New 5 Ways To Directly Find Your Advertiser

It is the goal of many bloggers to move to monetize their blogs with ad networks like AdSense to sell ads directly to advertisers. But entering this game can be difficult - especially in the early days while still growing traffic.

Here are 5 ways that I got direct ad deals with sponsors in the early days of my blog first:

1. Write your topic on Google blogs

What the advertisers to reach the top right of the search listings? These products and services obviously have a budget for online advertising and are looking for exposure and could lead to a direct relationship.

2. Visit other blogs, forums and websites in place

That is advertising in them? These advertisers target sites on a similar topic to yours and are more often than not they are willing to try new places that are relevant to your industry.

3. Identify the affiliate programs in place

Some affiliates also be interested in a relationship of advertising to your blog. This may or may not be in your best interest to follow depending on whether your readers affiliate products converted.

4. Click on Ads

The first time I was looking for advertisers looked at what local companies advertising photography in magazines and newspapers here in Australia and got on the phone and called to see if they are interested in placing an ad. Most had never done anything online before and not a few took the step in purchasing an ad.

5. Online stores and new sites

This is another tactic that I used from the start also with some success. It was google the keywords associated with my subject and not just look at who was the advertising (as in # 1 above), but looking at what companies were included in the search results, especially those below me in the standings. I paid a special interest in online stores that had a direct revenue from their sites and contact them to see if he would be interested in advertising - very few did. I also noticed that the new sites were also established just sometimes more willing to buy advertising.

I must say that when you have a low traffic blog that none of these methods is to make a fortune. You will have to be willing to price their ads relatively cheaply until traffic grows - but getting these offers ad is better than no income for your blog and the media already has relationships with advertisers to grow as increasing your traffic.

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Things I Learned From My Mistakes

Here's the thing - the Chitika ad I had in this position of the ads used to perform to their fullest potential. I had already tested and made sure it was working fine. However Chitika added a new option to the announcement of its first - an option that I ignored. In fact someone told me Chitika to make changes again this month - I got distracted (busy life) and never did.

Even though I feel pretty stupid and I am fully aware that I have not cost thousands to make this change before - I know I'm not alone.

Many bloggers are in the same boat. We put ads on our blogs, getting a point where we think it is well optimized and then move on to work on other aspects of your blog without having to do things that are still operating at its maximum potential. Ad networks change their offerings, add functionality and sometimes just change the blogs and do things that worked well and no.

The lesson here is to revisit the ad units and test whether there might be a way to increase performance. You can not see the settings to bring $ 70 per day as did I - but over time the little touches add up!

What was the change I made?

The change was so simple - I just did Chitika ad unit larger. The ad unit was used to have in a 468 × 180 pixels in size ad. The new is 550 × 250 pixel ad unit. It is much wider (now occupies almost the entire width of my content area) and a little deeper.

It does push the content down the page a bit, but it is only affecting refferal search traffic and content remains above the user experience may not be affected much - but the ad performance is much better (with 3-4 times the rate of clicks depending on the day).

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Does The Look Of Your Blog Is Like NASCAR

Like all things in life, with the advertising you need to know when to stop. The one thing that drives me crazy, is to blog and be bombarded by a mess of Goggle Adsense, pop-ups, and 125 × 125 banner ads. These are all ways to bring some money for their hard work, but at what point is to be counterproductive?

Here's a hint: if I have to scroll down to get to your content because you have nothing but ads in the top half, then I'll never go back to your site. Do not click your ads. I will not subscribe to their feed. I will not download your e-book. Do not tell my friends about you. Are you getting the point? Too many ads on your blog is simply an insult to your readers.

You got to have some simple guidelines for your advertising campaign and stick to your guns. I will not say that this announcement is good and bad. But I will say that there is certainly a point in the next ad you put cost you money.

Try one yourself. Click any message on your blog and scroll down to an arbitrary point in the post. Now take stock of what you see. What percentage of the screen is devoted to advertising? If the number is too high, then you are not satisfied reader (if he is).

So what percent of space should be devoted to ads?

Let's look at the outputs of other popular media our there. On television, for example, the average of a one-hour program is about 44 minutes of programming and 16 minutes of ads. That is a ratio of ad / content of just over 26%.

Print journals are much worse. The magazine has an average ratio of ad / content of about 40%! This is not exactly demonstrate a dedication to the satisfaction of the reader. Could this be one of the reasons the magazine circulation has fallen more than 10% since 2008?

So what we get from these numbers? For starters, you need to get your relationship to the lowest possible. Certainly, the standard of the Journal of 40% is a number no, and in my opinion, the figure of 26% of television is not much better.

All ads in the world will do you no good if no one is there to see. If your blog has been sitting around doing nothing, revenue growth, subscribers, or traffic, then try removing some of the ads. You will find a site easier to use with a solids content and classified ads consistently better than a little confusing group of flags.

So unless your blog has a world class pit crew and can be over 200 miles per hour, you better do something about their announcement / ratio content. My challenge to you is to get your ratio up to 20% or less. To his readers (and income) will thank you.

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The Parable Of The Lemonade Stand: Is Costing You Money From Adsense?

Imagine a lemonade stand. Entrepreneurs get the ingredients, start your business, and has dozens of customers each day. What he earns twenty dollars a day. Not bad for a humble lemonade, right?

Now, I throw in a twist: imagine the aforementioned entrepreneurs are in their 30's. They own the lot where the lemonade stand. The lot is located on a main road in a fast-growing suburban area. All lots adjacent to your business making thousands of dollars per day. Suddenly our lemonade stand seems pretty silly.

This concept is called opportunity cost, the economic consequences of choosing one thing over another. I'm learning about this the hard way - I've been doing cents per click that I could have been making dollars per click.

I will explain in detail a little more. As I mentioned before, strongandfit.net profitable blog is the first I ever had. As my traffic increased, so did my earnings from AdSense. A few dollars a day until the ads, so it was finally seeing the checks come at the end of each month (I'm new to making money online, so I easily amused).

But I started to notice something: a few products in particular kept popping up over and over again in my blog (widget AdSense). "Wait a minute," I thought to myself, "these products, of course, convert, so if someone is willing to spend money on promotion." I realized I had inadvertently put in the bottom of the economic chain: I was paying a few cents per click, while another person was earning commissions on sales produced by these clicks.

I did a little research and starts directly advertising for these products with affiliate marketing. So far it seems to be paying off, my blog is to make more money.

But there is another advantage: I have complete control over what is posted on my blog. It is becoming a win-win situation: My readers are referred to the high quality products and earn more in commissions.

I can use AdSense, but I'm spending more of my first "real estate" in my affiliate marketing blog. Perhaps you should also consider doing this.

A note from Darren

As Kevin says, I have nothing against any of AdSense. In fact I think it works quite well in some of my sites. For me the idea of ​​"opportunity cost" is very powerful. For every decision you make to use any ad unit type in your blog (if it's AdSense, some other ad networks, an affiliate product, an ad is sold directly to an advertiser, an ad for a proprietary product that is a potential opportunity cost of that decision.

The key is to test different options. Kevin has been successful in replacing the affiliate ads instead of AdSense for the products of other members would not work, but could do an ad for your own product. For others, it could be about sharing Chitika ads or other ad network. For others, it could monetize by selling ads directly. For others it might be better to have no ads at all, but sell yourself as a consultant in your blog.

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How Do I Have Some Sponsors Pay Without Regard

Strong world Librarian was four months old when I became interested sponsors. I had read articles on how to do it, and none of them seemed plausible to me and my situation.

On the one hand, my traffic was not impressive, and certainly not to the point where the sponsors come up to me. And while my blog has become a bit more focused in its first ten months, was aimed at a group of readers, in particular, so I was not sure that advertisers trust niche would be. It's a bit more focused now, but I can not really think of a better term for my readers of "The Weird Leal."

So I tried a little experiment sponsorship. My expectations were almost nonexistent. I did it more for curiosity than anything, hoping to be undertaken by readers and promote good will.

This is what happened.

Auditions and criteria

I decided to hold "tryouts" for anyone interested in a sponsorship slot in the library world's strongest. You can read my initial post here. If you are terrified of leaving this page because there is so much wisdom in the air, here is the summary of what we asked readers interested in doing:

Dear potential sponsor, please give me:

A paragraph about something you did in the last year that is proud of
Your URL
A description of your blog / business
Why are you interested in publishing an announcement in the library world's strongest
His pitch: Why? How great you are?

And I made it clear that I do not mind the size or the appearance of your blog. As one blogger was not selling anything outrageous, illegal, or spam, which had as much chance as anyone.

Ran auditions for the rest of August and then make my decisions.

The plan at this time

I figured I would get a small response ads of four respondents out of pity. Then I show ads for the month of September. When September came to an end, I would like to thank every blogger, I ask if I wanted to pay for a month or more to stay, or are you part and still be friends.

I thought about repeating this cycle for several months until all the ads were paid. Then I would end auditions.

I did not expect

I have a lot of answers. In fact, I have about 100 auditions. Some are long and very funny. Others went to middle and poorly written. Some were very close to flat-out begging, and others were so distant that he could not tell if they were really interested or not.

The good things about this

Any response from readers and commitment can be felt as a great victory for the new version of Blogger. So of course was very gratifying to see that people were paying attention.

I also learned how eclectic readership base was. I have emails from bloggers covering all conceivable topics and angles. I have emails from the foundations. I have business emails. Word spread, and suddenly had a lot of new readers, and some readers who had never committed out of hiding.

The bad things about this

There's really only one: because I had underestimated the response, I had not thought through my evaluation criteria. And suddenly I had a lot of auditions to sift through. It was very, very difficult to decide. And in a few cases, I ended up choosing a more arbitrary than it was happy, but could not find a better way then.

Here is my post announcing the winners.

This caused some hurt feelings, a lot of negative emails from disappointed applicants, the demand for explanations of how I have chosen ... and so on.

"Well," I thought. "The next round, I have to do better."

It would not be a new round.

The best things in this

A couple of winners on the left after a month with no hard feelings between us. However, several of them were ... and payment. When I was able to show their clickthrough rates and was told that the "sticky" traffic to my blog had been, I had to convince everyone. And then had an income very, very modest of the sponsors, but had no sponsors!

I also saved the trouble of going through another round of auditions and make people mad.

It also has a lot of people blogging about the experiment, and of course, traffic was its own reward.

Suggestions for anyone interested in trying this

Overestimate the response you get, so that (hopefully) do not get overwhelmed
Explain your evaluation criteria. You can still have some bad losers, but have an explanation before it may be useful to use
Give it your personal touch
Deciding which system to use to display ads, and figure it out before the night before it is supposed to run the ads. I can be real dunce. This was an example of my duncery.

Its own variant of this experiment could be a way to capture some sponsors and find out how some things before their numbers are in control of the sponsors on their own.

Above all: enjoy, have fun and experiment to take this opportunity to make connections, spark some creativity and do their own thing.

Do not try too hard to be like everyone else. You are not anybody. This is a good thing, if you believe it or not.

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Newsletter Readers Can Click Your Ads

I recently attended an event in which a presenter discussed the reasons for not using email marketing as part of their online business. One of the main reasons I presented was that he did not think the people who come from a newsletter click on the ads on their site.

His reasoning was that people coming to your site every week from a newsletter become blind to the AdSense ads that he was using (the main source of income). So instead of working in the construction of loyal readers who put all their efforts on SEO to generate one of the readers.

There were a lot of nominations in the room of attendees - at a level of what he said made any sense - but not very plausible to me.

You see my biggest day of AdSense earnings are always the day I send my newsletter. It handles a lot of traffic, but also seems to make in terms of income (of all kinds, including sales of ebooks, affiliate promotions and Adsense).

Today I decided to dig a little deeper in my Google Analytics statistics (which now integrates with AdSense) to see if what he said was true. This is what I found regarding adsense income in my photography site from different traffic sources in the past 3 months.

I am not able to share with you real eCPM (revenue per 1000 impressions) and CTR (click through rate) and I think I would break the AdSense terms of service - but I think the letter speaks clearly for itself.

"Aweber is the traffic coming from my newsletter and I have included a number of other traffic sources to compare their performance. You can see both eCPM and CTR that was Aweber place not only search engine traffic but traffic from the different types of social media and referral traffic from other sites.

Traffic Newsletter is undoubtedly the conversion in both CTR and eCPM. This is confirmed when I look at the traffic bulletin of others (for example, traffic from the mail servers of AOL and Yahoo), which is also higher than other types of traffic, both in terms of eCPM and CTR.

I also found interesting about these results was the traffic from sites like Facebook and Flickr, both back out Google traffic as CTR and eCPM. I had always assumed that social media, traffic has not become as well as other types of traffic, but at least on these results, it appears that not all social media, traffic is equal. On this topic - Twitter not become anywhere near as good as Facebook.

Of course, this kind of results can vary from place to place. Maybe because my photography site is not specifically a "product" of the site, but it is a "how to" on site traffic Google is a bit more general and less in a mood to buy which could reduce conversions - but at least for me is an indication that I'm in the right way to spend time growing my newsletter list!

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How To Monetize Your Blog By Mobile Traffic

In recent days I've been experimenting with the monetization of blogs for readers of my phone to do mobile versions of my sites.

Those who read ProBlogger on an iPhone, Android phones, Palm and Blackberry Storm are known to give you the option to view this post in a theme designed for mobile devices. I use to serve WPTouch this, which is a plugin for WordPress that I found very easy to use. I've installed, both here at ProBlogger and Digital Photography School.

I had to shut down recently, while making some changes on the server, and I was surprised the number of complaints I've received. Apparently, many readers these days to read my blogs on mobile devices!

WPTouch offers plenty of great features that will not go into here, except to say that you can customize the screen far beyond what I've done so far.

One feature that I will mention quickly is that the plug-in offers to those who see your blog in a way to add iPhone actually a Web application to the Home screen of your iPhone. This increases the number of people checking out your blog on mobile devices.

One of the other great features WPTouch offers is the ability to monetize the issue of mobile advertising. Once you have installed on your WordPress blog, all you need is to open the WPtouch area, and search advertising tab.

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Improving The Ad CTR: The Definitive Guide

Those who have been using the Internet as a business platform since the beginning have realized that there has been a significant decrease in the percentage of clicks on the ads of recent years. During the birth of this massive revolution curious and willing people to click on anything that was promised fame and fortune or any of the other things that Internet marketers advertising.

Today, however, we have developed a competent internet generation people who have seen thousands of ads thrown at them from all directions. This creates a problem for owners of blogs that would like their readers to click on your ads so they can have some pocket money for their efforts.

Understanding ad blindness

This problem, which is sometimes called "banner blindness" can be addressed to some extent, looking at the way that users actually see and use your website.

For example, ClickTale analytics software lets you see how visitors move their cursors all in place. This will give you an idea of ​​the areas where visitors interact with your site, but what we really want to know where visitors are looking for.

There has been some research on the study of how people look at web sites and most have concluded that people browse Web sites in an F-shaped pattern, which means they will read the title and then move their eyes down the left side of the page, occasionally blinking his eyes in the content, if something catches your eye.

As you probably do, Internet users skim read the contents to save time and to see if the information is something that is really interested in before committing to reading, word for word. Images and critical assessment of the study that produced these data can be found here.

Matching style ads to your content

The next thing you have to do is to match the style of their ads with content. Because of banner blindness, people on purpose will be to avoid seeing the ads if they can help, and if you do extra-clear that his ads are announced, then most people do not even consider looking at them: you have lost the opportunity to attract a click.

All visitors are interested in when they come to your site is content. You have to get them interested in your ads. Matching your content you are suggesting that the ads are as important as the content. If these ads are placed in the right places, then, is likely to be seen, and I hope it perceives as a
useful part of your site.

There are some other ways to combine your ads to your site. The one I found through my own research to have the highest click through rate is the AdSense link unit 15 × 468. When placed in the top of your site, link this unit may appear as a menu that can create interest and if the ads are relevant to the content, you can create excellent click through rates.

Now to talk a little banner and image ads. There is some discussion about whether or banner ads are a good way to make people click through your site. The obvious advantages are that you have a larger area to work on the site, and these ads are a visual aspect that may encourage people to see them. This does not necessarily encourage them to click, however.

Some research suggests that banner advertising is much more useful to create brand recognition actually selling products directly, and I for one would have to agree. If you have banner ads on various websites below, even after seeing them only once or twice, the visitor will feel comfortable with this brand, which means that if you do click through the page, and have a small element of trust in the brand.

The last point I'll consider is the types of banners to use. Some bloggers may be angry if they are not what they perceive as too many banners on a site, and immediately leave your site without reading the content, which is the last thing you want!

The words of wisdom here has to be: do not choke your site banners. This has to be left to their own discretion, but as a general rule I suggest you use no more than six to eight ads on any page image. In addition, advertisements in movement can be great, and will attract the attention of readers, but if used too much, you risk making your website look as if everything in motion, which can be very disconcerting. My recommendation is to have no more than two ads in the eye movement at any time.

In summary, for a maximum, the CTR you want:

ads on the top of the page
ads on the top left corner of your content
Banner ads sold to private sources who want recognition for your brand or
own products
Image ads low traffic areas with special eye for capturing moving
readers' attention (but not too many ads on the move).

What steps have been taken to improve ad click-through rates? What advice can you add from your experiences?

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Advertising Revenue are Dead as an Income Stream?

Earlier this week I saw a conversation between two Internet marketing bloggers on Twitter, that caught my attention.

The topic of conversation? Monetizing blogs by selling advertising directly to advertisers.

His conclusion on the subject? It is a dead and obsolete method of making money.

It was a fascinating conversation to watch. They gave some compelling reasons for his conclusions sound, including:

There has been a decrease in budgets that are being marketing companies (due to the economy).
Not much more money than you did in selling their own products and services.
Advertising, by its very nature, sent the people away from their blog sites to advertisers.
The online ads are not converted into a flag and only distract people from what you're talking about.
Sell ​​ads directly to advertisers takes time and administration.

While watching the conversation unfold, I found myself in agreement with some of these points, however, also wondered whether it might also be the cancellation of a revenue stream that does not have to be mutually exclusive of other forms of income.

In my own experience making money online, advertising has always been a part of my revenue mix. In the early days, took 95% of the mixture (too much, in my opinion), but still remains an important element for me. (Audience of about 24% of my income in December whether to include the direct ad sales and revenue ad network).

I will explain the reasons why it pays to keep advertising in the mix.

The economy: strong rebound in online advertising?

When talking with a number of bloggers who depend heavily on advertising revenue, I agree with the assessment that in many niches appear to have been a contraction in the amount companies are spending on advertising. However, I know bloggers who have seen an increase in spending in some niches.

Moreover, as we see the economy improves, I suspect we will see the money returned to advertising budgets, especially in the online space. Companies are realizing the potential of online media to reach the target audience and getting conversions. I suspect we'll see online advertising recover larger than it was before the global financial crisis.

Their own products and services

I completely agree that bloggers should be looking for ways to develop their own products and services. I wrote about how I made myself on numerous occasions during the two years, however I think it's possible to do this in conjunction with the performance of ads on your blog.

In my own experience of blogging, especially in the Digital Photography School, I found that there is a limit to the amount of your own product / s that you can promote your blog.

Although sometimes speak of "ad blindness" by readers of the ad to run, I suspect that the same can be said about the blindness of their own products. If all you do is promote their own products, readers can turn off these messages. Mixing things up with messages from other people (whether or affiliate advertising campaigns) can really keep things fresh (so far).
Be creative with what they offer to advertisers

I also think there are a variety of other advertising creative ways to weave in what you do as a blogger, without a flag, just slap ads all over. For example, a couple of things we've experienced with the supply of advertisers in DPS are:

Sponsored Contests: Here, an advertiser sponsors a contest on his blog. Offer a prize, to highlight their products and generate advertising revenue for them

Newsletter advertising: one of the surprises for me in the past year is that we have found advertisers willing to pay more for ads in the newsletters that banner ads

Sponsored by the content: I do not mean to sell the space on our corporate blog to actually write their own content, or for us to review your messages. Rather, we are studying, with companies is that sponsor certain positions. For example, a company can sponsor a series of messages on a topic related to the industry. Would have no influence on the actual content, they'd just be mentioned in the introduction to the role as the sponsor of this post.

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13 Ideas To Make Money For Bloggers Using Advertising

1. Ad networks

These are services like AdSense and Chitika, but also the smaller or more local and NuffNang (which operates in Australia and Asia). You can probably fit into one of the other categories as well, since they use different models to deliver their ads.

2. Cost per impression (CMP)

This is where you sell ad space and get paid based on what is often loads. Usually you get paid per 1000 ad impressions. The rate varies greatly, depending on topic. There are plenty of very low ad networks "remnant" out there that pay a pittance for printing, but if you have a higher value niche can get more money. I have paid up to $ 40 per 1000 impressions.

3. Cost per acquisition (CPA)

These ads pay only when someone takes some action after clicking on the ad. The move could be a sale, but could also be that the subscription to a service, leaving an email address, etc.

4. Cost per click (CPC)

This is what used to be AdSense: every time someone clicks on your ad, you get a certain amount. Now AdSense ads do a combination of CPC and CPM-les mix in.

5. Sponsorships

This is what I do at ProBlogger. Sell ​​ad spots on a monthly basis to the sponsors for a fixed amount per month.

6. Text links

When you sell a text link on your site, the person buying the bond is usually what makes the purpose of search engine ranking. As a result, Google frowns on these and you could be risking their own search ranking for it. I do not do this, as I see it as a bit risky, but some bloggers still do. Proceed with caution.

7. Payment by post

Also known as sponsored posts (advertorial), this is where you get paid to review a product or promotion in a job. Bloggers have varied ethical positions on the matter. In general, these days you are required to disclose that is being paid for the job.

8. Careers / Classifieds

If you operate in a niche where people buy and sell products or there are jobs that people want to advertise this can be a good source of income. You must be able to attract both advertisers and those who want to see the ads to work, though-so you need traffic and profile.

9. Bulletin of the advertising

This is a growing area for me. Some advertisers make love to be included in emails sent to our readers. We met with the group sponsoring some ads on the site banner with inclusions in our newsletter is a good way to sell space to advertisers.

Some ad networks (like AdSense) have ways to do this, but you can also sell sponsorships to the RSS feed directly. We use a WordPress plugin called RSS footer to add an ad in the RSS feed for ProBlogger.

Here are some ideas that I add to the mental maps ...

Ad networks like Kontera offer these, and I think Chitika and a few others do too. They are ads that appear in the messages, making certain keywords in the small ads (which often change the color of the word and / or underline it to make it look like a link). When the cursor over the word an ad appears with a description of a product you can buy. Some bloggers find these ads convert well, but others find them intrusive.

10. Advertising in video

If you post videos, you might be interested in integrating YouTube with AdSense, which lets you earn money from ads that appear in videos.

11. Image ads

Yesterday Scott Fitzgerald + ImageSpace alerted me to the media, which have a system that adds ads in the images. These are similar to ads that can be viewed on Youtube videos that appear and can be minimized.

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