How to Make Money Selling Advertising on Your Website or Blog

If you own a website or blog, run an internet marketing business, or work at home online, then you probably know what advertising options such as Google Adsense are and how they are basically an easy way to sell advertising space on your site/blog. You also might know that it can be put on just about any website or blog and that it is one of the most popular ways for website owners to make money online. It’s no secret that selling advertising on a website or blog is a great way to make money online, but many people don’t fully understand how to do it.

One of the best ways to make money online is by selling direct advertising on your website or blog. This goes far beyond Adsense ads. If you have built up a popular site then it’s pretty easy to find people who will pay you big money to advertise on it. I make thousands of dollars per month from people buying advertising on my blogs/sites.

Part of the allure of selling advertising is that the income is relatively passive and residual. You pretty much know how much you are going to make each month (barring any cancellations) and you don’t always have to be hoping for affiliate sales, Adsense clicks or other ways you make money from your website via your visitors performing an action. Sure you will probably have some advertisers cancel every once in a while, and have to find new ones to replace them, but for the most part income from selling advertising is pretty consistent.

There are services out there that will help find advertisers for you but they will take a percentage of the earnings. These services can be good because they make it a lot easier to find advertisers. However, I don’t use them because I like to get all the money from advertisers on my sites and I want to be in control of who is advertising on my sites. I like to find the advertisers myself so I don’t have to worry about losing any of the revenue or having the possibility of links being placed on my site to websites that I don’t want on there. This is more work because once you find them you have to take the payments, put up their ads, and keep track of them. But it’s not very hard if you get a good system in place.

So, how do you sell advertising for your website?

Let’s dig in…

There Are 2 Major Ways to Sell Advertising on Your Website

1) Revenue Share Advertising

Revenue share advertising is a very popular way that website owners can earn money with ads. Google Adsense is an example of revenue share advertising. These are sites that find the advertisers for you and then, when somebody clicks on the links that are displayed on your site, they give you a share of the revenue created by the click. The amount of money per click varies depending on the deal made between the revenue share company and the advertiser. This is information you usually don’t get to know.

Revenue share programs are great because they are very easy to set up. Basically all you do is sign up for the program, insert some code into your website template and the ads will show up. Not much extra work is needed on your part.

Of course, revenue share programs also have their disadvantages. For instance, Google Adsense has some very strict rules about what you are allowed to do with your ads. Make sure that you read and understand the terms of service before you click the “I agree” button. It is very easy to inadvertently commit “click fraud” with Adsense and once your account gets suspended, you won’t ever be allowed to reinstate it.

Another disadvantage of revenue share advertising is that you don’t get all the money from the ads on your site. They company usually takes just as much (or more) than you get. It’s the price you pay for the ease of use and them finding the advertisers for you.

One thing to remember with revenue share programs is that no matter what one you choose, make sure that you understand what they expect from you and what you are allowed to do and not allowed to do with your ads.

2) Direct Advertising

Direct advertising is fairly self-explanatory. You find the advertisers, display their ads on your site and collect the money. This is the best way to make money through advertising if you want to keep 100% of the profit from the ads. Of course, the disadvantage of direct advertising is that it’s not nearly as easy to implement as revenue share and you have to find your own advertisers for your site.

Before you start hunting down direct advertisers, you will want to decide which kinds of ads you want to run. Do some research and see what kind of ads work well on other sites similar to yours. You only want to run ads that are at least somewhat related to the content of your site.

Then make sure that you understand how to implement the ads into your website or blog template. You will need to know a little bit about coding to make your advertising look professional. Finally, you will need to know about the business side of advertising. You will need contracts and invoices and a way to keep track of individual clients. While direct advertising usually brings in more profit, it is far more time consuming and harder to keep track of than revenue sharing advertising.

Whichever advertising method you choose to make money online, be sure you understand the advantages, disadvantages, and limitations of each method as well as expectations of everyone involved. Advertisers can be very fickle and so can your readers. Some readers don’t respond well to sites that are covered in ads, so you will want to make sure that you strike a balance between content and ads. This is important because, if you lose readers, you’ll lose advertisers and income.

Revenue share advertising and direct advertising are both very good ways to make money online and are simple enough for just about anyone to implement. Remember that if one method doesn’t work for you, you can simply try the other. I actually recommend utilizing both so you can make even more money and spread it out a little between multiple income streams.

How to Find Blog Advertisers

Here are some ways to find advertisers for your blog so you can make more money from it…

1. Google your main keyword phrase and a few of your secondary keyword phrases. Now, take a look at the Adwords ads at the top of the search results. These ads are from businesses and entrepreneurs who are promoting websites in your niche to make money, and they are paying for traffic. You already know they are willing to spend money advertising for your keywords, so why not try to contact them and see if they want to advertise on your blog? They could buy a banner or text link on your blog for a set dollar amount per month.

2. Find other sites/blogs in the same niche, or similar niches, as yours that sell advertising and contact the people advertising on them to let them know you also sell ads on your site. You could even ask the blog owner where he gets his advertisers. Most bloggers are very helpful and would be happy to give you some information.

3. Go to the sections of forums or facebook groups in your niche where you can post that you are selling advertising. That should get you quite a few new advertisers. You could also post a special offer for ads spots on your blog.

4. Check out various affiliate networks and see if you can find affiliates who might be interested in advertising on your site.

5. Take a look at offline advertisers. This one is a little more complicated because you are dealing with people who are not usually as internet savvy as those above. However, if you look in newspapers and magazines in your local area, you might find businesses in your niche that would be interested in advertising on your blog. You’ll probably have to educate them a little so preparing a short report with screen shots of traffic and keywords would be a good idea. Don’t talk down to these folks because they aren’t stupid, but realize that terms you consider to be common (like RSS) might be a foreign language to them.

That is about all you really need to find advertisers so you can make money from your blog. There are plenty of other ways to make money blogging but selling advertising is definitely one of the best, and it’s relatively easy to do. Go find a few new advertisers right now using the methods above and before you know it, you will be a master at it, and making bank!

Tips for Selling Advertising

Here are some tips I have learned about how to make money online selling advertising since I started doing it:

* Be specific on what your advertising options and prices are. A confused advertiser will either not pay you to advertise on your site or they will complain later because they didn’t get what they thought they were paying for. If you look at any of my advertising pages you will see that I always lay out exactly what they get and how much it will cost.

* Offer a lot of options. Again if you look at any of my home business advertising pages you will see that I typically offer 10+ advertising options. Having more options increases the chances that you have an option that will fit the needs of most potential advertisers. You can’t make money selling advertising if you don’t have options that people want.

* Set the right price. It’s difficult to know exactly how much you should be charging but you want to get it close because if you overcharge you will lose advertisers and if you undercharge you won’t be maximizing your earnings. Take a look at what other sites in your niche with similar traffic as yours are charging and go from there.

* Only accept certain ads. You don’t want to have ads and links on your site to other sites that aren’t even remotely related to yours. You also don’t want bad neighborhood or banned sites linked from yours. Be sure to state on your advertising page what sites you will and won’t accept. And check each new advertiser’s site before accepting the ad. Deny them and refund their money if you need to.

* Don’t be sneaky. You must give your advertisers what they pay for. Don’t cut their ad time short, or hide it, or do anything else sneaky and unethical. You will lose advertisers very quickly if you do this. You can’t make money if your advertisers are mad.

* Keep track of the ads. You don’t want to accidentally remove an ad that shouldn’t be deleted or keep an ad up long after they have cancelled. Make sure you know which ads are supposed to be up and which need to be taken down.

* Put the ads up quickly. When an advertisers pays for a spot on your site you should get the ad up very quickly. They have already paid for the spot for a specified amount of time and you are wasting their money if you don’t put it up right away.

* Promote your advertising. You can’t make money selling advertising if nobody knows they can buy ads on your site. You should actively promote that you allow advertising on your site/blog. Get keyword anchored inbound links to your advertising page so you can rank higher in search engines, tell other site owners in your niche, put links to it in forum signatures and blog posts, etc… Any way you can to get the word out.

That’s basically all there is to it. Now you know how to make money online selling advertising. It’s one of the best ways to earn money from your website or blog and I highly recommend it as an additional source of income.