How to Price Banners on your Site/Blog

Filed under Blogging, Internet Marketing, Make Money Online by on May 30, 2011 at 10:33 pm {6 comments}

Banner PricingHow do you price banners on your blog or site? This is a complicated question and there isn’t a straightforward answer. However, let me attempt to answer it with certain examples and cases which can provide a useful guideline to get started. If you have an idea of how much banners cost on other sites, you might get an idea how to price banners on your own blog or site.

I have previously written about how to sell banners on your blog and it gives a useful guide to know how you can find advertisers and how you can get started. In this post, I attempt to answer another important question – how to price the banners. Once you have selected a list of companies, businesses or websites whom you wish to contact for an offer for banner, the next step is to let them know the price. Here are a few guidelines to follow –

Tip-1: Try to Find Similar Sites

This is a simple advice which actually helps a lot. If you can find sites that are similar to you and see how much they charge for a banner, you can get a fair estimate of how much you might want to charge.

This of course depends on the niche, traffic, Alexa rank and a host of other factors, but it still gives you a fair idea.

In the niche of internet marketing and blogging, here are a couple of banner advertising prices that I could find:

1. Wassup Blog: This blog charges $30/month for a 125×125 banner. The site has an Alexa of 67k at the time of writing this. No idea about other stats.

2. John Chow: John Chow is one of the best known bloggers in this niche and it shouldn’t surprise you that it will be very expensive to advertise on his blog. For the same 125×125 banner, he charges $500/month. There are several other banners available with his blog as well. At the time of writing this, his Alexa is 5711 and his RSS followers are 100,000+ !

This of course is just for an idea.

Tip-2: It is all about the Niche

Yes, it is all about the niche. On my Penny Auction Blog, I sell several banner advertisements (somehow I started with 250×250 and stuck with it ever since). My traffic stats are far less impressive: 373k Alexa, ~350UV/day. However, I charge a minimum of $50/month for advertising on my blog (that is for old advertisers. For new ones, I charge higher).

So why is that? The first reason is, it is all about the niche. I write about entertainment auctions and it is generally a niche with not too many bloggers. A banner from my blog will give the sites a very regular highly interested stream of potential members. If the niche is lucrative, you should charge higher.

Tip-3: Look to Provide Value

Advertising is all about value. If you are John Chow, you can charge money simply for an advertiser to connect to your brand. However, not all of us are that lucky to have such a huge branding. So what do you do? You should provide value in other ways. I give my advertisers an option for featured blog posts to reach my readers. This provides them with great value.

Also, when a new site opens, by advertising on my blog, they are able to reach out to a very interested group of people who might want to join their site. Even if they get 100 interested visitors from my blog, the price I charge is justified (they get more). It is all about how your blog can provide value.

Tip-4: Let Advertisers Come to You

You won’t find this on my blog but this is something which you should know. It helps to have an “Advertise Here” link which advertisers can click and then reach a page that lists your pricing. This is a good strategy to let advertisers come to you. Chances are, several of your potential advertisers have at least visited your blog once. By giving them an option to advertise, you are looking for conversions. Also, make the process easy for them.

Tip-5: Learn and Adapt

Pricing advertising banners is not straightforward and you and the advertiser will seldom agree to the value of your blog or site. This is why you need to learn and change with your experience. If you get feedback from an advertiser you wrote to, learn from the feedback. Perhaps you charged too much. Or may be you should have offered a better space for the banner.

As you write out to more and more advertisers and get feedback, you will start to learn how to charge the right price for the banners on your blog.

Do you have experience selling banner space on your own site? Do you plan to do so in the future? I would love to hear from you!

Photo Credit: Peter Blanchard

Selling Banners on your Blog

Filed under Blogging, Make Money Online by on May 23, 2011 at 7:48 pm {1,998 comments}

How to Sell Banners on Website or BlogHow do you sell banner space on your website or blog? This is a common question that is asked by people who have relatively new blogs and want to generate some extra cash with it. On my blog, I sell banner ads for a good amount of money which generates a nice passive income stream for me. That blog is almost an year old and it gets some decent traffic, so it was only natural for me to try to monetize it.

However, when I first started off, I had no idea how to sell banners on my blog. I didn’t know where to start, whom to contact, if anyone would be interested at all or even how to price them. These questions are not easy to answer, so I’ll give you a guide on how to do it. Hopefully, it will help you sell banners on your own blog or website.

Why Banners?

There are many ways in which you can monetize your blog. Banner ads are a very good start especially for blogs that are relatively new and starting out. Banner ads bring a guaranteed income, unlike other monetization methods like affiliate marketing. If you want to promote your affiliate marketing products, you will only be paid when you make a sale. This is not easy for new blogs to accomplish. Also, the blogger might prefer a steady income stream instead of the possibility of getting paid. It might also happen that the blog or website is in a niche that is not really well suited for affiliate marketing.

Banners are sold directly to advertisers and thus they usually bring in a higher revenue than cost-per-click programs like Google Adsense. On my blog, I make about 3-4 times selling ads directly than through Adsense. This is not surprising because I negotiate a deal directly with my advertisers and they find value in what I have to offer.

If your blog gets a decent amount of traffic, you can always negotiate a deal with an advertiser and provide them value.

How to Find Advertisers

This is perhaps the biggest challenge that bloggers and site owners face and also the main reason why they don’t advertise using banners. So what is the solution? There are many ways to find companies that might be interested in advertising with you. Some of the techniques that I use are as follows –

  • Search for Google Advertisers: Do a quick Google search for your niche and a few keywords that you are targeting. You will find sponsored links which shows which sites are advertising on Google Adwords. Now, you know a few companies that have the cash and the inclination to advertise and you can now contact those companies directly. Do the same with other ad networks as well.
  • Look for Similar Blogs: If you go to blogs or websites in your area which have more traffic than you get, you might see some advertisers putting their banners. You can contact them directly to see if they would be interested in advertising on your blog as well.
  • Find New Companies: If there are companies that are starting out in your industry, they would like to gain more exposure and they could be very well interested in advertising with you, so they can reach a wide relevant audience.

Is it Easy?

Truth be told, it is not. You do need to work your way through many emails and contacting many companies before you can land a good deal. It is definitely going to be more work than say putting Google Adsense code in your blog. That being said, you will reap long term relationships and rich dividends in terms of making money from your blog right away.

How Much Traffic is Good?

It really again depends on the niche and type of blog or website that you own. If you command an authority over your readers, even if you have less traffic, you can bag some good deals. It is hard to give you an estimate off hand, but 50-100 unique visits a day should be a good starting point. Of course you should also price your banner in a relevant way. If you get 50 unique visits a day, you may just make $20-25 per month (again, really depends on the niche and blog, but just as a rough estimate) so you might want to sell multiple ad spots.

In my next post, I will discuss pricing, how to write the email and what you can offer additionally to bag your advertising deals.

5 Ways I Make Money Online from my Blog

Filed under Make Money Online by on May 19, 2011 at 7:34 pm {2,777 comments}

Make Money OnlineThere are many ways I make money online. This blog is a humble attempt to document these and tell you that it isn’t rocket science. If I can do it, so can you. After all, that’s the whole motto of my blog in the first place!

Anyway, here are the ways in which I made money in the past, and so can you. I am discussing these methods with respect to my other blog, which is on the topic of penny auctions. My Penny Auctions Blog is a blogspot blog which I started less than an year ago and I already make some good money off it. Here are the ways in which I have monetized it –

1. Google Adsense

This is the simplest method of monetization that I know of. It is simple because you don’t really need to do anything. To get an Adsense account, you just apply for it with Google with a blog or website and you should be approved very soon. Once you are approved, it is easy to earn money with Google Adsense. All you need to do is insert their codes in the blog and you are all set. The advertisements will show automatically.

The reason it is simple is because it is very straightforward. Google will crawl the blog and look for all the relevant keywords. Then it will show the relevant advertisements on the blog. Because Google has the largest database of all advertisers, you can get the best deals. When ads are relevant, people are more likely to click on them. Google Adsense is a pay per click system, so you get paid every time someone clicks on your ads. Remember never to violate their TOS, e.g. by trying to fool Google by clicking your own ads from a different computer, asking friends to click ads for you, etc.

Adsense is good, but it is not the most lucrative. For my blog, Adsense brings in some steady income but it is not the main source of revenue from my blog. There are several other ways to make money from blogs.

2. Direct Advertising: Banner Ads

Direct advertisements through banners is a very good way to make money for bloggers once they get enough traffic to their blog. The more the number of visitors, the more the advertisers will be willing to pay for the banners they place on your blog. How much money you charge depends on many factors. At my blog, the average rate of a 250×250 banner is $50/month, which is not too bad. Blogs that get better traffic will command higher rates.

The main disadvantage of direct advertising is that you have to do the searching. I write to many advertisers in the field of penny auctions and only a few are interested in advertising on my blog. Thus I need to send out multiple emails pitching my blog and if they like it, they will get back. Most of the times I don’t get any replies.

If a blog is more popular, you can always include a link which says ‘Advertise Here’ and you should get advertisers who contact you. I cannot do it for my blog, since it isn’t so big – at least for now! 🙂

I will write a detailed post on how you should find advertisers for banners and how to email them about your blog. For now, you should know that it is hard work but it is definitely lucrative.

3. Featured Blog Posts

Featured Blog Posts are an excellent way to earn money as a blogger. For advertisers, they get to publish on a famous blog in the niche with plenty of visitors. In addition, advertisers can get a good dofollow backlink from an authority blog in this area.

So how do featured blog posts work? Well, if a new penny auction comes up with a promotion or news or some other exciting feature that it thinks will attract bidders, it publishes this on my blog as a featured blog post. In return, I get paid for it. The average cost of a featured blog post on my blog is about $25/post but it varies – for regular advertisers, I like to combine banner + featured posts into a single package.

The process of finding advertisers for featured blog posts is similar to the process of finding advertisers for banner ads. You write to individual websites and ask them if they want to buy featured blog posts. You explain how awesome your blog is and what benefit they will derive from it.

4. Selling Backlinks

This is not directly from the blog but through article directories. I have articles published in top article directories like EzineArticles on penny auctions. I offer advertisers a backlink from these sites. Since the articles are already published, I can sell the backlinks as soon as I finalize a deal. Here again, the charge is about $20-25 per backlink. Advertisers know you write quality articles only through your blog and you should contact them as such. Show them the value of high PR backlinks, especially for the new websites.

5. Affiliate Marketing

This is my favorite because it brings in the most revenue. I promote websites on my blog which have affiliate programs. It is important to make sure that the affiliate products/websites that you promote are good quality because as a blogger, reputation is very important and priceless. So I select the best sites in the niche and promote them on my blog. Whenever they get members from my blog, they pay me a percentage of sales.

So here it is, the 5 ways through which I earn money from my blog. What are your favorites? How do you monetize your blog? Don’t forget to share your story!

 

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