I’ve been wanting to write this post about selling advertising space directly for a while since I get lots of questions about this. In this post, I will write a comprehensive guide on how this is done. But before that, there’s an old post about this topic that you may (or may not) want to check out first.
1. Putting up the groundwork
The obvious advantage of selling your advertising space directly to your advertisers is that you will make more money. You eliminate the ‘cuts’ that these third-party networks take in order for them to compensate themselves for selling the ad for you. However, its not really that hard and obviously its not worth it to give these networks 30-50% percent just for them to do it for you.
To start selling ad space there are few prerequisites. You need to have the following:
- Considerable amount of traffic
- A detailed advertising page
- Some mentions / posts around the blogosphere
- Right technology and tools set up.
Considerable amount of traffic
Just like anyone else, I cannot say any fixed amount of traffic . It varies depending on several factors like you’re niche, your writing style and the potential advertisers. However its safe to say that you should have at least 20-50 daily loyal readers for you to make it work. Again there’s no set number for this and only you yourself can tell if your blog’s traffic is ready enough or not.
The bottom line is you need to work for your traffic first and with this what I mean is ‘good traffic’ and not just any kind of junk traffic.
Detailed advertising page
If you want advertisers, you have to convince them, and there’s no better way to do it than to have a perfectly crafted advertising page to begin with. If you look at my own advertising page, you can see that I’ve taken some screenshots from various sources like Analytics and Webalizer. I have also highlighted key statistics such as bounce rate, pages/visit and etc. I would say its important to at least show statistics from two different tracking tools and the reason is because some advertisers are not satisfied with just one source.
I used to update my stats on a per-month basis but as my time started shrinking I found out its impossible to do it so what I’ve done is instead collected the last 6-month statistics so that I don’t need to update it as often as I normally do it.
You may also want to display other details such as pagerank and Alexa rank although it would be minimal since advertisers are buying ads mostly because of the traffic that it gets.
Lastly you can put the pricing of the different advertising spots that you’re selling. At the bottom of my advertising page, you can see that there are links pointing to payment. In this way its easier for advertisers to pay shortly after you convinced them that your blog is the perfect fit for their needs. Of course, you must have a perfect payment system in place to make this process as easy as possible. It is discussed below in the tools and technology section.
Mentions/Authority
You can also include the mentions and authority on your advertising page. For instance, I included my place as one of the top 100 make money online blogs and am planning to include some more mentions. Shoemoney does it best with his advertising page but the reason for this is you want to brag that you have a well-respected brand throughout the blogosphere. This makes it much easier to justify the pricing that you have for your spots.
If you don’t have lots of mentions and authority yet, you can use your posts or activities on larger sites. For example, you can link on your guest posts on large blogs and specify that you occasionally guest post there. This helps a lot too since it associates you with the top people on your niche.
Right Tools & Technology
Above I emphasized the importance of having a good payment system in place. For this, I cannot recommend anymore than OIO Publisher. The ads on my sidebar are hosted via OIO Publisher and what this tool does is automate the entire process of selling ads for you.
Normally when selling your space directly, you will need to do a lot of things. You need to accept the payment, then you need to upload their banner, write the correct html code and you have to set the banner in such a way that it would expire after X amount of days. If the advertiser renews, you will have to repeat those steps again.
With OIO publisher, everything is automated and you get other cool features like the ability to do geotargeting, accepting payments through other means and a whole lot more. The plugin costs $47 for a multi-site license and if you purchase it from any links on this blog post, you’ll get it for $10 off. I would say its definitely worth it, very easy to set up and saves you a whole bunch of time.
2. Finding & Profiting from Advertisers
It doesn’t end there. Once you have all those things set up, you’re just ready to sell advertising w/c means you haven’t done anything yet as far as monetization is concern. After those initial requirements, you then need to start doing the actual finding and profiting from selling direct ads.
Looking for Advertisers
There’s a good chance that advertisers don’t come to you automatically so you need to look for them. The way I do that is I look on blogs in my niche that are probably in the same level as of me or even slightly higher. You can look at their banners and see who are advertising. You click those ads, and then you contact them using their contact forms. If they don’t have a contact form, there’s a good chance that their email is publicly available on their site so you may want to check out their other pages as well.
Webmaster forums are also a good source of advertisers although its effectiveness has considerably gone down from the past few years or so. Even with that, you should at least try. It may not land you an advertiser directly from there but it can surely give your site a bit more exposure. Top webmaster forums are digitalpoint forums and sitepoint forums.
Using the Swipe Files
If you remember a while ago, I sent you a newsletter email which contains a secret link to my advertiser-getting swipe files. You can get go back to that email as a reference or you can simply just save the PDF so you can have a local copy.
Basically these swipe files are template letters that you can send to a potential advertiser of yours. I would say those letters have worked well for me which means they’re not just those ordinary template files that you’ve seen somewhere else. It highlights lots of points that advertisers are usually looking for when finding sites to advertise on.
If you’re not subscribed to the newsletter, then maybe those swipe files can convince you. You can signup again here.
Utilizing third-party brokers
Remember how I said in the beginning that we don’t need to rely on those third-party networks to handle our advertising? Its true, however we can utilize them in some other ways. First is you want to make sure you’re signed up to them. Here are some:
- Advertise Space
- Buysellads
- Performancing Ads
- Google Adsense (yuck!)
What I’ve done is at least installed some of their tracking code here on my blog and the reason being is because I want my blog to be present on their marketplace as well. Also they can track my traffic by having their javascript installed on my end. The clever thing that you can do is you can accept advertising. Yes I know. However what you can do after an advertiser keeps on advertising for a while is to contact them directly and offer to advertise directly on your end for longer term plus with discount. Of course, you’ll then cut out these networks. More money for you, less cost for the advertiser and a win-win situation.
Another benefit is that some of these networks have a marketplace of their own that you can check out and browse. So with that alone, you instantly have a place to find advertisers related to your niche. Of course this is only possible if you are signed up to them that’s why I encourage you to at least sign up to these networks.
3. Other Helpful Tips
Now you have the entire process of selling advertising directly. But here are some more tricks that I can give that can probably help you more with it.
Give discounts
Just like anything else, the blogger-advertiser relationship is something that should be nurtured as it can do wonders for the long term. I would say most of my advertisers are the same ones that have been advertising here on my blog or other blogs for a long time. With that don’t hesitate to give them discounts or other perks. I always have advertiser who come to me and say he wants to have a test period and I give it to him for free. This adds trust but at the same time helps you establish that relationship with them
The powerful thing is once you get yourself in these network of advertisers, more and more of them will start to find you and advertise on your site.
Offer ‘custom’ packages
Direct ad sales is more known for having a fixed payment for 30 days or so but that doesn’t mean you can’t modify that. You need to always consider what the advertiser wants. You can offer a shorter period for a smaller amount of money, a free trial and you can even do it on a per CPM basis. It’s important to understand that advertisers’ needs are different from each other so if they ask for a slightly different package than the one that you have, ALWAYS consider it.
Automate It!
If you decide to follow the instructions that I’ve written here, then its already automated for you. Especially if you use an ad management network like OIO Publisher since it does everything for you.
But even with that, you can still take this up a notch higher. For once, you can automatically ‘subscribe’ your advertisers to payments which means they’re automatically billed per month on advertising on your site unless they cancel it. Just do make sure that you both agree on this as this may sound a bit fraudulent if you bill your advertisers automatically on a monthly basis without them being aware of it. Don’t do that!
You can also make the process of finding advertisers more handy by hiring people that will do it for you. You can hire someone for a specific number of hours just to spread your message to people. Again, this should be easy for them especially with the advertiser-getting swipe files that I provided you. You can have them do this on a monthly-basis or even just once but it depends on you.
Conclusion
Selling your advertising space directly may not be as powerful as it used to back in the early up to mid 2000’s but it can still be profitable if done correctly. I myself is relying mostly on advertising for keeping this blog alive and I think you can do it too since it doesn’t really take that much really.
I hope that you can find this guide helpful and if you have suggestions or you think this is not comprehensive enough, kindly just shoot me a comment. This guide is going to be constantly updated to make sure you’re getting the most out of it.