Sell Your Advertising Space

One the more popular ways of monetising a blog is by selling advertising space and some people have found this method to be very lucrative and easy to implement. Some sites have dead space or affiliate banners that are not pulling in any revenue. That space could be could be put to good use by displaying ads that are already paid for. If you play your cards right, you will have advertisers waiting in line to have their ads displayed as soon as the current one expires. From what I have seen so far, there are two main methods that you can employ when selling your advertising space. You can do it yourself or let someone else do it for you.

With this method, you have to deal with things such as communicating with advertisers, tracking payments, putting up the ads and keeping track of expiry dates. This can be time consuming but if you have time on your hands it could work well for you. A couple of ways you can go about doing it yourself are:

1) Advertise ad spots on your site – You can put up a simple box that says, ‘advertise here for $xx per month’ or similar and wait for interested parties to contact you directly.

If you get someone else to manage your ads, there isn’t a lot you have to do. You will have to provide them with some information about your site and then put up a banner in the space in which you want the ad to appear. From here on in it is a matter of sitting back and waiting for advertisers to come through. The only thing about these kinds of services is that there are usually associated fees but they are a less of a hassle than trying to do it yourself.
Here are some services that are worth taking a look at:

1) Project Wonderful – They use an auction style model to sell ads on your site which means you don’t need to set up a fixed price for the space. Advertisers name the price they want to pay and whoever pays the most gets their ad displayed. They support various ad sizes and you chose what you want to display. They even have options where you can display multiple ads within the same ad unit. Earnings are paid out via PayPal once you have earned $10.

A point of difference to them and similar services is their goodwill system. You have probably been on a number of sites with ‘advertise here’ banners which have been up for a while. This can discourage people from advertising on a site. With their goodwill system initial bids can be set at $0 where you offer free advertising. Advertisers may then see the benefit of advertising on a site which then gets the ball rolling for paid advertising.

2) 125box – 125box is an automated online advertising system. Their system is pretty basic and as per normal you enter in details of your site and your rates. They give you the option of putting in pricing for 1, 3, 6 and 12 months of advertising. Once you have keyed in all of this information you have to wait for them to approve the ad zone. When approved they send an email with the javascript code for the zone.

When a potential advertiser clicks on the 125box ad zone, a box pops up where they can put in their details, upload their banner image and more importantly see how much it will cost to advertise on your site. The only thing about their service is that you get 50% of the revenue so if you charge $20 a month you get paid $10.

3) Blaged – This particular service offers much more variety with the type of advertising you can display. Not only do they allow banner ads with the option of flash, you can display text and video ads as well. They do ask for a bit more information than Project Wonderful and 125box but they offer you more options. You can manage multiple websites from one account. You can set prices for the various ad types and you can have the option of allowing advertisers to make an offer. They pay you 80% of anything you make with earnings being paid out via PayPal.

Both methods have their pros and cons. If you are doing it yourself you don’t have to share the revenue with anyone but it can be time consuming. If you let someone else do it for you, you don’t have to worry much about a lot. All you really need to do may be to approve or reject ads but you will be sharing a portion of your revenue with the service provider.

125×125 ad blocks seem to be the most popular ad size at the moment. This may be because you can put up a number of them due to their size. You are not restricted to that size unit and can sell ad blocks of any size even if you get some else to do it for you. The decision is really up to you as to what size ads you are going to put up and how you are going to go about doing it. One thing to watch out for is to not have too many ads as it may distract readers and could lead to a drop in readership so try and find the right balance.