Making Money with Direct Ad Sales
If you are trying to make money online by selling advertising then you should be trying to take advantage of direct ads. Many site owners make the mistake of going through a broker and these ad networks can take up to 50% of the money that advertisers are willing to pay. Why not pocket the whole amount yourself? You also will have direct contact with your advertiser so you can build a better relationship with them, plus you won't be limited by the brokers payment options.
The main reasons site owners do not list private advertisements on their site is a lack of knowledge or they do not think they can find advertisers on their own. Let's take care of those issues with this article that is designed to cover what you need to know before offering direct advertisements on your site.
You want to give potential advertisers all of the information that they need before making a decision on advertising with your site and to do this you will create a specific direct advertising page. You will want to try to sell them as much as possible on the benefits your site has to offer. Make sure to include the following details:
Traffic
List both pageviews and unique visitors and break them down by day, month, and year. If you add a graph to display this information it can make the data easier to read and understand. RSS Subscribers, newsletter subscribers, Facebook fans, and Twitter followers are other metrics that could also help.
Options Available
What type of ads are you willing to sell? Be clear and concise here. Do you put a nofollow tag on their links? Let the advertiser know beforehand.
Prohibited Sites
If you aren't going to allow certain types of sites to advertise with you, then list that information here so you don't waste anyone's time. Some common prohibited sites are: adult, gambling, made-for-adsense, hate, and the list goes on.
Contact Details
Make sure at the end of your page you clearly list your contact details so potential buyers can get in touch with you for more information. Don't just list your email address, but if you are comfortable with the idea, add your phone number as well. Deals get done quicker over the phone.
You should link to your direct ad page somewhere prominent on your site to draw interest. I would avoid putting your advertising rates on the page because you can lose buyers if it is slightly above their price range. You want to be able to negotiate the best deal.
If you have any other tips on selling direct advertisements then please add them to the comments below.
How Much Do You Make From Your Traffic?
There are a couple of questions that every business owner who is trying to make money online should ask. One is how much money do I make from each visitor to my site and the other is how much money do I make from each lead that I generate. While these figures are not all that difficult to come up with, not knowing what they are can cause you to spend either too much or not enough money on advertising.
Revenue per Lead - In order to figure out revenue per lead you have to have actually made some money off of your site. Your Aweber autoreponders and newsletter should have been operating for at least a month and your readers should have taken some action on the offers that you have promoted. Then all you have to do is total up how much money you have made from the offers sent to your subscribers and divide it by the number of leads that you have. That is the average amount of money that you make from each lead that you acquire. Your goal should be to get as many leads as possible, as long as the acquisition cost is less than your revenue per lead. This will allow you to make more money off of more leads.
Revenue per Visitor - Not every visitor to your site is going to sign up for your newsletter, but they still can buy products from you, click on your advertising, or generate money from you in another fashion. If you are using Google Analytics or have another way of generating site statistics, you just need to divide your total revenue by visitors to your site to figure out your revenue per visitor. When looking into PPC advertising or any other method of driving traffic to your site, the cost per vistior needs to be less than this revenue per visitor.
If you are tracking your affiliate revenue by clicks from the newsletter and by clicks on the site you will have a better idea of your revenue per lead v. revenue per visitor. The more accurate your numbers the better picture you are going to have of your online business.
Other Goals to Track - How many of your visitors sign up for the newsletter? How many end up purchasing one of your products? If you use Google Analytics you can set goals for different areas of you site, and track just how the visitor got to that page, what PPC campaign is converting, and more.
Where to Put Ads on Your Blog
One of the more popular questions I have been asked when helping someone start a blog is where to put ads in order to maximize revenues. The important thing to remember here is that not every blog is the same, which means that you are going to have to test some different designs and ad formats in order to increase your click throughs, which should mean an increase in revenue from advertisements whether it is through affiliate programs or cost per clicks.
The picture on the left shows the hot zones according to google adsense. These are the locations that their studies show ad placements generate the most clicks. While looking to see what the graph shows and mimicking it on your site might work out just fine, let's dig a little deeper and figure out why those spots are as premium as they are.
The first thing that you might notice is that above the fold ads do a lot better than below the fold. This stands to reason since the user doesn't have to scroll down to see the ads.
You'll also notice that ads on the left do better than ads on the right, which fits in the Western style format of reading a page from left to right.
Users also focus in on the content, so the top of the content area is the best place for ads. However, the end of the content area also does well, and in my research I find that this is a great place for text ads for relevant sites, simply because the user has finished reading your peice and is either looking for more information on the topic, or they are interested in the topic and any related products or services will catch their eyes.
A few additional points that I have noticed personally. Larger banner ads do better than smaller banners. I think this is because the advertiser has more room to put information on a large banner and thus can draw the user in.
I have also noticed banners do well when the user is forced to look over it. If you put a banner between the menu and the content, or if you break up the middle of the content with a banner, those two positions have worked out great for me in the past.
I also like the stripe ads at the top of the blog, you can pick those up by going to Max Blog Press. Text link ads inside your content also do a good job of generating clicks, so if you write reviews or just link to something relevant in your content. You can automatically change the keywords in your blog by using the Ninja Affiliate program.
These are just some of the things that I consider when I'm putting ads on a site. Do you have any additional tips or tricks? If so, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.
Stripe Ads
I'm going to try out a new form of advertising with the addition of the Stripe Ad to my sites. This is the single line of text that is displayed at the top of the site in a nice, clean stripe.
I've also thought about using the Stripe Ad as a call to action which will take users to a specific landing page, maybe of a hot product that I am selling. There are some sites where people I never read our terms of service, so this might be a good spot to draw their attention, or to display breaking news.
Another nice thing about the ad is that you can rotate it between several different ads, which is perfect for testing, and I'm a big fan of testing in order to maximize conversions. If you want to weight one ad more heavily than another you can do that as well.
A nice thing about the Stripe ad is that you can customize the look of it to match you blog, with options on the font type, text size, alignment, and colors.
If you want to add the Stripe Ad to your blog then visit MaxBlog Press and download it yourself!
How To Increase Your Ad Earnings
There are several different things you can probably do right now to optimize your site's advertising and generate more revenue. The first and most obvious is to get more traffic, but that can take a lot of time and effort to do. Instead this article is going to focus on how you can make the most out of the traffic that you already have.
Ad Positions
It's important to note that not every blog or site is going to be the same. I can't just tell you that by putting an ad in such and such a place this is going to be your click through rate. What I can give you is a general idea of what locations work the best. First off, don't just look at other sites in your niche and think that since they are doing it one way, it must be the best way. You do want to start by thinking about where on the page your reader gives their full attention. Most likely this is above the fold and either towards the left of the page or right above the content. This has been reinforced by the heat map released by the Google Adsense team. Another great location for advertisements is the footer area right below your content area. By using the top left, above the content, and below the content strategy you are probably going to be on the right track, but since every site is different you should split test and experiment to find out which locations give your specific site the most clicks and then stick with that format.
Adding Additional Ad Space
This one seems like common sense but I see plenty of websites out there that do not seem to be utilizing all of their ad space. Where are the natual points for a reader to pause on your page? On blogs you will find it just after you end the article and before the comments section. This is a place where the reader considers what they want to do next so it's a great place for related articles, a link to have them subscribe to your feed, and for advertisements related to the post. Another great place is after the comment section. If a reader goes through the comments then when he or she comes to the end of the list they once again will be looking for more places to go. Why not give them the choice to click on an ad so you can make some money?
You can also find more advertising space with text links. These work great in two places, on your navigational menu and in the content itself. Just make sure that the link text and site you are linking to are a fit to what the content is about, so that way the user gets what they are expecting.
Do you use any other techniques to make money with your advertising? If so I would love to hear about them in the comments section.