How To Get Direct Advertisements For Your Blog

About a decade back, nobody thought that blogs would transform from a personal diary to full-fledged money making websites. Blog monetization strategies have undergone several transitions during these years, and bloggers have tons of monetization options at their disposal. One of the options is 'Direct Advertisements'. Interestingly, large number of bloggers does not use this option for many reasons. Let's try to understand the dynamics of direct advertising and the methods to grab direct advertisement deals.

If you own a blog with decent traffic (at least 500-1000 unique visits/day) and are planning to monetize it, direct advertising is an excellent option for you. Quality content and good traffic are two most important prerequisites before pitching for direct advertising.

Advantages of Direct Advertising

Cuts out the middleman - Almost every blogger who has monetized his/her blog is familiar with PPC (pay-per-click) ads served by popular 3rd party advertising networks. Since they act as a middleman between the advertiser and the publisher, they take a good share of revenue. On the other hand, getting direct ads from advertisers removes the middleman and you as a publisher get full incentive for your service.

More choice on type of ads - You can offer almost any type of ad format for the advertisers. With 3rd party advertisements, you have limited choices with some predefined standard ad formats. Through direct advertising you can offer a wide array of ad formats with much more flexible ad placements. Following are some popular ad types used by bloggers.

1. Banners (Animated/Static)
2. Text Links
3. RSS Ads
4. Newsletter Ads
5. Site Reviews
6. Audio/Video Ads

When you are in complete control of your ads, advertisers gets more variety to choose from that suits his business demands.

Flexible payment options - Another advantage is acceptance of payment in multiple ways. If an advertiser is not willing to pay by one method you can opt for the second. Normally, bloggers prefer wire transfer or Paypal as the best method to get payments from advertisers. Still, if an advertiser chooses any other payment medium you can be flexible and can go ahead with that option without any chance of losing the deal.

Long-term relationships - More than often, bloggers develop long term relationships with advertisers who are satisfied with their service. This not only opens the door for consistent stream of income from these advertisers, but also increases the probability of grabbing more advertising deals through referrals of these satisfied advertisers.

Flexible pricing - Since you are in complete control of your ad inventory, you can exercise extreme flexibility while quoting price of different types of ads to grab virtually every advertising deal that comes in your way.

Builds Credibility - A blog that gets consistent direct advertisement deals automatically builds it's credibility and is seen as an authority in it's niche.

Disadvantages of Direct Advertising

Difficulty in finding advertisers - Initially, a lot of effort goes in finding advertisers for your blog. Sometimes, it may take considerable time before any such deal is finalized. Once you start getting the deals, things become easier though you still have to move your legs aggressively to clinch new deals.

Time consumption - Keeping track of ad inventory, negotiating deals with advertisers, keeping track of payments and time deadlines consumes lot of precious time. If you have multiple blogs that are updated daily, things can become more difficult as considerable part of your blogging schedule is spent in maintaining your ad inventory and in finding new advertising deals.

Disputes - Sometimes, an advertiser is not satisfied with the results and may nullify the agreement from his end demanding refund of his payment. This can also lead to negative feedback to other advertisers in the pool.

Preparations For Getting Direct Advertising

Before you decide to approach advertisers, you must do some very important preparations to increase the probability of clinching your first direct advertising deal.

Create a dedicated advertising page - An advertising page concentrates all the necessary information needed to convince potential advertisers (kind of a portfolio of your blog). This page tabulates the most important statistics about your blog. In simple words, this page gives all the reasons why advertisers should choose your blog for advertising.

Following are some of the essential ingredients of a typical advertising page.

About your blog section - This section gives a brief introduction about your blog. What it's all about, it's niche, target audience and the purpose of its existence (reader's perspective).

Traffic statistics - The most important part of advertising page. Give all the important data related to your blog traffic to convince the potential advertisers. Following are some major blog statistics that are commonly used by bloggers in their advertising page.

1. Page Views (per day/ per month)
2. Unique Visits (per day/ per month)
3. Alexa/Compete and Similar Services Ranks
4. Number of Feed Subscribers
5. Demographic Data (V. Imp)

Some advertisers don't give much importance to Alexa and similar ranks but others do take them into consideration, so its better to include them in your traffic statistics section. Similarly, providing concentrated demographic data increase the chances of getting advertising deals.

Available Ad Slots - In this section the available ad inventory is showcased. This includes each ad type, their format, their exact placement and the number of such slots available for any location. To give a clearer picture you must supplement this section with appropriate snapshots of ads placed in a particular location.

Now here comes the tricky part. What about pricing of ads? Should we straightaway quote the price of each available ad slot? Well, I would strongly suggest you to keep your cards closed. Let the advertiser contact you with relevant details and then you can play your cards according to the situation. Ask for advertiser's website address when he first contacts you. This way you can visit their web site and can get fair idea about their budget and purchasing power. Through this approach, you create an opportunity for yourself to assess the situation and then create a flexible pricing plan. If you publicly display your ad prices, websites with considerably low budget may not approach you and big websites may grab it in much lesser rate then they were willing to pay earlier.

Testimonials - Great marketers use their customers feedback to promote their products. Same rule applies here. Get some testimonials from your satisfied advertisers and prominently display them on your advertising page. This builds your credibility and shows your track record of giving excellent advertising services. Apart from publishing the plain testimonial statement, you can further replenish it by including thumbnail image of the person with his/her designation.

Calculating Advertising Prices

Often newbies are in dilemma about setting the correct price for their advertisements. Sometimes, they fear that quoting a high price can result in loss of advertising deal, while quoting less will be like giving their real estate in pennies. How to overcome this situation and how to correctly calculate the prices for your ad inventory? Here are some basic guidelines to calculate ad prices.

Image Vs Text Ads - Normally image ads are always priced high than text ads. The CTR (click-through ratio) of image ads is much higher than text ads and hence this pricing difference.

Size Does Matter - Larger the size of the banner, higher the price is. If your 125x125 image banner is priced at $30/month, a 250x250 banner should be priced at 4 x 30 = $120/month.

Placement - If the advertisement appears above the fold (area visible without the need of scrolling), it is priced much higher than those ads that appear below the fold. If an ad is going to appear in the footer, it's price will be considerably low than that placed in the header of your blog.

Pricing Model - There are two popular pricing models for advertisements. The CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model and CPA (cost per action) model. The CPM model is the preferred way to calculate ad prices and is widely accepted model throughout blogosphere. In this model, a fixed amount is paid for every 1000 page views, simple. But how would you calculate the right price for a particular ad in this model? Here are some ways to do it.

The best way to get the correct value of an ad is to check public ad inventories and see their CPM rate. Login to your Adsense account and go to advanced reports to view the CPM rate for a particular ad. Take at least month long data to get the clear picture, though a long-range data will give much more accurate rate. Let's suppose you get a CPM rate of $1.20 from the report. Now according to your assessment of the purchasing power of the advertiser you can increase or decrease this rate. A low budget advertiser can be offered a rate of $1.00 or $0.80, while a big web site can be asked for a CPM rate of $1.50.

Let's assume that the deal is finalized with a rate of $1.50 CPM. How the monthly rate will be calculated? Suppose your blog generates 5000 page views per day. This amounts to 30 x 5000 = 150000 page views per month. So, at this rate the price of the ad will be (150000 / 1000) * 1.50 = $225/month.

Daniel Scocco has written an excellent article about calculating ad prices for your advertising space. If you are still in dilemma, you can also ask an expert to assess your blog's worth.

Finding the Advertisers

Now comes the real tough part (at least for newbies) of finding advertisers for your blog. There are many ways to do it.

Visit Marketplaces - There are several popular forums and discussion boards where advertisers and publishers meet solely for the purpose of finding and negotiating advertising deals. You can visit Digital Point - Buy, Sell or Trade Forum, SitePoint Marketplace and Webmaster World Commercial Exchange Forum to find advertisers for your blog.

Check Competitor's blogs - Visit popular blogs related to your blog's niche and see who is advertising on these blogs. This is a good source of creating a list of potential advertisers. Since they are already advertising on a blog related to your blog's niche, a chance of clinching a deal from these advertisers is more likely to happen.

Check public ad inventories - Some 3rd party advertising networks give public access to their inventory to account holders. Sign-up for these ad networks and browse their ad inventory. Again, filter out advertisers related to your blog's niche. Here not only you can get a list of potential advertisers but can also get a fair idea about how much they are willing to pay.

Write a blog post about it - This is one more way to attract advertisers. Write a blog post explicitly stating that your blog is now open for direct advertising.

Search engines - And last but not the least is search engines. Type in relevant keywords and visit the web sites. Check their contact page and create a list of potential advertisers.

How To Approach Potential Advertisers

Once you have the list of potential advertisers in your hand, its time to contact them inviting to advertise on your blog.

Write a mail giving your brief introduction. State your purpose of writing in brief. To speed up the process give your phone number and messenger id. Attach the media kit/rate card showcasing various advertising options available on your blog. It's somewhat similar to mobile version of your 'Advertise' page. However, this document must contain detailed pricing of every ad type. You must also quote discounted prices for long-term deals. One more convincing methodology is to give limited period read-only access to Google Analytics dashboard to verify your traffic claims for long-term deals (6 months or more). This offer increases the confidence of advertiser and the probability of negotiating a deal also increases.

If this is your first advertising deal, be ready to be flexible enough while negotiating pricing of your ads. Remember, your first deal will open the door for more such deals.

What Else I Have Missed?

I would like to know your experiences in maintaining independent ad inventories and your approach towards grabbing such advertising deals.

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Few Ways For Easy Making Money Online

1) Google AdSense
It is getting more and more people like to make money with AdSense through a website. Creating an AdSense site is not difficult as there are a number of site builders allow people to build websites without programming knowledge and skills. To generate Adsense revenue from your website you need visitors. The more people visit your site, the higher your AdSense earning will be.

2) eBay Business
Have a lot of old stuff or unwanted things? Why not sell them on ebay and make some extra money. If you need to make more profit by selling a wide variety of products, here's how you can find products for reselling on ebay:
1) Buy from flea market.2) Deal with wholesaler or dropship wholesaler.

3) Virtual Assistance
If you like to have a work at home job, consider becoming a virtual assistance. A virtual assistance work at home for a company or a business. The tasks of virtual assistances may include data entry, administrative works, book keeping, handling customers enquiries, issuing bills and many more. The pay rate of virtual assistances usually anywhere between $5 to $50 per hour.

4) Blog
Blog is often being as a personal diary. You can write anything to your blog as long as the content is legal and ethical. So how to make money with a blog? Below are some of the ways:
1) Sell your own product using a blog.2) Promote affiliate programs on your blog.3) Host Google Ads and earn AdSense revenue.
Your success will depend on the popularity of your blog. The more reader read your blog, the more money you will make.

5) Affiliate Marketing
BusinessAffiliates make money by selling other people stuff. To generate sales, you need to drive potential buyers to your merchant's website. There are several methods you can use to send potential buyers to your merchant's site:
1) Open a Google AdWords account to advertise on Google.2) Build an opt-in subscriber list through a website or blog and promote your affiliate products to your subscribers.3) Article marketing.

6) Get Paid to Sign up Offers
Need an easy way of making money online? Join Treasuretrooper.com free and start earning cash by completing companies offers and building your downline. Most of the paid offers are available to US residents only. International members can still make money by referring new members.

7) Forex TradingIt is interesting to trade currencies. There are many technical tools you can use to form your own trading system and strategy. You can achieve high return month by month if your trading techniques consistently predict the market movement accurately. However forex investment involves high degree of risks. So it is not suitable for everyone. When trading forex, you should investment only the amount you afford to lose.

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Ways To Earn Money Online without a Website

1) Selling on eBay
eBay is the largest auction website in the world. eBay has been helping tons of people to own and operate a home-based or small business. Online entrepreneurs can start an ebay business with little initial capital and sell their products in eBay without spending money on advertising and promotion because ebay has done all the promotion works for the sellers. There are now more than 2 millions people visiting ebay everyday and many of them are potential buyers.

2) Completing Offers
There are many companies willing to pay people to sign up and try new offers. You can find these companies joining

Treasuretroopper.com- Free to join. Currently have over 300 offers in the database. Earning per offer ranks from $0.50 to $35.00 and most are available to US residents only.

3) Writing Articles
There are many webmasters need new and fresh articles for publishing on their websites and you can make money supplying articles to them. The pay usually more than $5.00 per article. Below are sites that contain freelance writing opportunities:
Guru.com
Digital Forum - Copywriting Section

4) Paid Survey
Taking paid survey is an old way to earn money online but it can be a great source of extra income. Yellowsurveys.com provides a long list of survey companies that will pay people (mostly US people) for completing surveys. You should join as many survey companies as possible to maximize the amount you can earn.

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Make Money At Home

One of the largest perks of online surveys is that you can do it all from the comfort of your own home. Taking online surveys from home is a great idea and is a stress free way to earn some extra spending money. There is no right or wrong way to answer the questions on the surveys. You simply fill out the surveys with your own opinion.

Best of all, online survey sites do not require the consumer to have prior training or any specialized skills. All you need to have is the internet and the ability to answer questionnaires giving your honest and unbiased opinion for what you are being asked.

When you work from home you can plan around your schedule. You hold your own time. If you are a morning person, then be a morning person. If you like to sleep till noon and stay up all night, then answer the surveys in the middle of the night. There are no set hours for you to conform to. Most online surveys take between five to fifteen minutes for you to complete. Since you can get up and walk away from the computer when needed, filling out surveys will not disrupt your daily routine. Another advantage is there is no time limit. There are no set hours that you must be free to work or you’ll lose your job. Sick days are accepted. Want to go on vacation? Then go for it. It's your own, your holding your own time.

If you are looking for an easy time efficient way to make some extra cash from your own home, then online survey will be a step in the right direction.

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Types of Paid Surveys

When deciding to pursue paid online surveys, you may not know exactly what to expect. There are several different types of surveys, and you will probably encounter every type of survey in your new part-time job filling out surveys.

These are some types:

Focus Groups - Focus groups are chat sessions, sometimes conducted by typing and sometimes with voice software or by telephone. You and a group of other people will answer questions and give opinions on a particular topic. Discussion groups are much like focus groups.

Product Reviews - A favorite among survey takers is the product review. You may be asked to review a product which the company will send you. Sometimes you are allowed to keep the product, which makes this a very popular survey form. You may also be asked to review products you already own, which is not as exciting, but is still a nice source of income.

Online Surveys - The most common type of survey is just the plain vanilla online survey, in which you fill out multiple-choice, true/false or short answer questions. Many market research firms use these simple surveys, some short and some longer, to conduct research for their clients.

Mail / Phone Surveys - Some research firms also use mail and phone surveys to conduct research for their clients. You will sign up for these surveys online, and then participate by mailing in a survey form or taking part in a telephone survey.

Product Testing - Another popular form of survey is the taste test. These surveys are obviously not conducted entirely online, but you may sign up for a taste test through your regular survey companies online, and then take the taste test at a location near you.

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Make Money with Paid Survey

Make money with paid survey, is it just a scam or non-sense. Well, there are actually lots of reputable market research and consumer companies welcome people to become their members to earn cash participating in their online survey. It is a legitimate way on making money online. In addition, Paid survey is very popular, there are more than a 100,000 people searching for paid surveys every month in Yahoo as recorded in Overture Search tool.

However, the downsides of paid survey is that you will not know how much amount of money you make every month. The companies only send paid survey invitations to you if you are eligible. If you receive more surveys in the month, you'll earn more. The biggest problem is that most paid surveys only available to US residents, so people outside US will find it very hard to make money with paid survey.

Start Earning with Paid Survey:

• Creating a new e-mail account would be a good idea, specially for receiving paid survey invitations. You can use Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and other free email services. This will make finding your survey invitations easier compare to using an existing email that receives plenty of mails daily.But if you want to use your existing one, it's up to you.
  

• You can go to Yellowsurveys.com to sign up with as many online market research companies as possible as you want. The site compiled a long list of market research companies that offer paid surveys. Sign up with the companies in "Most Popular" category first and then continue to join the rest. This can take few days of work and effort.

• Wait for paid survey invitations send to you. It can take fews days to months to receive your first survey invitation. Do not rely on paid survey as your main source of income. It can only be a way of earning extra money.

• Get Paid with your surveys. The best part is to get paid for the surveys. You won't get paid immediately after answering the survey, this is done once the survey has been completely closed, so it could take around 2 weeks to get paid for the surveys, but once you take surveys on a daily basis and you have payments being made every week this won't be a problem

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