Direct advertising sales can be a huge opportunity for established websites to increase their revenue. Direct advertising is great for bloggers and smaller websites because you are not required to deal with an intermediary – you keep every cent you make.
Think about it this way. If you sell a banner through an ad network and that banner is worth $40 per month, you will get less than its true value because the ad network has to take their cut. If there are people willing to pay $40 for ad space why should you sell it for less? There is no reason why you’d have to share the profits with a middleman, that is, if you can find advertisers on your own.
What You Need To Be Successful In Direct Advertising Sales
In order to attract advertisers, the site must have good traffic and valuable content because almost every time the advertiser won’t waste time paying for banners displayed in places where there are little chances of making good profits.
If you didn’t reach yet a point where you have around 1,000 unique visitors on a daily basis, this method may not be the most effective way of monetizing your website. In this case, it’s necessary to do some SEO work first to improve your rankings in search engines.
Your blog or site should have a very clear focus because advertisers’ purpose is to have as much targeted ads as possible to increase the chance of selling their service or products.
Make sure your blog looks professional and has an effective web design. If you don’t have experience in the field of web design, it’s recommended that you pay someone to do the job for you.
It’s a very useful investment because sponsors will often associate their product with the place where it’s promoted. Sponsors don’t want to deal with ugly sites. So, the look matters a lot. When hiring a web designer, you should tell him that your purpose is to make your site attractive for advertisers. If he’s experienced, he’ll know what to do.
How to Connect With Advertisers
Make sure you have a dedicated Advertise Here page where you write all the reasons why your site is the best place to place an ad. Talk about traffic, audience, search engines rankings and special awards. Briefly, here’s where you convince sponsors to contact you.
However, advertisers won’t always come to you so you must look for them. You can approach people linking to your articles and site owners who leave comments. You should check the popular sites in your niche and see what companies have banners there. Contact them presenting an attractive offer.
Forums about advertising can be extremely useful because people are gathering here with a very specific purpose in mind: finding advertisers or finding publishers.
About the author: Daniel Ruyter has been a blogger since 2010 and helps small businesses connect with bloggers through his firm Alpha Tree Marketing.
