5 tips for Earning Money selling Ads on my site blog

Hello,

I'd like to give you some tips I've used to grow my income from selling ads on my sites.

You see, before I was not interested in selling ads on my sites, I used adsense and grow lazy, I didn't want anything to do with talking with the ad buyers or dealing with renewal of ads, etc.

But then I tried buysellads.com because they take 25% of the price, but they deal with payments and advertizers, plus they have a marketplace which means my ad spots are found not only by my sites visitors but also by advertizers browsing the buysellads marketplace.

At first I only used buysellads to sell the 125x125 pixels ad spots.

That's all I did. I didn't sell many.

After I started applying the following tips and my ad sales have greatly increased, at the moment I'm earning about $15 per day just by ad sales, which is in fact $20 minus the buysellads share. And that makes about $500 per month, and it's only a beginning since I've used those tips only on 2 sites of mine.

1. advertise the fact that you have advertisements
Although it may seem obvious that you have ad spot for sale to you, the more you advertise that fact the better. So have in your menu and in your footer a link to a page which lists your ad spots and price. Buysellads provides you with a javascript you can add on your page that will show ad spots, sizes, traffic, prices and advertisers can order directly from there.
On this page also add some text to tell advertisers what you know about your site audience, some of it you can find via the summary in Alexa..
For instance or my shetoldme site it is found there: http://www.alexa.com
"Shetoldme.com has a three-month global Alexa traffic rank of 19,686. The site has a relatively good traffic rank in the city of Chandigarh (#1,753), and this site has a bounce rate of roughly 44% (i.e., 44% of visits consist of only one pageview). Relative to the overall population of internet users, Shetoldme.com's users tend to be under the age of 35, and they tend to be men earning less than $30,000 who browse from home. While we estimate that 59% of this site's visitors are in India, where it is ranked #3,236, it is also popular in Bangladesh, where it is ranked #2,023."
So only use the things that are useful to you. For me the fact that the site is popular in India and Bangladesh is NOT something I'll put in my page. But I'll mention the part about the demographic, even bend it to say that it caters more to a female audience if I think it will attract more advertisers.
Still in the tip about advertise that you have ad spot, use your forum signature in webmaster forums to tell other members that you have ads for sale, since all advertisers are webmasters/bloggers in some way or another, it is the perfect audience for this part of your business.

2. provide standard sizes
As I said at first I only offered 125x125 ad spots, because those were popular in blogs. But my sites are not even blogs! And plus 125x125 is small. The standard sizes you want to provide to the advertisers are 468x60, 120x600, 160x600, 300x250, 720x90, etc.. provide as many as you want, but me I limit myself to 125x125, 300x250, 720x90 and 160x600 but I should also offer 468x60 since it is THE original standard. That's something I'll add to my arsenal.

3. fake scarity
In buysellads interface (or your own if you choose to do direct sales) always keep the available ad spots limited to 1. For instance if you plan to offer 10 ad spot of size 125x125 and you currently have 2 advertisers don't have it look like 8/10 available. But reduce the number to 3 so that it looks like 1/3 available. That will prompt advertisers to act fast (now) to take the ad spot, since it could be taken by someone else if they wait until tomorrow to decide. When you have a new advertiser, then when you go to buysellads to approve the ad, then change also the maximum so it will look like 1/4 available for the next advertiser.
This is ok when you provide ad spots which are always displayed 100% of the time, it doesn't change anything. But you should not do it (morally) if you choose to have one ad spot where ads are rotated, because having 3 ads in one ad spot is not the same in terms of impressions as having 5 ads in one ad spot.

4. give the best ad locations
Don't be tempted to hide your ads down below. The advertisers are not cash cows, if they spend their hard earned money to advertise on your site they will track the results and depending on weither they get clicks (CTR) and if your traffic converts they'll decidde to renew or not renew their ad. It is better to keep one existing advertiser for one year than to have 12 advertisers who stay only one month because your ad placements are not useful to them. If you are not sure which ad locations are the best it is very easy, simply imagine you are paying money to advertise on your site.. Where would you want your ad to appear? Then you will know the best ad locations. If you currently use adsense ads on your site, you probably already have put adsense in the best ad locations and that one of the reasons why adsense perform so well, because people give the adsense ads the best locations on their site, at least they try to do that. Now imagine if instead of adsense blocks you would have direct advertisers, they would be very happy to have prime locations for their ads. That's what you want to offer them, good value for money. Of course if you use both adsense and direct ads, then you want to balance it, so try to really balance it, don't give the direct advertizers a bad deal just because adsense pays more. Maybe adsense pays more BECAUSE you give it constantly the best locations, and if you balance it a little you may find that direct ad sale will perform the same or even better than adsense after 2 or 3 months. Give yourself the chance to try at least, you can always revert back.

5. pricing your ads
What I do is I start with very low prices, the minimum at buysellads is $10 (so you earn $7.5) for 30 days. This is very low and shouldn't stay like this. But to get advertisers as soon as I put a new ad spot, it is the easiest way. Then each time a new advertisers buy an ad, I increase the price by $10. The existing advertisers will continue to pay their original price as long as they don't cancel they ad, but that's ok.
The advantage is that new advertisers will not know how much other have paid for their ad, they only see the new price and they see that other advertisers already have bought one ad, so they say to themselves that it means your traffic is converting, so they try too and order.
That's why you want to start low prices to get some advertisers on board, because the crowd attract the crowd. If your ad location is empty and priced honestly, it will be harder to get the first advertiser. But when your ad location has already several advertisers it is easier to sell one more even at an inflated price. Which will finally make a good average or you.
If you see that advertisers are cancelling their ads and the ad location starts to have less and less advertisers, reduce the price. That way after a while you'll find the right price. Because the right price is determined by the market, not by yourself ultimately. There is a sweet spot in terms of price and you can find it this way.
Other people just set the price by looking at their traffic and saying, I want that much per 1,000 impressions, so my price will be that. This can work, but personally I prefer to start low, increase over time as new advertisers order and then find the right price this way.
Sometimes the price can go very high, personally I sold ads at $97 for 30 days for a 125x125 ad spot. This was the maximum and after I didn't get much orders and then went back lower to have more. Because it's better to have 10 advertisers at $37 than one at $200. At least that's my opinion.

Conclusion
As I said those are my 5 tips, but I am still a newbie in selling ads, I think if I was more experimented I'd prefer to direct sell ads so that I don't have 25% of the price going to buysellads. For instance you can sell ads and manage it with an ad manager such as Google's DFP SMall Business ( www.google.com/) or you can do it all by hand or with a little script to manage renewal dates, orders, etc..

At the moment I'm sticking with buysellads because of their marketplace and the 25% allow me also not to have to worry about anything regarding orders, refunds, etc.. But I do that while knowing it would be more clever to have a direct relationship with advertisers so I could then put them on a mailing list to offer them special deals and new advertising opportunities whereas now with buysellads I don't have their contact information, so it is not a good long term practise.

If you have more experience in this field and would like to share it with me and others you are most welcome!