How To Get Started Selling Direct Ads on Your Blog

Many new bloggers assume that they can go on to make a fortune out of Adsense ads. In reality, Adsense can make you enough money to pay for your blogging costs and have something extra on your hands. But most bloggers won’t be making more than that. Besides, Adsense ads are not only ugly, but they don’t provide you with the best opportunity to monetize your blog. Google may be simplifying things for you, but it is not doing it for free. Getting started with selling your own ads can be daunting. There are a lot of questions to be answered before you can start a campaign. Here are just a few that comes to mind:

• Are there enough players in your niche who are willing to spend money advertising online?
• What products could be attractive to your audience?
• How are you going to find advertisers for your blog?
• How much should your charge per ad?
• Will you be charging per click, action, or 1000 impressions?
• Where are you going to display those ads?
• Do you know how to measure the performance of each ad?
• Are you getting the best EPC from your ads?

There are plenty of other questions that you may have on the topic. While there are general ways to find out about how get advertisers on your blog, most bloggers won’t tell you how they go about doing it themselves. As a rule of thumb, you need to have a decent amount of visitors to your blog before thinking about selling your ads. Once you start getting 25,000+ unique visitors per month, advertisers will start finding you. But what if you have less traffic than that?

There are ways to get around that issue. First of all,  you need to have an action plan. If you want to make sales on your blog, you need to have a decent media kit. There are plenty of companies that will share their media kits with you, so you can always learn from them. You also need to keep building your online assets so you can use them to lure advertisers. For instance, you should keep adding RSS subscribers and building up your Twitter presence. These small little details do make a difference.

How Much Should You Charge and Where To Get Advertisers?

These are the main questions that I get from new bloggers. How much should your charge for your ads? You should always take a look at what your competitors are doing, but you should use those numbers as a guideline. If you get a lot of traffic on your blog, you may afford to ask for a decent amount of money. But if you are just getting started, don’t go for unreasonable numbers. You can always start with a fixed fee and then graduate to “per 1000 impressions” model as you get more visitors to your blog.

How do you find advertisers? There are plenty of ways to do that. You can always contact the ones that are advertising on your competitors’ sites. You can also get aggressive and start calling and e-mailing businesses that can get some value out of advertising on your blog. You certainly don’t want to be passive here. Waiting for advertisers to come to you is not a good idea either.

At the end of the day, everything you need to start selling direct ads on your blog is available on the Internet and through your competitors. By watching what others are doing in your field and comparing their strategies, you can pick up the positives and ditch the negatives. Of course, when you get your feet wet, you are going to figure more things out by experience.

Your take: how would you go about selling ads on your blog?