Selling Advertising on your Blog

Blogs are a great medium for selling advertising. And charging people to advertise their products of services are a great way to support yourself and your blogging efforts. There will come a time when advertisers will approach you to be on your site, but that only comes with a big readership and reputation. This post is designed to help you start the process and to win your first few advertisers.

Get Set up to Offer Advertising

The first step is to set your blog up to accept advertising. All blogging platforms come with optional widgets or modules to help with this. Research the options and decide what fits best with your blog. The convention in blogging is currently to offer 125 by 125 pixel adverts, which can sit quite nicely in the sidebar, with six or even eight being above the fold. The long banners we use to see at the head or foot of the page are rare now. An alternative to having a row of adverts is to use a revolving advert system, which I have on this blog. There are actually 6 adverts over to the right, but only one displays at a time. If you refresh now, you’ll see another one.

You need to establish a way to record statistics, and most advertising add-ons will show views and clicks. So, get the module added and let’s move on to the next step

How Much Should you Charge?

The price of advertising on the internet is always directly related to the amount of traffic likely to see an advert. Current convention is that blog advertising should cost somewhere between 0.5% and 1.5% CPM, but what does that mean? CPM is “Cost per Mille” or cost per thousand page impressions. Therefore if your blog has 10,000 page impressions per month, an advert on it should cost between $5 and $15 per month (page views divided by 1000 and then either 0.5% or 1.5%). This is merely a guide and you should adjust your own advertising costs to suit your niche and to reflect what competitors are charging.

Start off by working out that span of 0.5% to 1.5% based on your blog’s traffic, then go and have a look at what competitors are charging – they’ll often have pricing on their sites. Now you need to make a decision on your own pricing, based on that knowledge.

I took the decision early on to price advertising on all three blogs very low. It was a strategic decision – I wanted advertisers to think it was a “no brainer” to make the sales process easy and to get them on board. Part of the reasoning was also that advertising was only a very small part of the overall income strategy. Our current advertisers know they’re getting a bargain, and they also know that the prices will go up as traffic improves.

Creating an “Advertise Here” page

Now that you’ve decided on pricing, you need to create a page to tell people the benefits and how much it will cost them. It should have a menu button on the blog and you can simply send a link to that page when you start to get enquiries.

The page needs to be simple and clear – don’t offer too many choices. It should tell prospective advertisers in detail:

• The blog’s traffic
• How much the adverts cost
• What information you will provide them with in terms of views and clicks
• Whether they have to design the advert or if you can
• What the next step is

For an example, have a look at my page here.

Using the space

Once you’re all set up and ready to go, you need to fill the space. There’s nothing worse than seeing a blog with six empty spaces for adverts boldly stating “Advertise Here” – it’s worse than an empty restaurant!  There are a number of ways to fill those spaces initially:

• Use them for other sites you own
• Use them to advertise your own products
• Use them to advertise affiliate programs you support
• Use them as reciprocal adverts for other bloggers – you put their blog advert on your site, and they put an ad for yours on their site
• Use them for a charity you support

Selling the advertising

Sadly, doing all of the above is unlikely to get you a flood of people begging to have an advert on your site! You’re going to need to sell some space yourself. Start by making a prospect list of people who you think would benefit from being on your site:

• Begin with friends and family – do any of them have websites which would benefit from traffic from your site?
• Suppliers are always a good source – who designed your website, printed your business cards, what about your accountant?
• Next think about businesses in your town – your local restaurants, the car dealership, the real estate agents
• What about your niche? List the businesses that target your niche – these are your key prospects
• Finally there are your web “Friends” – people and businesses you know on social media sites, who again, would benefit from traffic and links

Going through that lot should give you a decent list to begin talking about advertising. I’d recommend deciding on an approach strategy on an individual basis. You’ll want to call some of them, email others and perhaps even Tweet a few! However you decide to contact them, be positive and be direct: “I’m offering advertising on my blog, which is now getting more than 10,000 page views per month, and I’m sure your business would benefit from an advertisement linking to your website.” That’s the sort of language I use whether on the phone, in person or via email.

One tactic you can use is to offer a free period – at the end of the day, the space is free! If you’re struggling to convince someone to go for it, let them have a free space for a month. Then when you go back to them you can have another go at selling them some space. It can be quite powerful to say “Your advert was viewed by 3000 people last month and 12 of them clicked through to your website.”

So that’s how to approach and implement advertising on your blog. Until your blog becomes huge, advertising won’t make your fortune, but it can and should provide a steady base income.

Do you currently offer advertising on your blog? How’s it going? Do you have any great ideas for selling advertising?

Also have a look at:

1/ When to start making money from your blog

2/ The ultimate footer ad

3/ Making money from your blog – Remember to have fun