Advertising is one of the easiest ways to earn money on the Web. You don’t have inventory to worry about, no shipping and fulfillment problems, and there is minimal credit card fraud risk (though believe me, there are scammers who use stolen credit cards to pay to advertise their website).
To earn from advertising, you can opt to use a third party service such as a banner ad like Burst Media or contextual ad networks such as Google Adsense. They get the advertisers and you just cut and paste a code to display on your site. Of course, they get a percentage of the revenues your site generates ranking from 30-60 percent. Our article “How to Generate Advertising Revenues for Your Web Site” provides a more extensive discussion on how to apply to banner ad networks and the like.
But how do you go about it if you want to get advertisers directly to your site, without intermediaries such as the banner ad networks or Google Adsense?
At Powerhomebiz, we sell advertising space on our website – both banners via CPM, sponsored text links, and newsletter advertising. In our experience, here are what advertisers are looking for when choosing sites to use for their advertising:
1. Who are the visitors = It is important for advertisers to know whether your site’s visitors are what they are after. More than just traffic numbers, they want to know whether they can get targeted traffic from your website. They want to know whether the customers they want are visiting your site.
2. Traffic levels = Advertisers will often ask you how many visitors/pageviews/uniques you get in a month. Some will go to Alexa.com to check your traffic standing (not accurate, but many see it as a good guide). If you are selling banners through CPM rates for example, they will normally ask you how long it will take you to show the 20,000 ad impressions they ordered (or how many they ordered).
3. Your rates = how comparable your rates are with others.
4. Customer service = advertisers want QUICK support from sites they want to advertise on. You need to be quick to respond to their emails, whether inquiring for your media kit or asking your ad rates or checking the performance of their ad campaigns.The key to understand is that advertisers will always look for metrics to help them gauge the ROI they can get from advertising in your website. If they don’t think your site will not give them a good ROI, they will not advertise or renew their advertising on your site
5. Monitor campaign performance = advertisers want to see how their campaigns are doing on your site, so they can make decisions fairly quickly whether to change the creative, pause the campaign or increase the campaign. You need to be able to provide them with real time statistics. We use phpadsnew and it is just great (and FREE!).
Good content, very helpful.
Thanks!