Plugin.com

Sell Advertising on Your Site

Written by: Donna Ann Peck 922 views

Congratulations. You’ve published a website. Now you want to make money. Most website publishers want to sell advertising on their sites. How do you get ads for your web pages? Not a simple project, but a range of options exists for the undaunted entrepreneur. The business of selling ads is challenging yet doable. You don’t need to become an online advertising executive to enter the fray.

Five ways to sell ads

Let’s assume you have one banner ad per page on your site. You can sell ads in five ways.

Flat Rate. Advertisers pay you a flat rate to display their ads on your site for a period of time.

Cost Per Thousand, or cost per mille (CPM). The advertiser pays you a certain rate for every 1,000 ad impressions, where an impression is a single appearance of an ad on a web page. The ad server counts each time an ad loads onto a user’s screen as one impression.

Cost Per Click (CPC). Advertisers pay you a fee each time users click on their ads.

Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Action (CPA). Advertisers pay you each time users click on their ads and continue onto their sites and perform the agreed-upon actions. This may be purchasing a product, registering for a newsletter, or other action of value to advertisers.

Cost Per Lead (CPL). The advertiser pays you for each qualified lead your site generates from their advertising. This is a type of CPA deal.

Assemble a media kit

Create a five- to fifteen-page PDF document for potential advertisers. Include an overview of your site, pictures and descriptions of major sections, information about your site audience (demographics and reach), and other information about your site useful to advertisers.

Create a rate card

A rate card lists the different ad sizes you accept on your website and the cost for each type. Put the information in a table format listing the sizes, site sections, and targeting types. Rate cards are a starting point for advertisers to determine what you charge. Most advertisers and agencies, however, pay some amount less than what you have listed.

Calculate the value of your website

What is the value of your website to advertisers? Revenue Per Thousand Page Views (RPM) expresses the total value of all advertising that appears on your website pages. RMP gauges the overall success of your site.

One way to calculate RPM is to total the money you earned from your site in one month divided by the number of page views. For instance, if you made $5,000 and displayed 100,000 page views, your site-wide RPM is $50.

Another way is to calculate the effective CPM. Let’s say you sell a banner ad on a flat-rate basis for $1,000 and displayed 100,000 pages views. Your effective CPM for the banner ad is $10 CPM. ($1,000/100 since CPM is per thousand page views = $10 CPM.) You sell another ad on a CPC basis and get 200 clicks at $0.25 each or $50. Your effective CPM is $0.50 CPM. ($50/100 = $0.50 CPM.)

To calculate RPM you add the effective CPM of each ad unit on a page. For instance, if you sold two ad units on a page for $10 and .50 then your RPM would be 10 + .50 =$10.50 RPM.

Once you establish an RPM minimum for your site, you know your baseline earnings. Use RPM to gauge the health of your ad sales and maximize the value you receive from each web page. You want to sell your entire advertising inventory for the maximum dollar amount possible, thus generating the highest RPM. Over time, you can increase RPM by selling a variety of ad types and changing your targeting criteria.

Find advertisers for your site

Advertisers want your viewers. In internet marketing, reach is how many different people visit a website to see an ad and also what percentage of these people fall into the targeted audience.

A common measure of reach for a website is its “unique visitors per month.” For example, an advertiser has an ad banner campaign targeted to car owners. Out of the 100,000 unique visitors your website receives each month, 90 percent own  cars. A car ad running on your site would reach 90,000 different car owners in a one-month run. Hence, your website has a reach of 90 percent.

Your goal is to make sure you have a buyer for every impression on your site, every day of the month. Usually, a portion of the impressions each month fall in the remnant category. Remnant inventory is generally used for house ads or is sold to bulk advertisers. For a low CPM or CPC, the bulk advertiser agrees to pick up all remnant inventory on your site.

Make your website attractive to advertisers

You want your website to attract advertising. Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO of Author Marketing Experts, advises her clients to blog frequently.  “You need an active blog that is being referenced on other blogs,” she says. “Your website is like real estate. Imagine a store out in the middle of nowhere. Now imagine that same store in the heart of a busy street with traffic buzzing and the sidewalk full of people. That store has quadrupled in value,” she says.

Traffic and buzz makes your website valuable. What have you discovered about attracting advertisers?

2 Responses So Far... Leave a Reply: