Earn Money Online Selling Ad Space on Your Blog

By Herrick Peterson

Do you have a blog that gets a large amount of traffic? If so, you could sell ad space on your blog and earn money online through it.

Evaluate Traffic

The first thing you need to do is evaluate your traffic. Gather important details about your traffic because potential advertisers will want to know this information. Here are some of the most important data to gather about the traffic your blog receives.

• Alexa Rank
• Daily/Monthly Unique Visitors
• Daily/Monthly Page Views
• Demographics (Location)

Determine Pricing

After you evaluate your traffic, the next thing you should do is determine which forms of advertising you want to offer and how much you want to charge for the advertising space. Most people sell banner ads and text link ads on their blogs but you could offer other types of advertising. Did you know that you could get paid to place an opt-in form on your website? Yes, banners and text links are not the only things you can use your ad space for.

Once you have figured out what type of advertising you want to offer, you need to figure out which pricing model to use. There are different ways to charge for advertising. Below are the most common.

CPC - Advertiser pays only when someone clicks on their ad
CPM - Advertiser pays a certain amount of money each time their ad is displayed 1000 times (Example: If you charged an advertiser $5 CPM, the advertiser would have to pay $50 if their ad generated 10,000 impressions.)

Flat Rate- Advertiser pays a flat rate for advertising regardless of impressions or clicks

Figuring out how much to charge for the space you want to sell can be tricky. If you are unsure of what to charge, take a look at what other bloggers are charging for ad space. Make sure that you look at blogs that have similar traffic as yours.

Find Advertisers

Once you have put together your advertising package(s), you can then move on to finding advertisers. The first thing you should do is set up your website to let advertisers know that ad space is available.

You can do this by adding space on your blog that says "Your Ad Here". This line works for banner and text advertisements. Make sure that you link to a page on your blog that goes into more detail about your advertising options.

Good advertising pages usually list the benefits of advertising on the blog, traffic details, pricing, payment options, available ad space, and contact information.

At this point, you have two options. You can sit back and hope that an advertiser contacts you about advertising space on your blog or you could put in more effort to get advertisers to buy your ad space.

It would be smart to choose the latter option because you may be waiting for a long time for an advertiser to come to you. If you want to sell your ad space as fast as you can, go out and let others know that you are offering ad space on your blog. There are many ways to do this but some of the best methods are listed below.

Banner Ad Networks

Sign up to a network such as BuySellAds and list your blog there so advertisers can see what you have to offer. Lots of bloggers have success using banner ad networks. Keep in mind that you may not get to keep 100% of the money you make from selling ad space through these networks since they often take a cut from your earnings.

Webmaster Forums

There are quite a few webmaster forums that allow their members to post ads in their marketplace. Many of them have an advertising section where members can buy and sell advertising. Digital Point Forum is one such forum. You can make a thread notifying other webmasters about the ad space you selling on your blog. Make sure that you abide by the rules of these forums.

Reaching Out to Website Owners

You can also contact website owners directly and see if they would like to advertise on your blog.

Let's say that I owned a blog about parenting. I could go and check out the websites that have ads showing up in search engines for parenting related keywords. I would contact them directly and see if they would like to advertise on my parenting blog and direct them to my advertising page. I could also search for blogs related to parenting and see who is advertising on them. I could contact some of those advertisers and see if they would like to advertise on my blog.

Those are only a couple of ideas that you could use to reach out to potential advertisers. If you do some research, you could come up with a long list of potential advertisers. Once you've got a list of potential advertisers, contact each one of them with a good pitch.

Did you think that selling ad space would be easy? Even with everything that has been said so far, there are still other things that need to be done like managing ads, processing payments, and keeping advertisers happy. As you can see, selling ad space does require some effort before you can earn money online but it can be worth it if you play your cards right.

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