You’re a Blog Publisher: Selling Advertising on your Blog

Written by Angela Booth from Blogging For Dollars

Your Ad Here

Your blog is a publication, just like a magazine or newspaper is a publication. Therefore, you can follow the well-traveled route of selling advertising on your blog, just as other publications do.

Selling advertising on your blog works even if you’re developing a business blog. The reasons you may want to sell advertising space on your blog include: becoming an authority in your industry and defraying some of the costs of blogging.

Here steps to follow to sell advertising on your blog.

1. Pay attention to your referrer logs - who’s reading your blog?

Your first step is to check your referrer logs, so you can discover who your readers are. Once you know who they are, you can work out what they’re interested in.

If your readers are small business owners for example, they’ll be interested in products targeted to small business - anything from computers to office furniture.

2. How much traffic are you getting?

Once you know who your readers are, it’s time to work out how much traffic you’re getting to your blog.

Yes, you need traffic - but relax if you’re not getting ten thousand visitors a day; 200 to 500 targeted visitors a day are fine. Targeted traffic is always better than “traffic” in general.

3. Work out where your ad positions will be

Your next step is to decide just where you’ll place the ads. Check other Web sites to see where they place advertising, and the styles of the display ads they use.

In addition to display advertising, you may also want to consider text link advertising on individual blog posts. You can sell text link ads for a year’s placement.

4. How much will you charge?

How much you can charge for advertising space depends on how much targeted traffic your blog’s getting. The more targeted your traffic is, the more you can charge.

However, there’s no way of telling whether your blog’s readers are responsive to advertising until you place ads and work out the click-through rates.

Test: you can sell your first few ads at a highly discounted rate, until you collect some statistics.

4. Put up affiliate or other ads, or just “Your Ad Here” ad blocks while the ads are unsold

Once you’ve decided where your ad positions will be, and your rates, put up an “Advertising” page on the blog, with information for potential advertisers.

While the ad blocks remain unsold, put up placeholder advertising with affiliate ads, ads for your own products, and “Your Ad Here” blocks.

So there you have it: steps you can follow to sell advertising on your blog. Good luck: advertising is expected on blogs, and you can make it work for you.