When the Google Adsense era came to oblivion (wtF!) or when most people realize that using AdSense isn’t really as lucrative as 123, they forget it and turned their head to what is known as Direct Ad Sales or Sponsorship. Well you might have read a ton of post about direct ad sales and I can’t argue that this could possibly be the highest form of income earner for a blog. What I can say here is that it isn’t really as easy as what it seems especially for newbies or for people on the more unorthodox niche and I know most people can testify for it.
So positive things with direct ad sales is of course, you’re cutting the middleman, then its better for blogs in this niche and for branding, it also makes a lot of income possible. The problem with it now is that, even though you’re on an Alexa of 100,000 and below it still cannot assure you that you can get out $100 on ad sales on a month. I know some people who are really on a situation like that. Another problem is that, because the value of almost everything is close to being a junk, advertisers are not lenient anymore to advertise for a month. They test for the first 5 days, if they want the results, they’ll continue if not they’ll take their ad again!
One more problem is when the blogger or publisher gets desperate because no one is advertising for their blog, they’ll do a firesale! They sell their ads for so cheap, which is not bad but is not good either because you’re making your income source underachieve. In which if you put up a WidgetBucks Ad or maybe shoppingads you can likely get some more. Again, Im not degrading the value of Direct sales, its just that sometimes it’s not for everyone.
What other alternatives for unsponsored sidebar? A lot! You can let CPM banners take that or you can run some affiliate products there or you can just remove the sidebar and optimize it contextually! The thing here is that you always want to get the highest income possible. If you’re on a debt niche, then Im pretty sure you’ll get no private ad deals w/c means no income, but when you run AdSense there, more likely it will generate you some income. If my memory serves me right I think ads related to it pay $1 up to $5 per click. I guess thats it for today and let me know you’re strong voice.
adsense oblivion? uh oh. i’m screwed. :O
would love to be able to do this soon, but i’m still grappling with how to do so for my particular niche.
Private Ad Sales increase over time as your blog gets bigger and attracts more attention. The more readers who visited your blog daily, the easier it will be for you to make an income off of this sort of thing.
Also, you may want to reread your posts just a little bit because there are a few grammar errors 🙂 .
Thanks for the post Melvin.
To make money from direct sales you need to have lots of traffic and users..else you look to monetise your blog with some other avenue…or just blog for fun 🙂
I agree with you Melvin.But again for a newbie,who is desprate for getting sponsorship,the slots will be charged very low.I do not think there is any issue with this….
like what? Hehehe. I suck at grammar! or my fingers do.. 😉
It really depends on the reach your blog has. Blogs with 10k+ subscribers consistently sell out their inventory (for the most part) and I’m sure the advertiser gets a few sales, particularly if their product/service is related to the blog in question.
I disagree that most advertisers want a 5 day trial. In the last 5 years I’ve only had one advertiser ask for this and he was quickly rejected. Most serious advertisers put their money where their mouth is. Of course, if you price your ads too high you may get more enquiries about justifying your price.
Regardless of the monetization instrument, unless you have a decent traffic (regular readership + excellent search visits) what you make will be only peanuts! 500 to 1000 visitors per day would probably fetch you some decent amount.
I have not started private ad sales yet due to this reason and am trying only AdSense, Bidvertiser, CreditBurner, ProjectWonderful etc. PerformancingAds also fetched some money but those people are not very transparent on affiliates.
Will try private ad sales soon 🙂
Cheers,
Ajith
If a blogger does a post saying that he is charging $1 for each banner ad won’t people flock to buy it?
I see. I do have about 3 advertisers who take trials up in the last 3 months and all of them came to renew again and again..
Interesting post, Melvin. I haven’t tried the private ads yet, though I think I’ll try soon. 🙂
I have currently been testing AD selling. Not going well but I think it needs some time.
As per as Adsense is concern. More traffic means more click and more $$$ in adsense account.
Depends on the type of traffic you have. If it’s mainly social traffic, selling ads works… but if it’s decent, targeted traffic you want to milk that yourself as the slots will be worth a lot more than $30 – $100/month if you use them right 🙂