Today’s guest post comes from Chad Randall, the Director of Sales for b5media and the author of AdvertiseSpace. Chad has been working in the online advertising industry for over 6 years now, and has personally sold more than $5,000,000 in online ads. I figured he’d be a good person to ask about how to make your blog attractive to advertisers.
1. Have an “Advertise with Us” Banner on your site
This is the single most important issue. It should click to an Advertising information page and have an easy way to contact you for more information and rates. Key points: Make it a graphical image or a tab. Keep it above the fold.
2. Keep the ads on your site specific to your site
Don’t have smiley ads and wallpaper ads if your site is site is about mobile phones.
3. Show them the banners
If you currently have no paid placements on your site, put up house ads or partner ads in the same spot you would run a paid spot. (A house ad refers to banners for other products or sites that you or your company own)
4. Throw up a free bonus ad.
By putting a free advertisement on your site, you may not only encourage similar ads or competitors to that product, but the company you added for free may decide to advertise with you. Ask for full disclosure of the performance of the campaign in return. (Total clicks, total purchases etc. ) Key points. Put the free bonus up with a direct URL without tracking tags or affiliate tags.
5. Show your site stats.
You need to show at least the basics for site statical information: Monthly unique visitors and total number of impressions are the 2 key ones. Other less important can be Google PR & Alexa rank.
6. User demographic information. Know your audience.
The bare minimum is Male/Female % and average age of your readers. Other potentially useful information includes geographic, HHI, single/married, number of kids. etc. How do you get this info? You can do site polls, survey’s, or get more detailed stats from ComScore or Quantcast.com
7. Have an ‘About Us’ section.
Clearly explain who you are and what your site is about. And also why you are an ‘authority’ on what you are writing about, and why anyone should care about what you have to say.
8. Don’t use Google AdSense on your site.
OK, this could be the most painful one for most people especially if you are generating a few hundred bucks a month from it already. But Google ad sense devalues your site and makes it look unprofessional. You have to ask yourself, “Do I want some real revenue from my site or Google’s table scraps.”
9. Keep your blog on topic.
If you are all over the map in regards to topics about which you talk about, advertisers won’t know if they are a good fit for your site.
10. Keep your blog professional.
If you are talking about your cat, (Matt Cutts), ranting about your drive to work, swearing or bashing every product you can think about, it will scare away advertisers.
updated – for spelling. Thanks Eric.
In my opinion blog post titles should be easily readable and understandable by the readers then only they will read the post .
#8 – Ads on a commercial website is very unprofessional and I agree with that. Maybe on a personal blog but not on a corporate blog.
Ads just doesn’t make “sense” =)
I’m not sure to not use google adsense on the site.
But if anyone want to put their ads on my site better than my earning google adsense, that’s the time to remove google adsense on the site.
Useful info and perhaps I’ll set my other blogs to attractive advertiser.