Blog Tipz

Private ad sales are the best for your bottom line and ensuring your advertisers remain loyal to your brand. You have more flexibility than nearly any other method of selling ads, and you generally don’t have to go through an ad broker or be forced to pay fees for someone else to manage your advertising.

While there are certainly advantages and disadvantages for the various forms of advertising – private sales, managed sales, and CPC/Google Ads – you have to discover which works best for you. Obviously, there will be preferred types depending on the type of site you own and how you intend to position your content to your readers (and eventually advertisers).

These tips apply to most networks and methods of advertising, although you can undoubtedly change them to suit your site’s needs.

Focus on Long-Term Ad Sales

One of the main reasons you should focus on long-term sales is to retain advertisers who would normally purchase multiple, lower-cost ads on various blogs. Convincing these advertisers that your site is better to advertise on compared to other sites might not be easy at first, but you’ll see a lot of return should you present them with 25% (or equivalent) discounts on multiple-month or yearly advertising sales. Should you lose a single advertiser, you’ll still have others to fall back on, should sales decline.

Vary Time Lengths

Let’s say you have a moderately popular blog, which receives more than a few thousand visitors per day. It won’t be too hard to sell advertising, especially if your site ranks within the top twenty thousand sites and has a good community built up around your site – visitors that return frequently to see new content.

Some advertisers may want to only purchase advertising on a daily or weekly basis, as they don’t have the budgets of the larger companies. In order to do this, set up a platform where it is easy to manage multiple time frames. You’ll notice this as a trend on extremely popular sites – the traditional media sites often sell advertising for only a few hours, in some cases, in order for advertisers to target, more than anything else.

Offer Various Ad Sizes

Offering various ad sizes – 468×60, 125×125, or similar IAB ad sizes, is ideal for expanding your advertising opportunities. Advertisers want some flexibility. Some will find larger ads more relevant for their business, while others will want to focus on smaller, more relevant ads. Keeping your ad spaces booked will increase demand, and this will drive advertisers to look into other ad sizes, should certain ones not be available.

On quantity versus quality – you could sell a dozen 125×125 sidebar ads at $100 each or sell a single 300×250 ad for a similar amount.

Price Ads Appropriately

Pricing ads can be difficult, especially if your site is extremely new. After a few months, you’ll get a better picture of how much return you can give your visitors based on content and visitor trends.

Blog Ads, Federated Media, and BuySellAds are some of the most popular advertising networks for bloggers, although ads on these sites are going to be more costly than selling directly through email or your own private method. Bloggers selling through these sites must pay between 10-25% commission on each ad sale to pay for network costs and overhead – serving ads to billions of visitors monthly isn’t cheap. Therefore, if you aren’t using a service like this, price ads slightly less.

Depending on how much traffic you receive, look for similar sites and what they are pricing their ads at. If you have more content areas, price higher, and if you want to be competitively, price lower in order to garner additional ads sales.

Join an Advertising Network

The aforementioned networks for advertising can be greatly beneficial, if you don’t have enough traffic to boost ad sales on your own. Sure, they’ll take a percentage of your sales to pay for their own costs, but if you sell a single ad through these sites, you’ve been more profitable than selling on your own.

They generally help connect you with advertisers, and any support or technical issues will be taken care of by the advertising network, while you would be taking care of this if you were managing ads yourself.

Put Your Advertisers in Good Company

On your advertising page or in a promotional message to potential advertisers, mention others who have advertised on your site. This boosts the effectiveness and number of advertisers who may intend to purchase advertisements on your site in the future. Advertisers want to see whether your site is a part of their target market, and this can increase their returns, in seeing what other sites have advertised on your site.

Be Straightforward, but Detailed

Don’t leave out any important details or terms out of your advertising page. This page should include the length of each advertisement, whether refunds will be given, and how you deal with advertisement lengths. Place important details in headings or using bold text. Beneath this, place further important details, but keep most of the information in a simple format.

Advertisers want to see how long their ad will last for, any rotation factor, and some details about your site’s traffic. For the most part, you can’t make any guarantees – visitors of nearly every site can vary slightly from month to month. Continuing to deliver great content is one way to ensure that your visitors will receive what they were looking for – return on their purchase.

Demographics

Perhaps you’ve already stated your demographics on your “About” page, but it is also important to include some further details on your advertising page. Larger sites may want to keep this information private, only offering it to interested advertisers through email, but may also be included before purchase, in order to entice more advertisers.

Demographics refers to the niche that your site is in, as well as who your target market is. For example, a blog about blogging may have a somewhat skewed demographic, towards younger people interested in learning how to blog, as well as those who have more experience using computers/the Internet.

Provide Some Method of Tracking

A good percentage of people who advertise through your site will provide their own method of tracking click-throughs to their site, but it may also be valuable if you provide a method for them to track this information.

You’ll need some experience with advertising before you venture into this aspect of advertising, although there are some solutions freely available to provide this to your advertisers.

Conclusion

Selling private advertising is one of the most reliable ways to generate an income from your blog. You are guaranteed to sell advertising space as long as you target the right markets, offer compelling content, and propose good rates. Long-term ad sales, flexibility, and targeting are extremely important in the advertising space to create demand for your ads.

CPC advertising is losing relevancy. Today’s ads are more about inviting visitors into another site, solving their needs or wants. Quality is also extremely important, and private ad sales solve some of the other problems that come with using larger networks like AdSense.

What has been your experience selling private advertising on your site – and what other tips can you suggest to other bloggers?