How to sell ad space on your blog

Jan 132012

Even if you don’t run affiliate or CPA or affiliate ads on your blog, if you want advertisers to PAY for the ad space on your blog there are some things you
need to know, understand, and incorporate into both your blog and advertising opportunities.

The first is – Internet advertising metrics are already established. It does not matter how wonderful your content is, unless you are in the top 25 of bloggers within your niche (in which case they are paying for your representation and endorsement as a celebrity not ad space) your advertisers will be expecting a Return On Investment (ROI) for their ads. They WILL be tracking your ads performance and they will determine the VALUE of your ad space based on that performance.

Any blogger who is expecting to earn ad revenue is a website publisher – The blogger part is about your writing. The ad revenue part is being a website publisher.

The items your advertisers track are the SAME things you should be tracking when you run affiliate ads to optimize the revenue potential of each ad space and link. So paid ad spots OR CPA ads.

These are things you MUST do in order to wear the hat of a ‘professional website publisher’.

1) Your ad spots should be optimized to increase the Click thru rate.
(Think design, layout, and limited outgoing links.)

2) Know your audience /readership and target your ads to their interests and your content.
Don’t make your website or blog overly general. A ‘parenting blog’ isn’t specific enough to provide search engine traffic. If you go general – you need to categorize to allow for better ad optimization.

i.e. A parenting blog about ‘raising boys’ will provide better ad performance then a general parenting blog. Most merchants can target their ads to land on the boys clothing pages which will convert better for a unique audience of moms raising boys. You should place ads on relevant audience pages. If your blog posts are parenting related don’t put up ads for high end ladies fashion.

3) Know the real value of your ad inventory and understand the terminology used in buying and selling online advertising.
Most blogs do not have enough unique visitors to qualify for advertising buys. This is why you will see (with the exception of those few blog celebrities mentioned above) most successful revenue generating blogs using an ad network.

That big advertiser isn’t going to cut 500 $10 cheques for a banner ad. They are going to cut ONE $5000 cheque to a network for 250 000 unique banner impressions by category, in the top fold, served to UK viewers only.

Unless you can provide a min 500 unique, geotargeted, with a time cap of 1 or 2 in 24, your ad space isn’t likely to perform enough to justify a large brand purchasing banner ad space.

If your goal is to earn advertising revenue as a blogger, it is time to put on the publisher hat and start learning the industry standards for buying , selling, and tracking ad inventory online.

A great way to do just that is to run affiliate program ads. When you can convert an affiliate program, you know you can also make your paid advertisers happy and you will have the performance stats to back up the claim.

Karrine McFarlane is the owner of Her Media Marketing and Design Ltd. Established in 2006. A certified affiliate manager, Karrine has over 13 years of experience developing Internet presences for businesses and has been working in Internet advertising for over 7 years.
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