Monetize Your Site or Blog by Connecting to Advertisers
Oct. 16, 2009
18 Comments
With so many social networking websites like StumbleUpon, Digg & Reddit and other microblogging services like Twitter, Tumblr & FriendFeed and of course not to forget the traffic exchange sites like BlogExplosion and EntreCard, there are lots of ways to bring traffic to a blog or site these days.
Monetization
But as any expert, or even a newbie blogger may know, the real question is: is that traffic getting converted into earnings? If you’re thinking ‘no’, this article is meant to help you change that to a ‘yes’.
The problem: Although you’re getting thousands or maybe millions of page views and visitors every month, nobody knows exactly how much traffic you’re getting. Thus no advertiser contacts you despite those clusters of 125×125 “Advertise Here” banners already placed on your blog.
Reason behind it: People know the value of blogs/websites which receive huge traffic every month. However, they seldom care to download the entire list of the top 100K websites from Alexa for example and check which ones allow for advertising, nevermind contacting them to check their ‘real’ traffic statistics and finally placing their ads. It’s the natural tendency of all humans to get things done the easy way. Instead they usually try to look for simpler methods of filtering these websites according to their requirements.
Finally the Solution: As hinted in the reason above, we need a solution which brings your blog/site to the attention of advertisers in an ‘easy’ manner. The solution is actually a list of websites, which are the meeting places for publishers (bloggers/webmasters) and advertisers. Here goes:
BuySellAds.com (recommended)
TechnoratiMedia.com
AdEngage.com
DigitalPoint Forums
Sites like these have always been around, so what’s so special about the above?
For advertisers: It simplifies the the selection process by categorizing all member blogs/sites according to different criteria like Impressions/month, CTR (click through rate), CPM, Alexa ranking, etc. So advertisers can easily select where to advertise their products.
For publishers: As a publisher (specially true to BuySellAds.com) you are given total control to set specs such as the advertising dimensions, number of banners on your blog/website, etc. You can also set different prices for different ad zones (remember that a 25% commission is charged by BSA and around 40% by Technorati Media & AdEngage, so you may want to make your prices slightly higher than usual)
Moreover these ads will be banners and NOT text-link-ads so there’s no risk of getting penalized by Google. Also the banners appearing on your site/blog are all controlled by JavaScript which further avoids any SEO issues.
With AdEngage and TechnoratiMedia (relatively new), the choice of ad sizes are quite limited, but of course the most famous 125×125 ad size is present. TechnoratiMedia, being new, doesn’t have many advertiser accounts right now, and the response time taken by AdEngage is much more than that of BuySellAds.
In the DigitalPoint forums , as other forums you can only place your ad as a thread which may/may not come in to the notice of advertisers. If your thread doesn’t get frequent replies it will easily get lost in the ever-coming stream of new threads. Digital Point is being referred in this post as it is one of the most famous forums among webmasters.
NOTE: As of now there are no ‘exclusive’ restrictions from any of these sites. Hence you are free to use several advertising networks on your site/blog at the same time and diversify yourself between these advertising programs.
18 Responses to “Monetize Your Site or Blog by Connecting to Advertisers”
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Oct. 18, 2009
Monetize Your Site or Blog by Connecting to Advertisers | Ben Lang, Entrepreneur…
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Awesome post. Agreed, I've never liked using Buysellads because they take a commission from what I make. But the positive is they show all your blog statistics to the advertisers. Doing this improves the chances of them purchasing a ad slot on your blog.
Thanks for your insight!
Yes Rob, showing all the blog stats is really a gud idea and moreover we can update our stats as many times as we want. And I think the 25% commission is worth paying for the advertisers-exposure your site gets from BSA. But recently competition at BSA has increased quite a bit, so presently traffic plays the main role in ranking better at BSA and to attract more advertisers.
Thanks for this great post!
This a very useful post and I would recommend that all bloggers read it.
Great, share it! And many people will read it!
Cold calling is another way to step out and get some direct advertising revenue. Check out other blogs…google ads for related keyword searches…and print mags for potential advertisers.
Great idea, thanks for sharing Robb!
You can use Blog Stats plugin to create an auto stats page for advertiser (http://www.improvingtheweb.com/wordpress-plugins/...
Cool, thanks for sharing.
In one way these brokers are excellent because they may get you some advertisers and money that you might have not received but on the other hand you need to test and find out do your advertisers come from your site to the broker or from the broker to buy advertising.
If you find all your advertisers are coming from your actual site, why pay an outrageous 25-40% commission.
I've seen a lot of bloggers use BSA buts now im seeing them go on their own without the broker but any cash is good cash.
Thanks for the comment Blaine!
Well, we at TechChunks have managed to get ALL our advertisements by direct contact with the Advertisers. I value forums like DP (Digital Point) much more efficient than the Ad Portals like Buy Sell Ads. Why to give them a portion of your revenue, if you can directly contact your advertiser and keep everything?
Thats very impressive, thanks for sharing…
Ben
Another good post. Thanks for sharing this with everyone.
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