most favorable method of costing for private Ad sales. Sponsors simply pay to have their ad displayed in your slot for an agreed period of time like for a week or a month period.(I am Using It!)
  • Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) – an amount is charged for each thousand times the Ad is to be displayed on your website(Mostly seen on Forums rather on blogs).
  • Pay Per Action (PPA) / Cost Per Lead (CPL) – payment is made each time the Advertisement is clicked and the customer undertakes some type of approved action (such as registering, subscribing or making a purchase);

5. Analytics

You should prepare a .pdf or image file of your website analytics. It should consists some important blog statistics, like:

  • Daily/Monthly New Visits
  • Daily/Monthly Page Views
  • Average Time on Site
  • 3rd party rankings like Alexa, Compete, Google PageRank
  • Countries from where people are visiting in percentage distribution form
  • Blog Achievements

Conclusion

There are several aspects to selling advertising space. With many choices, some blog owners just take the easy way and put their space in the hands of an advertising network, where the profits are quite low and sometimes the inventory is sold for scraps because of overabundance in supply. When done effectively, selling Banner Advertising Directly can be very profitable and worthwhile.


Top 10 Search Terms:

• advertise here banner • advertise here

No related posts.

75 thoughts on “5 Things To Keep In Mind While Selling Banner Ads On Your Blog”

  1. Great post sushant, once again it was worth reading your posts. I think that finding advertisers myself is a great way as i get to keep all the revenue, but if your blogs traffic is low then their are rare chances of you to make a sale. And I also think that as bloggers we should concentrate to writing and promoting our blogs instead of looking for advertisers, i would prefer doing this once my blog starts generating good sales from affiliates and third party networks and i should be able to hire a staff blogger and seo expert.

    Thanks
    Vishal Sanjay
    http://www.dumblittleblogger.blogspot.com
    .-= Vishal Sanjay´s last blog ..Top 30 richest internet entreprenuers =-.

    1. Glad to see that you liked this post. O agree that if are newbie blogger, then you should first and most important thing is to build it a better blog and you will rather see advertisers coming automatically and purchasing your ad space.

      Thanks For Commenting.

    2. Yes Vishal, when I started looking for advertisers I just dropped ideas to blog. I think they are eating my time and started to concentrate on money. But I prefer it not to happen and would like to kill at the budding time. So, stopped looking for adverts and waiting to know if someone come to by themselves.
      .-= Senthil Ramesh´s last blog ..Win $180 Cash Prize and more at SmartBloggerz =-.

  2. Direct advertising does seem the way to go eventually but I really don’t see it as a good strategy in the beginning. Direct sales takes up a heck of a lot more time and effort than using ad networks and you can really only sell effectively until you’ve got high enough traffic to substantiate direct ad sales.

    I suppose it’s a trade-off like anything else and best used depending on the blog.
    .-= Matt Savage@Plenty of Fish´s last blog ..10 F*cked Up Online Dating Stories =-.

    1. Yup, direct ad sales are mostly seen on blogs with traffic. You will hardly see any advertiser buying banner ads on a blog with merely 50-100 page views a day. In such type of blogs, giving your ad space to 3rd party services like adsense is the best to generate revenue.

      Thanks For Commenting.

  3. This is really a good idea. I am going to copy this post so I can go over it and figure out how to do all this. Are those square ads at the top of the right column your ads that you get paid for???
    Thanks for this good information.

    1. Ya, Those ads are directly sold by me to the advertisers for specific period of time and it’s working perfect for my blog.

      Thanks For Commenting.

  4. Intersting post i don’t really buy the idea of ads before the community on your blog is there, I feel that they have a negative impact on the growth of your readership.
    thansk for the post!
    .-= Biodun @ Webmaster Forum UK´s last blog ..Using 301 Redirects =-.

  5. Great post and you are so right that it is better to sell ad space directly but it is very difficult and time consuming to reach out to advertisers. I have been running some affiliate banners from sponsoredtweets and adgitize and am doing better than adsense but not as good as if I had a “real advertiser”.
    .-= Tycoon Blogger@Make Money Online´s last blog ..Twitter Follower Management Tool – Tweepi Review =-.

    1. Statistics speaks about how popular a blog is from an advertiser points of view. It’s strange to see that your blog is having such nice statistics even then you are saying advertisers are not coming. I think you should try to check on the rates if they are high or you could try asking advertisers on other blogs if they would like to buy ad space on your blog.

      Thanks For Commenting.

    1. I hope you soon get advertisers which will help you to keep running your wordpress blog. Concentrate more on blog improvement part and advertisers will automatically will love it.

      Thanks For Commenting.

    1. Glad to see that this article helped you.
      It’s true that if you don’t have a community then you don’t need to place ads on the blog before you build it. It really doesn’t makes any sense of placing banner ads where only search engine robots visits.

      Thanks For Commenting.

  9. Selling Banner Ads is one of the best way of internet marketing. So here you have posted very nice article about the Selling Banner Ads, i like your tips and i will follow all those when i will do this.
    Anyways keep it and keep sharing.

  10. Great post. I think this is the way a lot of bloggers should go. If you have enough traffic and are bringing in new members each month, then it is a very attractive idea. I would love to advertise my business on such a site because you know that you are getting a better quality ad which is not competing with many other text ads. Also, by taking the middleman out, as you said, the blogger makes more money and the advertiser often gets better ROI.

Comments are closed.