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Advertising Your Site The Correct Way - Part 2

Posted: 27 Mar 2008 07:42 PM CDT

Since I introduced you guys to part 1 of my “Advertising Your Site The Correct Way” post series, I figured it is now time to show you part 2. Ok, so now you guys have an idea on how you should go out to purchase ad spots. Purchasing ad spots should be a lot easier for you now, but what about when you want to provide advertising spots on your site? Lets say that you’re an owner of a few billboards stands around the world (you know…the ones by the freeways) and you decide to sell the spots for advertisements. Depending on how you go about, you will receive different types of offers and results.

There are always correct ways to do things and there are always wrong ways. You can’t help but to try things out to know what might happen. Well, I’m going to provide you some tips on how it should be done. Of course it is mainly based on my opinion, but I have strong opinions, so I hope this will help.

Providing Advertising Spots

Alright, now lets get to work. You’re now interested in providing advertising spots for people to purchase, so you decide to set up a location on your site for these spots. Before you actually do this, ask yourself if you’re ready for it. If your site is fairly new and have very low traffic rate, I will suggest you not to sell spots yet. Having a high Alexa rank or a high bounce rate does not mean you should provide spots either. A high Alexa rank means nothing because anyone can have a lot of traffic, but not authentic real traffic. This is where bounce rates will come in because the higher the rate, the more it means ads are clicked on less by people that are actually interested. Some advertisements on your site might receive 100s of clicks, but ask your advertiser what the usual time range the visitors stay on the site. If you’re going to provide ad spots that only gives me a click with 1-5 seconds view time, I will not even bother. Do not scam your advertisers. Make friends with them

How Many Spots?

Now after all that fiasco I just talked about, how many spots are you going to provide for advertising purposes? Make sure you start out small and go bigger as more advertisers come to you. An average start out is about 2-4 125×125 ads and 1 468×60 ad. You probably won’t even receive that many advertisers in the beginning anyways, so make sure you don’t place too much. The more you have, the more “BLANKS” you’ll have and the more people will leave. As your site grows, advertisements on the sidebar or the top will not matter anymore because your content would probably overpower any distractions

Where Do You Place The Ads?

Placing the ads in the correct places is the hardest part of selling advertising spots on your site. You won’t know what your visitors would like to see and where they would like to see them. Another thing is if you put the ads out of view, you will also receive less advertisers, so what do you do? A new thing I’ve been trying here on Bloggin-Ads is “HEATMAPS”. What heatmaps basically tells you is where your visitors click and where they’re zoomed in on most of the time. Crazy Egg is a site offering these features for free, so make sure you sign up.

It helps you:

Find the right spot for your ads
Find the right layout for a page
Find the right place to put everything

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE NO BLANK SPOTS, FILL THEM IN WITH AFFILIATE SITES!

Pricing / Rates

Making money seems to be a thing now and everyone wants to make something online, so why not through selling advertising spots. This sub-topic is a no brainer because the higher you charge for advertising, the lower the amount of people would actually inquire about your spots. I have seem a lot of site owners selling ad spots successfully at $1-5/month because it is quite a bargain and you do get some clicks. As your site grows, you could slowly raise the price. Basing your pricing and rates on your Alexa rank no longer works too well in my opinion. Site owners are gaming their Alexa ranks with other sites like Entrecard. A high rank does not mean maximum authentic results as I have mentioned in part 1.

Provide Stats - A good way to get eyes zoomed in to your advertising page is to provide some stats. Stats are good because advertisers that are interested do not have to dig around for your stats when it is just right in front of their eyes. Take a look at my advertising page. I only provide the bare essential stats like Alexa rank, Technorati rank, RSS subscribers, monthly pageviews, and monthly uniques.
Provide Testimonials - If you have had advertisers in the past, make sure you ask them for a favor of writing a testimonial for your advertising page. After putting a testimonial up by Tyler Cruz and Max Lee (SiteHoppin’), I managed to snag a few more advertisers

Organize And Simplify Things

I have been using a great advertising organizing program called OIOPublisher for quite some time now. For the price of $37, this plugin really does make things A LOT easier for both the owner and the people purchasing your ad spots. The creator Simon Emery has had so much success with this creation that he even created a “LITE” version of the plugin, so the ones that don’t have $37 may also try some of the features. Here are a few things I like about this plugin and how it helped me (see it in action in my sidebar)

Creates a whole sidebar widget, so no coding necessary. The ads will automatically rotate with each refresh.
Allows you to have any size ad (mainly 125×125), InPost Links, Product Selling, Paid Reviews, and more.
Stats are tracked and advertisers are also e-mailed weekly with weekly stats (my favorite feature).
Great 50% paying affiliate program!

Don’t let me stop your there. You can try out the plugin in this DEMO version, but if you’re ready, purchase the plugin here. Even if you don’t wish to pay for the Full-Version, using the Lite version is still better than any other type of code or script being used elsewhere. The full version price is just a small investment that will return big.

Project Wonderful’s Trick?

I’m sure a majority of you have tried advertising through Project Wonderful’s system. If you haven’t heard of them before, here’s some information. Although I have never used them before to provide ad spots, I have heard they’re fairly easy to use. You basically put in their code and people will be able to advertise on your site through Project Wonderful’s dashboard. Another creative thing they use is the option to bid on the advertising spot you want.

$/Day Rate + Bidding

I mention Project Wonderful is a trick because using their code on your site provides advertising for a “DAILY COST RATE”. What that means is you will be paying the spot per day, but people can outbid you on the spot. If you bid on a advertising spot on a certain site that has a $0.30 minumum bid, others will be able to outbid you. If I’m correct (correct me if I’m wrong), you lose your money if others outbid you after you had gets posted up. I don’t really like this idea, but it seems to work for a lot of people. PW is lucky that Entrecard uses their services otherwise they won’t receive this much exposure. The only thing I like is you can advertise on a site for as many days as you want and you will not be limited to paying for 30 days.

PW…those bastards…tricked me in a way because I didn’t know advertising is per day, so I deposited $5, but only got like a few days out of that. I know it’s my fault, but it sort of is confusing if you’re new to it

Stuck In One Group

PW is currently stuck in one group crowd and that is Entrecard. I don’t really see anyone using the PW code without being an Entrecard member. What this means is that you will get 90% of your views from other Entrecard members. If I recall, Entrecard is free and others will already see you and click on your link at no cost.

Now that both the 2 part posts are complete, I hope you have some ideas on how you should advertise and how you should provide advertising spots. If you haven’t had the chance to read part 1, please make sure you do first. I did mention I will have some topics relating Entrecard in this post, but I have decided that it is a bigger controversy and it will be published in its own post. :). Although it doesn’t matter if you do or not since both posts are two different topics, I still suggest you do.