"This post is part of, August - Make Money Online Month"
How do you get your blog ready for direct ad sales? When do you decide you are going to reduce or completely eliminate your CPC ads {Adsense, YPN etc...} which have so far provided you with a stable source of income, but yet not enough.
Of course if you have a lot of traffic, you can use every single method of monetization possible - at the expense of looking ugly. Personally I would like to know that my ad inventory is sold out rather than hope I get enough clicks or conversions on my CPC and affiliate links. Here are some methods I am employing -
- Clean your blog - This includes making your sidebar clutter free, removing all unnecessary badges, those widgets that you think look "cool", keeping only relevant links on your sidebar, take all or most CPC ads off your blog. Many of these methods will eventually keep a reader on your blog for a longer period of time. Which means they might potentially click on an advertisers banner. Which makes them happy.
- Use plugins for CPC ads - If you still want to use CPC Ads or affiliate links and have a WordPress powered blog, then you should install this WordPress plugin to better target who sees your Ads. If you get a lot of search engine traffic the best way to monetize it is by showing ads to visitors that come via that channel. Of course you shouldn't overdo it as you also want them to become long term readers.
- Set up an Advertise page - If you don't have a specific "Advertise" page yet, you should consider setting one up. Have all the various ways that an advertiser can advertise with you, make it crystal clear about the various forms of advertising you offer, alongside your prices. Some bloggers like to display their prices, some don't. It's up to you to decide.
- Statistics - It doesn't matter if you have 100 visitors a day or 10,000, you need to show some form of statistics to a potential advertiser. Set up heat map testing by using the free service from crazyegg and see for yourself where your visitors click the most. Make a graph of this, alongside your technorati ranking, traffic stats from Alexa and/or Compete {I know, I know they're useless} or just show your own personal traffic stats. You do track your traffic, right?
- Approach a potential advertiser - It's OK to send out emails to a potential advertiser asking them to have a look at your blog as a platform to advertise their site/product. You can also approach other bloggers to advertise on your blog. If you have a blog and have competitive pricing for a prime spot send me an email. I might just advertise with you.
I'm working on a few of the points myself to make my blog more desirable to potential advertisers. If you have any tips you would like to share, leave a comment.
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The ideas you gave are sound. According to me, a successful blog need more than just a clean look. Good blog needs good contents. Some peoples think only of quality, and they forget about the quantity. Awesome blog needs both quality and quantity. The more posts your blog have the better for everything. One more thing, the more posts you have, the more posts you got indexed by the search engines, and the more traffic you get. If you have ads on those posts, you probably generate unlimited amount of pennies.
The content is a definite yes, and probably one of the primary factors why you would get any advertisers in the first place. As I’ve written a lot about the importance of content, I really didn’t feel like I needed to emphasize that anymore.
Thanks for commenting.
Very good info… also to get advertisers you need some decent traffic and that is the biggest money maker.
I appreciate your helpful tips, but what I’m really looking for is directions for how to CODE for ad space. I use WordPress, but I’m not a coding expert. How do I create spaces to insert advertisements? How do I keep track of whether or not people are clicking on them? How do I ask advertisers to submit graphics/ads?
The best advice I can give you, is to hire me