How to sell ads.

There are two ways to earn via advertising: by using a third party advertising company to sell your ad space; and by selling the ads yourself. With a third party advertising company such as the contextual advertising network Google Adsense or banner advertising network such as Burst Media, the hard task of selling the ads for your space is already done for you. The downside, however, is that you get to keep only a certain percentage of the revenues and you have less control as to what types of ads are shown in your site.
If you sell the ads yourself, you get 100% of revenues and you can select which types of ads you want shown on your website. The task, however, is not simple, as you need to find these advertisers yourself. The key question you will be faced is how much you should charge for the ads. It is important to note that traffic is not the only consideration in setting the price.
There are different factors to consider when setting a price for the ads on the website:
•    How big is the site's traffic? A site that attracts millions of users a month can charge higher rates than a site that attracts only hundreds of users per month.
 
•    How established is the brand name of the site? A web site with an established brand name in its field can charge way more than a no-name site that has never been mentioned in the press or media.
 
•    How desirable is the site's target market? A site that attracts venture capitalists and CEOs can charge significantly higher than a site attracting teenagers, even though its traffic may only be less than 10% of what the teenager site reaches. The higher the income and spending potential of your audience, the higher the price of ads you can charge.
 
•    What is the ad payment going to be? Is it CPM or cost per impression where the advertiser pays for every 1,000 times the ad is viewed? Or will you charge a flat rate, whether on monthly or annual basis for long term sponsorships? Or are you going to charge CPC or cost per click where you get paid every time the ad is clicked on? Whatever the modality, it is important to have a reliable ad serving system that can help track the impressions and clicks that you can control and the client can access.
 
•    Where is the ad going to be placed? An ad above the fold can charge a higher price than an ad below the fold where it is not going to be readily visible to audiences.
 
•    What is the ad format that is going to be used? You can charge a higher rate with a leaderboard or large rectangle compared to a 125x125 button. You can also charge more for the more intrusive ads such as above-page or between-pages layer ad units, including EyeBlaster, Eyewonder, CheckM8, Pointroll, Viewpoint/Unicast, Klipmart, and Rovion. Determine what ad formats you want to run in your site and then set the price for each of the ad format you will use.
 
How extensive is the coverage of the ad on the site? An ad that will be placed in all of the ad formats of the site -- e.g. it will be the only ad shown in the banner, rectangle, skyscraper, text ad -- can be charged higher than an ad that will utilize only 1 ad format There are too many unknowns and variables to consider before you can put a price tag on an ad. .

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http://efuse.com/Grow/ads__the_basics.html
Summary
Pick a niche: It's important to be focused.
Get attention: It's vital to get people to your site.
Selling the traffic you have: where to go when you think you're ready.
Be specific: the more specific your topic, the higher the "cpm," or cost per thousand your site can charge.
The good news is anyone can set up a Web site since it's a relatively inexpensive endeavor. The bad news is everyone does set up a Web site precisely because it is so inexpensive. You have to think hard about how you're going to effectively compete against all those who are having thoughts similar to yours. The way to outsmart them is staying one step ahead by thinking through these issues.
Pick a niche
Don't try to be all things to all people. Your Web site will end up being a mile wide and a half-inch deep. Instead of speaking keenly to the specific needs of a tightly targeted audience, you'll say something watered down to many, thus not leaving a particularly memorable impression on anyone.
Ask yourself if your audience is narrow enough. That's right, narrow enough. The more highly defined your target group is, the more likely your Web site will meet the critical needs of that group. You will have to offer something to pull them into your Web site with some reliable frequency. It may be information, some utility (such as a calculator that is geared to the specifics of a given industry), a database, or an archive, or it may even be an attractive price on a cappuccino machine that serves 120 cups of java to your closest friends.
Attention! Figure out how to get it
Look, the last thing you want is to have your spiffy new site launched and no one shows up except for you and your competitors :) The biggest mistake I see today is people who blow their whole budget on Web site development and leave nothing for promotion and PR (public relations, as in distributing press releases). Do one of two things:
1.    Reserve a piece of the development budget for marketing. Of course, site developers won't love me for saying this because it means you'll have to scale back the site.
2.    Go back to the well and ask for more money. Tell management it needs to amortize the investment it is making in the site with a marketing budget or else it will have the slickest site nobody's ever heard of. There's a distinct look of realization when management realizes this wisdom. It's a bitter pill sometimes, but management will probably respect you for biting the bullet and raising the issue, if it hasn't been raised already. The alternative is something similar to a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the opening of a bridge that has no cars lined up to go across.
Pointing to your site on-line
You want to advertise your site on other sites. You might buy those on-line avails (availabilities) on other sites, or you may be able to save some money and barter ads between your site and others. . To read more about cooperative links with other sites, click here.
One of the best-kept advertising secrets on the Internet is advertising on e-mail mailing lists. There are more than 60,000 of them. Now, many of them don't accept ads, but lots of them do. Ads are cheap to buy and cost nothing to produce because it's all done in e-mail.
It's worth your valuable time to search these three databases and see which ones in your niche accept advertising: the List of Lists; Liszt ; and Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists. There are "one-way" lists such as my WDFMnewsletter, which goes from me to 12,000+ people. "Two-way" lists are discussion lists, such as Online-Ads. Here, 6,000+ recipients can talk to each other. Make sure you advertise on a moderated list where the moderator keeps the discussions on the topic.
Ultimately, whether you advertise with banners on sites or on lists, make sure you give your target group a darn good reason to come to your Web site.
Pointing to your site off-line
You must, must, must consider off-line promotion of your Web site as integral to your plan to attract traffic to your site. Maybe your content or attraction is so good it gets talked about and pointed to in the trade press. Nothing builds traffic like a third-party editorial endorsement. Print or broadcast ads are a big help, too, if you have the budget for it. Remember, you can barter with a print publication the same way you can with another Web site.
Think about having an event on your site to draw in visitors. Even better, design a campaign with weekly or monthly events. Whatever it is, it has to be snazzy enough to prompt people to write down the URL, go to their computer, fire up their browser, and go to your site. You must give them something juicy enough to sink their cyberteeth into:)
Selling the traffic you have
Many sites get erected because they have an interesting editorial angle. Amazingly, many of these sites don't think twice about how they're going to sell the advertising "avails" that are created. You have to ask yourself some serious questions here.
Are you going to hire a "rep" to sell those avails? How much will you pay him or her? A good one isn't cheap. Will you have reps in L.A. and New York, where much of the media sales happen? Even if yours is a local site, this isn't entirely out of the question.
Perhaps you'll farm out the sales. Often, a rep earns a percentage of the sale plus some "draw," or money up front that keeps him happy until those sales start to come in. The ratio is often 50:50, but there is no hard and fast rule here. Some reps are paid entirely on a commission basis, but to attract a good salesperson, you have to have a hot product that many people want right off the bat.
Check out ad auctions (where you can buy excess inventory of ad avails cheaply in an auction-style environment) such as Flycast.com. Or you may want to be part of an ad banner network (which allows the buyer to purchase ad avails across scores of web sites, instead of just one), such as DoubleClick. Many of the large networks deal in huge volumes and would need millions of impressions (or avails) a month to make it worth their while. You have to ask yourself, "What am I going to do to draw millions of impressions to my site?"
If you think you'll be generating fewer than a few million impressions to your site, look into Ad-Venture Network, which has a minimum requirement of 500,000 impressions from you monthly and sometimes less, if you have a unique high-end audience. Ad-Venture works with you in three ways:
1. It will rep your site as a stand-alone site, rather than part of a network. The cpm rate asked for on your behalf with this plan is between $30 and $50.
2. It will include your site in an "affinity network," which groups your site with others of similar ilk. This is helpful when selling avails since Ad-Venture often will do campaigns based on sports, business/finance, or games. The cpm here is slightly less than the first option because it is a little less targeted.
3. Run of network. In this option, ads will appear on your site that are somewhat random but are sold at a cheaper rate. The asking price for this plan to the advertiser is $25 cpm. Be aware that most rate cards are negotiable and advertisers know that. They're apt to ask for discounts, sometimes very deep discounts.
In addition, Ad-Venture sells other types of avails, such as sponsorships, button placements, or a position on your e-mail update service. With Ad-Venture, there is no up-front cost for you. If it sells avails on your site, it will pass along the cost of serving the ads, which is about 50 cents cpm and then charge you the agreed-to commission.
Another place you want to check out is LinkExchange, which allows you to barter ads on your site for exposure on other sites. The ratio is typically two ads appearing on your site for every one of yours appearing elsewhere. You won't make money doing this, but it's a good way to turn unsold ad avails on your site into exposure on other sites that will build your traffic and awareness. Know that just about every single site out there on the Web has a good amount of unsold ad space. You might as well put it to work with LinkExchange.
Beware. Some ad networks gather and use the data collected from your site. Some may supply it to their clients, while others promise to use it only for internal statistical analysis. This may or may not be an issue for you, but ask about it whenever you're discussing a relationship with an ad network. It's not the sort of thing you'd want to have as a surprise down the road.
Comprehensive information
The best place to find information about all the available ad banner services is Mark Welch's banner advertising site. This site offers comprehensive information about the various services for banners and firsthand information about which services pay and which are scams. It's required reading if you're considering banner ads for your site.
Be specific
The more specific your topic, the higher the "cpm," or cost per thousand. This means you can charge more for the eyeballs of hard-to-find people. Look to the magazine universe for an analogy. Fortune magazine or Ad Age will get more money per reader than People or the Enquirer. Your cost per visitor will be higher and you're apt to have fewer of them because it is a smaller audience, but they'll be more interested in what you have to offer. To augment your advertising revenues, you may want to syndicate your content. I do this with my Web Digest For Marketers (WDFM) newsletter. I license the short reviews in batches of 10. I call them "ten-packs." Since I've already written the reviews, I can sell them for less than what it would cost another publication to make.
Finally, I've found that having testimonials from advertisers on my site is an extraordinarily potent selling tool. If the ads that ran in my newsletter were successful, I ask the advertisers to write a brief paragraph about what they liked. For their efforts, I always thank them by offering a discount on a future ad or sending them a copy of my book, Essential Business Tactics for the Net. By the way, without announcing it, I always send a copy of my book to people who have advertised. I find that brings in repeat business. Free samples are always a good idea, unless you're in real estate :)
Finally—are you going to make a fortune selling advertising on your site? Probably not. Are you going to pay back your site's expenses? Possibly. But it depends on your expenses, your site's focus, and its desirability to advertisers. But if you're interested in having your site generate income, taking ads can help you do that--if you're prepared and know what you're getting into.

In this lesson, I will cover 5 steps to selling your own ads:
1.    Make room for your ads and get some up before you try to make sales
2.    Contact your competitors.
3.    Set your prices.
4.    Create a solid advertising page.
5.    Contact potential advertisers.
Step 1 - Make room for your ads and get them up.
You will have a hard time selling ads if you don’t already have ads sitting there. This means you need to create a section for the ads now.
A very popular and effective format for selling ads is the 125×125 ad banners in the sidebar. I use this ad placement and it has worked out very nicely for me. Your sidebar will need to be at least 260 pixels wide to use the 2-column placement that I have. If your sidebar isn’t wide enough, you could use a single column.
In order to make sales, your ad section will need to appear as high as possible in the sidebar. I took a look at some of the big sites in my industry and tried to match their placement.
In order to be able to charge the same amount to all of the advertisers, I knew that I would need the banners to rotate. To make them rotate, I used a plugin called Got Banners. The page I got it from no longer exists so I guess I’ll just post it here: Got Banners Download. You basically install a little piece of code in the sidebar and then manage the banners by going to Options>>Got Banners (Settings>>Got Banners in WP 2.5+) in your WordPress admin.
Some of you may want to sell advertising on your sites. This could be very effective if you do it right. Create a section where you can put the banners now, and we’ll discuss making the sale later on in this lesson. If I had a bunch of niche sites, I would probably create the section in a theme that I could use on all or most of my sites. Your enemy with that approach is wasted time, and using the same theme will save tons of time.
Another very common ad placement is the 728×60 banner like the one they use at SparkPlugging.com. They don’t sell their own ads as far as I can tell, but the placement is what we’re looking at. Again, you have to create the placement before you can make the sale.
What banners do you put in until you can make sales? I would use affiliate banners from sites like NeverBlueAds and AzoogleAds. They have all different sizes of banners that should fit in nicely on almost every site. You can also use banners that point to other sites that you are trying to establish.
Perception is everything when it comes to making these sales and you have to put your best foot forward. Trying to sell banners when you don’t have any banners in your section will be a HUGE waste of time.
Step 2 - Contact your competitors.
At this point of the process, you are NOT trying to sell advertising to your competitors. You are simply going to contact them to determine the rates they sell advertising for. Many of your competitors will have the rates published somewhere on their sites, others will have to be contacted via email or telephone. You should ask how much they charge, and how many impressions (total hits on pages the ad is on) you could expect to get per month if you were to purchase an ad spot.
Step 3 - Set your prices.
Once you have determined how much your competitors are selling advertising for, you will be able to set your prices accordingly. You should figure out exactly how much your competitors are charging per impression.
If your competitor can deliver more impressions than you each month, you will want to lower the amount you charge per impression by a slight amount, something like 10%. If you can deliver more impressions than your competitor, I would increase the amount you charge per impression by 10%. After you start selling ads it will become easier to determine whether you can sell your ads for more or not - this formula is here only to get you started.
Example: Your competitor is charging $500 per month for an ad spot and can deliver 500,000 impressions to that ad each month. That means he/she is charging $0.001 per impression. That’s 1/10th of a cent.
If you can deliver 50,000 impressions to an ad, charging the same amount per impression would give you a price of $50 per month. Lowering your rate by 10% would give you a monthly price of $45. This gives a slightly better value than your competitor, which is a trade off for not being able to deliver as many impressions.
Step 4 - Create a solid advertising page.
9 out every 10 banners I sell are sold directly from my ‘Advertise‘ page. In order to sell advertising, you will need to put your best foot forward - talk about your strengths as a site.
Possible Strengths:
•    High amount of traffic
•    Valuable traffic - maybe you don’t have that much but you have people that are looking to spend a few thousand dollars on a cosmetic surgery or something.
•    Targeted traffic
•    Solid organic traffic - Organic traffic has a longer attention span than social traffic.
•    Good rankings for solid keywords
•    Loyal traffic
I use PayPal subscription buttons to make the sales on my advertising page. That way, all of my ads are sold on subscription. During the first few months I sold my own advertising, I created a HUGE hassle for myself by not selling on subscription. I had to invoice each advertiser every month and that ended up being a major pain. Switching to the subscription method made my life a lot easier.
These subscription buttons can easily be made from your PayPal account. You simply go to ‘Merchant Services’ and then click the ’subscribe’ link in the ‘Create Buttons’ section. It will have a simple form that you will use to create the button, and will then give you code that you will paste in on your advertising page.
Step 5 - Contact potential advertisers.
At this point you basically have two options. Firstly, you could wait around hoping that you can make advertising sales from the traffic you currently have. I’m doing this now, and am selling out my advertising almost every month. However, in the beginning I was a lot more aggressive, because I needed to be.
After I created my ad sections and set my pricing, I contacted all of the companies that were advertising on my competitors’ sites. This resulted in some sales during the first week. I didn’t have an awesome sales rate, but was able to get a few because I contacted so many people. I want to say I contacted about 30 and sold maybe 3.
When I emailed these companies about the possibility of advertising on my site, I let them know that I was offering advertising at a better rate than other sites they were advertising on.
It’s very wise to contact some sites in the beginning, because once you have some legit advertisers, it becomes a lot easier to sell to more.
One trick that I considered using (in the end I didn’t have to) was selling a few spots at a huge discount. For example, you could contact a premium advertiser in your industry and offer them an ad spot for $1 per month. That gets a high-end advertiser in your ad section and that looks great to potential advertisers. As an alternate method, you could tell them that you would like to give them free advertising for a few months. That way, you get a premium advertiser in your ad section and might be able to sell to them after the free period ends.
Conclusion
Selling your own advertising can result in a lot more profit for your online business. Making that sale will require creating a good perception and providing a little more value than your competitors. This value can be provided by either providing more impressions or a better rate per impression.

Ten Great Ways To Sell Advertising On Your Website
by Scott F. Geld

1. Offer a discount to your customers when they spend over a certain dollar amount for ad space. You can also apply this tip to the amount of ads they buy.

2. Offer your customers a free bonus for renewing their ad order. It could be an ebook, special report, online utility, etc.

3. Sell advertising space between your content. You just break an article in half and insert the banner or classified ad between it.

4. Write content that's tailor made to mention and relate to the product your customers are advertising. This is more work but, you'll sell a lot of ads.

5. Tell your customers when they buy an ad you'll also add it to your free ebook and message board for free.

6. Offer to endorse the product your customers are advertising before or after their ad. In all honesty, you would have try out the product first.

7. Write a review for your customer's product to place under their ad. This is similar to a testimonial or endorsement but more in-depth.

8. Offer a buy 2 ads and get 1 free deal. With the slow economy and advertising sales, most businesses are bound to be looking for a good ad deal.

9. Give your customers a ton of free bonuses when they buy ad space. It can be submission software, an ebook full of advertising or copywriting tips, etc.

10. Guarantee your customer's advertising results. If they don't like the traffic they receive, give them a refund or another ad for free.