Lisa Sugar had an inkling that her online celebrity gossip blog PopSugar was on the right track when Banana Republic called in July 2006 and offered to buy up all the ads for a week -- six months before she had even hired an ad seller. -- "The Sweet Spot," Forbes, April 23, 2007
How would you like that? A huge advertiser calling you up out of the blue to offer you money. Judging by the size of ProBlogger's readerbase, I imagine most of us would consider it a dream come true.
Care to venture a guess as to how many visitors she was seeing at that point, though?
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Back in February, I wrote about "The Top 3 Ways to Generate Revenue from Your Blog" -- number one being advertisers:
Dedicated advertisers are usually your best source of revenue. They pay a much better rate, they’re a guaranteed revenue stream every month, and they tend to stick around. The only downside is that you usually need to have really healthy traffic levels to make it worthwhile for advertisers to work with you directly.
I noted later in the comments that what constituted a "healthy traffic level" really varied from nice to niche -- some sites may be able to attract advertisers with a tenth of the traffic of others; it's just so dependent on what type of readers you're attracting.
Additionally, you definitely want to avoid monetizing too soon. Very few things can kill a site quicker than letting your advertising overwhelm everything else.
Let's suppose, though, that you do have healthy traffic levels for your niche and are indeed ready for advertisers. How do you go about finding them?
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One of the most difficult parts of selling advertising on your site is actually figuring out what rate to charge. Here's a super easy way to get started, though.
When you determine where you want your ad(s) to go, put an AdSense ad there. After a few days or a few weeks you'll have a firm idea of how much that ad is making you. Then, you can simply mark up your advertising over that rate.
For example if ... Keep reading »
