How To Sell Your Blog’s Advertising

49 Comments May 26, 2007 / Posted in Advertising, Blog Development

How To Sell Your Blog's Advertising

I believe private advertising is the best way to monetize your blog without sacrificing the user experience. Private advertising is now the only way I am monetizing my blog, as I recently said goodbye to CPC advertising (Adsense and Konterra) because they litter the blog with low-paying and often irrelevant ads.

Over the past month, quite a few people have asked me how I sold most of my blog’s advertising spots without using Text-Link-Ads or any other ad-brokering program. There are many advantages of selling your advertisingly privately, most importantly being that you keep 100% of the income instead of having to split it with a brokering agent.

Think Like an Advertiser

You have to look at how advertisers choose to advertise - generally, it comes down to how popular a blog appears to be. Unless the blog is already receiving several hundred visitors per day, generally, it needs at least a PageRank of 4 to make any decent ad money. I waited until Google updated my PageRank before actively trying to push my advertising.

Advertisers will consider a variety of factors when deciding which blog to advertise with. Things that advertisers take into consideration include:

  • Niche of blog
  • PageRank
  • Alexa ranking
  • Technorati ranking
  • Number of RSS subscribers
  • Number of Backlinks
  • Age of blog
  • Posting frequency
  • Average daily visitors and pageviews
  • Number of comments left by community

Here are a few hints on how to sell your blog’s advertising quickly:

1. Competitively price your ads.
The best way to decide what to charge for your ads is to visit similar blogs in your community that have similar rankings. You can also scour the Link Sales section of forums such as DigitalPoint and see how much other blogs are charging per link.

If you have to, underprice all your ads in order to sell them out initially. You can always raise the prices once you sell out all your ads - that’s the rule of supply and demand.

Generally, if you are just starting to sell your ads, a competitive price for a text link on a PR 4 blog is around $10 per month.

2. Make it clear on your blog you are offering advertising.
This is obvious for most seasoned bloggers, but include a special page on your blog dedicated to your advertising options. Mention all of your rankings (Alexa, PageRank, etc.) and add a contact form to the page.

You might even create “Advertise Here” banners for all the blank spots you are planning to sell.

3. Offer multi-month discounts.
By offering slight multi-month discounts, you are giving your advertisers incentive to stick to a longer term contract. Many advertisers who buy text links would rather do so in three-month spurts, as that is how often Google’s PageRank is updated.

4. Actively seek out advertisers.
I have had great success advertising my advertising on the DigitalPoint Link Sales forum. I copied the text on my Advertising page and mentioned my pricing and discounts. Within a few hours, I had sold half of all my text links.

One thing to note is that in order to post in the DP Link Sales forum, you must have previously made 25 replies or posts in other sections of the forum.

5. Go above and beyond by showing your advertisers you truly value them.
Once a month, I like to write a post thanking both my advertisers and top commentators for their support. Going above and beyond is not something everyone does, so this kind of extra link love really shows that you appreciate their contributions.

Conclusion

Hopefully, by employing these techniques you will start to sell advertising on your blog or web site. I shared some of these secrets with David Wilkinson last night and he sold most of his ad spots within a few hours.

As I mentioned earlier, it is difficult to sell advertising without any PageRank. However, by competitively pricing your ads, you can sell ads on any blog. Don’t be afraid to set your prices low initially, because you can always raise them once your ad spots fill up.

Even though Text-Link-Ads and other brokers provide a great service, you do not need them to effectively monetize your blog.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me.

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  1. naveen said on May 26th, 2007 at 10:05 pm

    how should i publish my blog add

  2. Funny Video Clips said on May 26th, 2007 at 11:28 pm

    It would seem as though blog owners are really starting to realize the benefit of their sites in relation to advertisers. I seem to be seeing more and more blogs that are handling th ad sales themselves like you’re doing Nate. I think it’s a great thing to not have to give a broker 50% of the fee and you gain control over the system. Hopefully this is the beginning of a very competitive time that sees Google and the other heavyweights sit up and take notice - and hopefully start sharing a higher percentage with the publishers.

  3. Blancarte said on May 26th, 2007 at 11:51 pm

    nice post, sir! i agree 100% with your methods.

  4. Josh Buckley said on May 27th, 2007 at 6:51 am

    Great tips nate! I’ll be sure to try it on my site

    Now, you should delete some of the comment spam ^^

  5. Nate Whitehill said on May 27th, 2007 at 4:33 pm

    Hey Josh, thanks for the comments. LOL yeah…. That person has been mass-spamming by blog for the past few days now.

  6. Adnan said on May 28th, 2007 at 6:36 am

    Hey Nate - I’ve been to your blog a few times now - great post.
    I recently added some advertising options, I think I need to lower the price a little now ;)

  7. Stephen Welton said on May 28th, 2007 at 8:17 am

    Great tips. Will have to use them once my site has been established as one worthy of being visited on a regular basis by loyal readers.

    Thanks for taking the time to put this together for everyone.

    Stephen

  8. Wolf Stone said on May 28th, 2007 at 12:39 pm

    i guess i have my work cut out for me.. all i have to do is have 25 replies or posts in DP Link Sales forum..and of i go !! Thanks nate…some essential information!!

  9. David Wilkinson said on May 29th, 2007 at 2:23 pm

    Yep - these tactics realyl DO work. A few hundred dollars in my PayPal account in under 48 hours speaks for me. ;) Hehe…

    Just dropped some link-love: http://www.techzi.net/articles/2007/05/29/entrepreneurs-making-a-living-online/

  10. Angie said on June 2nd, 2007 at 8:06 am

    I’m nowhere near being able to sell space on the blog I am putting most of my effort into right now, but I found your artricle so helpful. I’ll be coming back to consult it again, but for now it really helped me figure out some of the direction I need have for the time being.

    I agree about Adsense. No good for blogs. I have one static site where it does VERY well, but other than that it’s just clutter.

  11. Jamdo said on June 5th, 2007 at 11:59 pm

    Nice wrap up and I agree 100% with everyhing you say - in fact I have used most of the techniques you mention to monetise a few of my other blogs - and they work!!

  12. Saman Sadeghi said on July 1st, 2007 at 10:13 pm

    Great article Nate!

    Question: how are you collecting the income - PayPal?

  13. Saman Sadeghi said on July 4th, 2007 at 1:48 pm

    OK, after doing a little research on your site, I see that you’re accepting PayPal. Did you have to become a merchant or do any special setup?

  14. Sucker said on July 10th, 2007 at 4:06 am

    I’m not used to seeing anything under PR6 go for $10/month on the DP forums.

  15. ken said on July 12th, 2007 at 6:37 am

    I miss out this post. this is a great read for next action plan after buying your idea about private ads is the best:)

  16. Simon said on July 29th, 2007 at 2:14 pm

    My blog has yet to be ranked by google as its still only a month and a half old, but I’ll be sure to keep these tips in reserve for when I decide to go in the direction of private advertising.

    Thanks for the input
    Simon

  17. Lizzie said on August 9th, 2007 at 7:03 am

    Great post Nate, thanks for the info. We will have to apply this method to our travel blog. Do you think we should go to a travel forum instead of DP to seek out advertisers?

  18. Nate Whitehill said on August 10th, 2007 at 6:47 am

    Hi Lizzie, I think that DP will work just fine for selling text links. However, if you are concerned with contextually relevant advertisements, I would seek out a travel forum as well. Good luck!

  19. Study Guide said on August 12th, 2007 at 3:18 am

    Great tips. It’s a shame most people don’t look at it from the advertisers perspective…

  20. Tech Bold said on August 19th, 2007 at 10:34 am

    Good tips!

    But for those who have just started out or are not in the A-list, getting direct advertisers can be hard.

  21. Charles Lau said on August 22nd, 2007 at 12:26 am

    looks like it is only feasible to sell ads when your blog is of certain age and certain crowd and page rank…

  22. KingJacob said on August 24th, 2007 at 8:45 pm

    But its worth the work because the more money you earn the more you can spend to make your blog an a-lister.

  23. sajid said on August 26th, 2007 at 2:37 pm

    someone want to advertise on my site?

  24. Ashwini said on September 1st, 2007 at 10:46 am

    Just signed up for DP forums…but will hav to wait 2 weeks before I can put my post on the Selling thread..
    I hope I will b able to sell off my links
    but nate,
    My Blog currently has a PR of 3
    it means the prices should be extremely low although , during this time’s BL export, I am getting some 800 Google Backlinks.My blog’s also ranked 800 in technorati

    once I go selling for lower prices, and PR export happens, wouldn’t advertiser consider my blog a poor quality 1 selling off links at that price?

  25. tides said on October 20th, 2007 at 11:44 pm

    thanks for this nice post…

  26. Tiff@Three Peas in a Pod said on November 13th, 2007 at 9:33 pm

    This is exactly the info i was looking for!! Thanks a bunch!

  27. TV on the Web said on January 9th, 2008 at 1:08 am

    Thanks so much for this post. This is a very good primer on selling ads. I run a few blogs–the one I linked here gets the most traffic for me. I’ve been considering looking for advertisers directly rather than using adsense and CJ. Adsense works well for me, but CJ hasn’t converted once, which I’m surprised about.

    Your tip to go to the digitalpoint forum is good advice. I’ll start there. And I’ll be back to read more here.

  28. KG Lew said on May 12th, 2008 at 7:29 pm

    Thanks for sharing these tips on advertising. I am actually waiting to get a PR change before I offer advertisement on my new blog…

  29. John said on May 13th, 2008 at 7:54 am

    Hello NWH, I still do not understand, selling links is the 100% black hat tactics, so why to follow advertisement tactics, Google rules now a days, still if one wants to sell links on his blog not much more effective if Google panelized it. what do you think for the same.
    Is there any way to handle this problem?

  30. Great Love Story said on May 15th, 2008 at 5:19 am

    I have free hosted blog on which every right within the community website, so i can not sell advertisement till now, but i have promoted my blog a lot and now it had 3 pr as well as good rankings in serp, than how can i get now advertisement through it?

  31. Online Products Shopping said on May 27th, 2008 at 10:28 am

    Well it’s very tough to make an advertisement on well established blog.
    It’s always have fear to get penalize by Google because of advertisements.

  32. Sexy Wallpapers said on June 7th, 2008 at 11:30 pm

    Most advertisers who consider PR are those who into PPP.

  33. SEO FAQ said on June 16th, 2008 at 6:34 am

    Where can i buy web sites on the internet other than sitepoint and digitalpoint.com?

  34. Traveldeals said on July 18th, 2008 at 8:54 pm

    Great idea
    But digitalpoint prices are too low.. and lot of sellers. Hard to stay on the board :D

  35. Poems MD said on August 4th, 2008 at 5:53 am

    ok, the pointers have sense ;)

  36. Florida Search Engine Optimization said on August 4th, 2008 at 10:49 pm

    This is Great tips, Nate, I am about to start advertising on my blog will help me a lot.

  37. textlinkspro.com said on August 6th, 2008 at 10:06 am

    another service for selling and buying links is http://www.textlinkspro.com

  38. amine said on August 29th, 2008 at 10:53 pm

    yes its tru i agree with you

  39. Kristen said on May 5th, 2009 at 2:43 pm

    So..how can I tell what my traffic is for my blog in order to start selling Ad space? How do I find out what my PageRank is? I’ve listed my blog space above for you to view.
    Thanks!!! :)

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