Selling an advertising space is probably one of the best way to make money online but only if your website is generating adequate traffic. If you are just a beginner or maybe, you have been blogging for sometimes but your website is still not getting enough traffic, selling an advertising space will not be the best way to earn money online. Most advertisers will not buy an advertising space, unless they are sure a blog is getting significant amount of traffic.
Advertisers usually look for highly ranking websites and they are willing to pay well to get their business ads placed on such websites. This is especially important for advertisers dealing with marketing since the highly ranked websites equals to more customers visiting their websites. In addition, advertising in highly ranking websites is also considered as a great way to boost a page ranking.
If you are blogger with a website that is already generating enough traffic and you are considering selling an ad space, here is a few things that can get you started;
Decide what Type of Ads you Want to Display
You can decide to offer banner or textual contents links ads, depending on the availability of the space and what you find to be more convenient. Banners ads will mostly pay more than textual ads but requires a bigger space.
On the other hand, text ads are links from your website pointing to another website. Some advertisers may give you a specific anchor text to incorporate within your content while others may want you to link back to their homepage. Others will link in a way they are able to monitor the activity (clicks) coming from your website.
However, when it comes to selling links, you have to be very careful with who you are dealing with and avoid sites that require you to offer dofollow links pointing to their sites. Google do penalize websites that are caught selling links.
Set a Price
There is no specific set amount when it comes to selling an ad space and how much money you decide to sell depends upon many factors such as; how highly ranked is your website, is your website well targeted, how many subscribers do you have, what is your site bounce rate, among others.
Setting a fixed monthly charge would be better since you get paid each month regardless of the outcome. If you are not sure of what you can charge, you can always find out what other websites are offering so as not to over charge or undercharge.
If your website is getting very high traffic, you can go for CPM (price per thousand impressions). Here you basically set the number of times the advertiser’s ads will be shown on your website and how much money you will be paid per one thousand impressions.
Another way to sell an ad space is through CPC. Unlike CPM where you get paid per thousand impressions, here you only get paid per click basis or you could choose to be paid a fix amount of money every month.
Look for Advertisers
If you already have good amount of traffic, you have decided what type of ad to sell and you have set your price. The next step is to search for advertisers. You can start by advertising your self through direct ad sale campaign (Advertise Here) or through other advertising networks like Buysellads.com.
If you decide to do it directly on your own, your “Advertise Here” should be placed on a landing page where visitors can see it clearly and should also be visible to search engines. In addition, make sure you provide stats about your website to all advertisers.
You could also sell an ad space by looking into the highly ranking pages in search engines like Google and find out which companies are advertising on same page. You can then contact those companies directly with your advertising offer.
No of Ads Slots
No advertiser will be happy to advertise his or her business in a website where ten more ads are been displayed. Start by offering one slot and if you find you are able to satisfy the needs of your advertisers, you can then decide to sell more slots.
Promote your Blog
Even if you have considerable amount of traffic, it won’t hurt to promote your blog even further. By promoting your blog, you will be making sure your traffic is maintained. The more visitors you bring to your website, the more chances your ads will get clicked. You can also use social networks to promote your advertising slots if you still have more to offer.
Find a Reliable Payment Processor/Online Bank
Since you are selling an ad space, you will need to have a reliable payment processor or an online banking where the advertisers can deposit your payment.
You do not want to have problems when it comes to payment. You can arrange with payment processor like Paypal to make sure advertisers are automatically charged the agreed amount without you having to deal with them each month.
