How to Find Advertisers for Your Website: The Ultimate Guide

Direct advertising sales is arguably the best method to monetize a website. Finding advertisers for your site and actually closing the deals, however, is not as straight forward. Over the past 6 months I had more than 10 high profile companies sponsoring AWT Blog Tips, and through out this article I will share what I have learned along the way.

The Pros

• More money: The first advantage of selling your own ads is the fact that you will cut the middlemen out, increasing your revenue potential. Suppose you sell text link ads on your sidebar through a certain company, and the text links sell for $50 monthly. Since you are using the company network to sell the ads, they will eat 50% of the price, and you will end up earning only $25 monthly for each text link. If someone is willing to pay $50 for a text link on your site, though, it means that they are getting $50 of value out of it. Why, then, should you share that with someone else?
• Independence: Sure, large advertising networks have access to a wider pool of advertisers, and they have more credibility to close the deals. But if you have all the requirements in place (see the section below) and spend some time looking at the right places, I am sure that you will be able to sell your own ads just as efficiently as the larger networks.
• Flexibility: The third advantage of selling direct advertising is that you will have much more control over where and how the ads will be displayed (i.e., you can avoid intrusive advertising). Google Adsense is nice, but unless you blend it with the content — annoying some of the readers — you will get terribly low click-through rates.
• Credibility: Finally, having sponsors and direct advertisers on your blog might help your credibility. Even small and poorly crafted blogs can stick some Adsense units here and there. Having established companies that are willing to partnership with your site, on other hand, can signal that your content has quality and that the site is somewhat professional.

The Cons

• Time consuming: While selling your own ads has many advantages, it is no panacea. The first drawback of this monetization option is the time that it will consume. This time will be spent optimizing your website for the ads, finding potential advertisers, negotiating with them, and handling the administrative matters (e.g., making payments, tracking statistics, delivering reports and so on).
• Many requirements: Selling direct adverting is not as easy as making money from Google Adsense. As you can see from the section below, you will need to have a popular blog, a professional looking design, special software and the like.
• Unstable: Unless you close deals for very long periods, which is unlikely, you will find your self looking for new advertisers or optimizing your website to attract new ones every other month. The opposite is true for most advertising networks, where you just need to plug some code and they will do the rest of the work. (If your site or blog is just a hobby, therefore, direct advertising might not be the best option)

What You Need to Have in Place

• A popular website: Before landing direct advertising deals you will need to have a good amount of traffic on your site. There is no “magical” number here, but a good rule of thumb would be 1000 daily unique visitors. If you are below that mark you should focus on building traffic instead of looking for advertisers. Other factors like Google Pagerank, RSS subscribers and Alexa rank might also help. (Notice that small websites might also be able to sell direct advertising, but usually the time spent on that will not justify the results)
• A clear focus: You might have the most popular site on the Internet (well, not as extreme as that, but you get the point), but unless your site also has a very clear niche and a defined audience, advertisers will not find it very attractive. This means that you should avoid rambling about 100 different topics on the website. Advertisers want to deliver a message to specific people, and the more specific the better.
• A professional looking design: If you are planning to monetize your website through sponsors, you probably should invest some money into a professional looking design. Advertisers will be associating their product or service with your website, and not too many of them would be willing to get mixed with an ugly, MySpace looking site.
• Give visibility to the sponsors: This point is connected to the previous one. Not all templates and themes will be suitable for selling direct advertising. Preferably you want to have an idea of what kind of advertising you will sell (e.g., 468×60 banners, 125×125 banners, text links) and design your website according to those objectives. Advertisers want visibility, so reserve a good spot for them.
• Adserver software: In order to serve your ads, rotate banners and track statistics you will need to install an Adserver. If you are looking for a simple solution you should try WP-Ads. This WordPress plugin will serve ads for specific ad zones that you create. The only drawback is that it does not count clicks (only impressions). If you need a more sophisticated solution check OpenAds. You will need to spend some time learning how to use it, but it offers virtually all the features you will ever need.
• “Advertise Here” page: It is very important to have an “Advertise Here” page. On this page you want to give some details about the website, like audience, traffic and any other factor that might be of the interest of potential advertisers. Secondly, make sure that you have some link to that page on the navigation bar and if possible close to the zone where the ads will be displayed. You can see a perfect example of such layout onCopyblogger.com.
• Standard letter to approach advertisers: While some advertisers will contact you after reading your “Advertise Here” page, the rest of them will need to be directly approached by you. In that case, it is a good idea to create a standard letter to contact the advertisers. There is no “one size fits all” solution here, but you can follow some general guidelines:
  1. Introduce yourself and quickly explain what the email is about
  2. Explain why you decided to contact them and what they have to gain
  3. Give details about your site (traffic, subscribers, topic, audience)
  4. Give details about the advertising options (location on the site, max number of advertisers, monthly price)
  That is it, after that information the advertisers should be able to decide if they are interested or not. If they reply, then you will fix the details. Bear in mind that all the info I mentioned should be contained in 2 or 3 paragraphs. If you send an essay to potential advertisers they will just skip it altogether.
• Accepting payments: You might have everything in place, but if you are not able to cash payments — or more importantly, if advertisers are not able to pay easily — you will end up losing deals. PayPal is the best option here. Notice, however, that a personal account will not suffice. You will need at least a premier account to be able to accept credit cards.

Where to Find the Advertisers

Once you have your direct advertising program established, you will start to receive inquiries from people. On the beginning, however, you will need to hunt advertisers down. Do not get discouraged if get turned down initially, provided you have all the aforementioned requirements, sooner or later you will find someone willing to take a shot on your site.

• People linking to your site or articles: If a company is willing to link to your articles or to add your website under its “Links” or “Resources” section, it is also probably willing to discuss about advertising on your site. Keep track of those incoming links.
• People leaving comments/e-mails: The same principle applies to people leaving comments on your blog or sending you e-mails. If among them you see an employee or the owner of a company that could be interested on your website, bingo! Contact him or her and get the conversation going.
• AdWords advertisers: Through out your search for advertisers you will notice that most of the established companies are not aware of the benefits of online advertising. If a certain company is already spending money on Google AdWords, however, it is very likely that it would also be open to other forms of online advertising. Think about some keywords that are related to your topic and Google them. Check the sponsored links that will appear and contact them. (You can also check the advertisers that appear on the Adsense units of related websites)
• Other advertising networks: While Google AdWords is by far the largest advertising network on the Internet, there are many others that could be useful. Check the companies that are spending money on AdBrite, Text-Link-Ads, BlogAds, SponsoredReviews and so on.
• Banner advertisers on similar sites: Check out popular websites on your niche and see what companies are advertising there. Provided you offer them an interesting deal (i.e., a reasonable price for your size), I am pretty sure they will be interested.
• Create a “Potential Sponsors” bookmark folder: This technique produced outstanding results for me. I have a bookmark folder on my browser called “Potential Sponsors.” Every time I come across a company or website that could be interested in sponsoring my website, I bookmark it. Currently I have over 100 bookmarked sites on that folder, and I have not approached half of them yet.

How Much to Charge

• You need to provide value: It is all about value. A potential sponsor or advertiser will want to see some returns for the money he will be spending on your site, and this can be seen as visibility (impressions) and leads (clicks and possible sales). Make sure, therefore, that your advertising deals will deliver.
• The numbers: Remember that there are some pretty cheap advertising options out there (e.g., Google AdWords), and you will need to be competitive. Provided you reserved a good spot for the sponsors (sidebar or header, preferably) you could start charging a $0,5 CPM (cost per 1000 impressions). If your blog is generating 100,000 monthly page views, therefore, a banner spot on your sidebar should cost around $50. Start low and build your way upwards. Popular blogs (e.g., TechCrunch) have a higher CPM, sometimes as high as $10, but you will need a huge credibility to arrive there.
• Cross-check: You can easily check if you are charging a suitable rate by using Adsense units on the places where you will sell direct advertising. Analyze how much you would gain with Adsense, and adjust your rates accordingly. Secondly, you can also check similar sites that are already selling direct ads.
• Be flexible regarding the terms: Flexibility is key. First of all make advertising agreements on a month-to-month basis. People don’t like to commit to something they are not completely sure about. If someone proposes you a longer deal, offer a discount in exchange.
• Offer test periods: Unless you have a very popular website, you will find potential advertisers reluctant to spend real money. If you are confident that the deal will create value for both parties, however, you can use that on your favor. Offer a free test period whenever needed. Some of the times the advertiser will turn you down after it, but other times they will confirm the deal. Either way you have nothing to lose.

How to Remove Broken Links From Your Website

Broken links are links on your website that point to pages that no longer exist. For instance, suppose you write a post linking to an article you found very interesting on another website. A couple of months down the road that website owner decided to delete the article, or to shut the website down completely. Your link will now be pointing to something that no longer exists, so it will be considered a broken link.

Why should you care about broken links?

First because it creates a bad experience for your visitors, as it’s pretty frustrating to click on a link expecting to find something there and get a 404 error.

Second, Google knows broken links are a bad experience for users, so it doesn’t like websites that contain too many broken links (i.e., it might reduce the search rankings of a page or website that has too many).

Now that you are convinced, here’s how to remove broken links from your website. Visit BrokenLinkCheck.com, put the URL of your website, and click on “Find broken links”. Depending on the size of your site you might need to wait some minutes.

If you want a more hardcore tool check out Xenu Link Sleuth (you’ll need to download and install this one though, so the above one is much easier to use).

Once the results are displayed go through each URL and remove the dead link. I suggest that whenever you delete a link you keep the anchor text there and add a “(Update: link no longer active)” message aside to it to let users know what happened there.

Repeat this process once a year or so to make sure your website will stay clean of broken links. Your visitors will thank you, and Google will reward you.

Nine Blogging Milestones to Celebrate

You probably have some big goals (or dreams) for your blog.

Maybe you’d love to make a living online. Perhaps you hope to attract a large audience, or you’re aiming to become well-known in your field.

These goals can sometimes seem a very long way off, though. For many bloggers, it takes months to start to get the results they’re hoping for.

Instead of looking far ahead to a distant goal, focus on some of the milestones you’ve already achieved, and the ones which are coming up.

I’ve listed the milestones in roughly the order you’re likely to achieve them, but no two blogs (and bloggers) are the same — so you might well find that you’ve skipped some or reached others in a different order.

Milestone #1: Getting Your Blog Up and Running

Some people read about blogging, think about blogging, talk about blogging … but never get around to starting their blog.

The set-up stage can take a lot of time and thought — you may need to get your head around the techy side of things, or you might have tricky strategic decisions to make. If you’ve got yours online, that’s a great achievement.

Milestone #2: Publishing Your Second Post

Once your blog’s online, Post #1 is often not too tricky: you could, for instance, simply write a bit about the purpose of their blog and about who you are.

Post #2 is harder. I’ve seen a fair few blogs with just one post … ever. If you’ve got at least two posts on your blog, congratulations!

Milestone #3: Getting Your First Subscriber

You might get some initial traffic from Facebook friends or forum buddies, but it’s when you get your first subscriber that you know you’re on the right lines.

If someone’s signed up to follow your blog by RSS or email, it’s a safe bet that they liked what they saw. You’ve turned a casual visitor into a (hopefully) loyal reader.

Milestone #4: Getting Your First Tweet or Share

Once you have some readers, it’s only a matter of time before someone (other than you!) tweets one of your posts, or shares it on Facebook … or on LinkedIn, Google+, etc.

To reach this milestone a little sooner, make sure you have social sharing buttons on your posts. There are plenty of WordPress plugins that can do this. You may want to focus on one or two specific social networks, rather than providing dozens of buttons.

Milestone #5: Getting Your First Comment

In the early weeks of blogging, it might feel like you’re writing and writing … and no-one’s reading. Getting your first comment proves that at least one person is not only reading, they’re engaging.

If you’re struggling to get comments, check out some of the links (and some of the great comments) here: Seven Ways to Get More Comments on Your Blog.

Milestone #6: Getting Your First Link

The first time another blogger links to you is real proof you’re doing something right. It might be in their blogroll, in a weekly roundup post, or even in a post that tells their readers how much they’re enjoying your blog.

You might be tempted to hurry this one along with a link exchange (asking another blogger to link to your blog in return for a link to theirs). Keep in mind that Google may penalise you if you do this too much, plus link exchange requests can be irritating to other bloggers.

Milestone #7: Making Your First Dollar

Even if you’re not interested in making a living from your blogging, you might at least want to offset your hosting costs. The day you first make money from your blog — even if it’s just a dollar — is one to savour.
If you’re unsure how blogs make money, or if you’re looking for an easy-to-implement method, try our post Seven Ways Blogs Make Money — Which is Right For You?

Milestone #8: Writing Your First Post for Another Blog

There’s no rule saying that you have to guest post on other people’s blogs … but I’ve never met a successful blogger who hasn’t. Guest posts are a great way to get in front of a big audience, to build a relationship with well-known bloggers in your niche, and to get links.

You don’t need to have lots of readers in order to guest post (in fact, you can guest post even without a blog of your own). If you need a helping hand, read our Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Your First Guest Post.

Milestone #9: Getting a “Thank You” Email from a Reader

Comments are great … but there’s something particularly special about receiving an email from a reader to thank you for you post.

Maybe you wrote something that helped them solve a tricky problem in their life. Maybe your words encouraged them during a tough time. Whatever the situation, you made a difference — and that’s something to be truly proud of.

What would your #10 be? And which of these milestones have you already reached? Let us know in the comments…

How Broad or Narrow Should Your Blog’s Niche Be?

One of the questions that’s come up a few times is how to select a niche, or how to fix problems with one. Usually, problems crop up because a niche is too broad or too narrow.

Is Your Niche Too Broad?

Here’s an example of too broad a niche … in fact, this blog doesn’t really have a niche at all:

My blog covers travel, health, personal development, Twitter, and watercolour painting.

While you might personally have a very wide range of interests, it’s not a good idea to combine these into one blog. Even if you have no intention of making money, you presumably want readers – and they’ll want a blog with a focus.

Fix it:

• Choose a core topic (or two or three closely related topics) to focus on. For instance, it might make sense to combine health and personal development.
• Write down what your blog is really about. You might find it’s useful to use bullet points here. Imagine you’re explaining your blog to a friend or a potential new reader.
• Use different outlets for your other interests. If you have a blog on personal development, with a slant towards health, there’s nothing stopping you writing guest posts about watercolour painting.

Is Your Niche Too Narrow?

A very narrow niche might sound like a good idea, but in practice, it can be very tough to get traffic and readers. A too-narrow niche is also a common cause of burnout: you simply run out of things to say, or lose interest.

It might look like this:

Best brushes for watercolour painting.

While that could make a great blog post or even a great series, it’s not going to be an easy topic for a whole blog.

In my experience, bloggers often choose a too-narrow niche not because they’re passionately interested in it but because they hope it’ll make money. The truth is that a slightly broader niche will usually serve you better.

Fix it:

• Move one step up from your current topic. From best brushes for watercolour painting, you might choose to blog about painting tools (brushes, canvases, etc) or you might blog about watercolour painting.
• Consider buying a new domain. Perhaps your current domain name restricts your topics too much, and it’s time to find a new one.
• Rethink how your blog makes money. Very niche sites are often monetised with affiliate marketing or ads. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you might find a broader niche is easier to monetise in other ways (e.g. by selling products or services).

What’s your blog’s niche? Do you think it’s too narrow or too broad? Let us know in the comments!

How Should You Monetize a New Blog?

You’ve got a new blog – maybe it’s been running for a few days or a few weeks. (Or perhaps you’re still in the planning stages.)
How should you monetize?
(And if you’re wondering whether it’s too soon, check out this post from last week where we looked at why you can and should monetize your blog right from day one.)

As I see it, there are two really good options for a brand new blog.

Option #1: Affiliate Links

Although affiliate marketing sometimes gets a bad rap, it’s a straightforward way to make money, and (done with integrity) it creates a win-win-win situation for you, your reader, and the product creator.

Many digital products (like ebooks, software and membership sites) offer an affiliate program, where you can sign up to earn commission on any sales you generate. If you own any digital products, look for an “Affiliates” section on their website, or contact the creator to ask if there’s an affiliate program. Often, you’ll get a 50% cut.

If you want to promote physical products, Amazon will give you a small percentage of sales – this could work out very well if you blog about laptops, cameras, phones, or anything else where readers are likely to buy high-priced products. If you mainly promote books and other low-priced products, though, it can take a long time to make any money like this.

Tip: Only promote products you own and like. Don’t sign up as an affiliate for a product you’ve never used – it could badly backfire if a reader buys on your recommendation. Always be honest when reviewing products, and let readers know any drawbacks.

Option #2: Services

Creating a product up-front is probably going to take more time than you have – but how about selling a service instead?

Hopefully, you have a few skills that relate to your niche. For instance, on my site Aliventures I blog about writing – and I could feasibly sell my services as a blogger, an editor, a proof-reader, a writing coach, and so on. (In fact, I’ve done all of these in my time.)

Don’t underestimate yourself here. Skills that may seem second-nature to you could be very valuable to someone else. Let’s say you’ve started ten blogs and you’re now great at installing WordPress, setting up plugins, tweaking themes, and so on. You could offer blog setup to people who aren’t so techy minded.

Tip: Offer your services for free to a few selected people, and get them to give you feedback so you can improve. Ask them for a testimonial that you can include on your website: this will be a big help in persuading potential customers that you’re reputable.

So why haven’t I mentioned one of the most popular options out there – running adverts on your site? Many new bloggers want to monetize using ads – but it’s rarely a good way to make money. You need a lot of traffic to make ads worthwhile, and while they can provide a nice extra stream of income, you’re unlikely to make a living from them.

(To give you an example here, it took me 11 months of blogging to get my first $100 from Google Adsense, and just a couple of months to make that much through freelance blogging.)

If you’ve been blogging for a while, tell us what monetization techniques worked best for you in the early days of your blog. And if you’ve got a new blog, or you’re about to get started, leave a comment to tell us how you’ll be monetizing.

Meta Tag Analyzer

Some time ago I wrote about the importance of having a short and pertinent title tag (you can read it here).

The title tag might be the most important factor on the header of a site, but all the other meta tags (description, keywords and author) should also be considered. They will not make a huge impact on your search ranking but every little help should be used to fine tune your blog.

Meta Tag Analyzer is a very helpful tool for understanding your meta tags. All you need to do is to type the address of your site and it will report the status of the page, the number of keywords, the relevancy of the title, the quality of the tags and much more. Check it out.

Use forums to promote your blog

A very simple yet effective way to promote your blog is through the use of online forums. The first thing to do is to find a couple of forums related to the topic of your blog and register up. Big-Boards.com is an excellent resource to find large forums. Currently they track almost 2000 of the largest online boards on the Internet.

Once you pick a couple of forums and register up you will need to customize your profile. Most of the boards allow the user to create a signature, make sure you use it to place a link to your blog with a small description of what users will find there.

Now you are set, just engage in the discussions and contribute with useful information, so that people will want to check out your signature link.