By the end of my undergrad college years, most of my income was coming from my websites.\u00a0 This was 6-7 years ago (damn, time flies!).<\/p>\n
Back then, I always struggled with monetization.\u00a0 I was playing the ad revenue game, which is a tough game–particularly, if you rely mostly on Google AdSense.\u00a0 That’s when I began to shift my focus and research from AdSense to direct ad sales.<\/p>\n
Around that time, the big thing to sell was sitewide footer links on a highly indexed site with good PageRank. I sold hundreds of dollars worth of those footer links.\u00a0 I sold them as monthly subscriptions, so month over month, my income would increase, as I continued to pack in those footer links.<\/p>\n
These days, due to changes in Google’s algorithm, sitewides aren’t nearly as hot of a commodity.\u00a0 Nonetheless, the ways to find and make a direct ad sale from the years yonder still apply today.\u00a0 I know this, because, just last month, for LocalClericalJobs.com<\/a> (the subject of my 300K Case Study<\/a>), I made $100+ worth of direct ad sales.<\/p>\n Here’s how you make direct ad sales.<\/p>\n First, in other to make a direct ad sale, you need have a compelling ad offering–i.e. value proposition–for your potential buyers.\u00a0 There are essentially 2 reasons why someone would buy an ad from you:<\/p>\n It’s best to have all\u00a0 3 criteria for the type of ad you’re selling, but it’s not necessary.\u00a0 For LocalClericalJobs.com, my value proposition was based on a very high number of indexed pages.\u00a0 Here, take a look at the ad I posted at DigitalPoint: direct ad sale example<\/a>.<\/p>\n How do you price your ad?<\/strong><\/p>\n The best way to determine this is just to check out what other similar ads are selling for.\u00a0 This quick and dirty research gives you a sense of the market rate for your ad.\u00a0 For most ads, I like to price it slightly below market, so that I can generate more ad sales.\u00a0 After all, the beauty of selling ads is that you usually have an unlimited inventory to sell.\u00a0 It’s not like you’re selling a bike, where you want to get the best price possible.\u00a0 With a text ad, if the market price is $10\/mo, I would rather price mine at $6\/mo and sell 2 (making me $12\/mo) than to only sell 1 (at $10\/mo).\u00a0 Note that this doesn’t apply to ads with very limited spots (e.g. a leaderboard ad at the top of the page).<\/p>\n Also, be aware that different marketplaces have different market prices.\u00a0 Therefore, you can price discriminate across market places.\u00a0\u00a0 More on this in a bit.<\/p>\n So, where can I sell my ad?<\/strong><\/p>\n For LocalClericalJobs.com, I tried out 3 forum-based marketplaces.\u00a0 Here they are, along with my thoughts on each.<\/p>\n In addition to these forum marketplaces, you can also try a number of other similar webmaster forums.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I don’t have experience with others.\u00a0 Another channel to advertise your available ad spots is your newsletter\/mailing list.\u00a0 I had decent success with this, but obviously, your success will depend on the size and responsiveness of your list.\u00a0 If you don’t have a list, you can go to the WarriorForum Joint Venture Forum<\/a> to find people selling solo ads on their mailing lists.<\/p>\n Alright, so that’s Direct Ad Sales 101 in a nutshell.\u00a0 I’ll leave you with one last thought to munch on.\u00a0 When most people do research in picking a niche for a site, they focus on monetization through AdSense, right?\u00a0 They use the Google AdWord Keyword Tool to find niches that would generate a large amounts of traffic and assume that traffic will convert to AdSense clicks.\u00a0 But, what if you’re aim is to monetize through direct ad sales?\u00a0 Then, the best way to research a niche is to go to these forum marketplaces and see what ads are in hot demand.\u00a0 How do you do this?\u00a0 Just go to the Digital Link Sales Forum and do a search for “WTB”–i.e. “Want to Buy.”\u00a0 See what niche has a lot of buyers and create a site targeting these buyers.<\/p>\n Good luck!<\/p>\n dave<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By the end of my undergrad college years, most of my income was coming from my websites.\u00a0 This was 6-7 years ago (damn, time flies!). Back then, I always struggled with monetization.\u00a0 I was playing the ad revenue game, which is a tough game–particularly, if you rely mostly on Google AdSense.\u00a0 That’s when I began […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-300k-page-job-search-in-a-box","category-monetization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":391,"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions\/391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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