Make money selling direct advertising

After avoiding advertising as a means to make money online, because of PageRank and traffic concerns, I have decided to try selling blog advertising direct to interested parties. Contextual advertising programmes like Google AdSense, Text Link Ads and other Pay-Per-Click advertising either do not appeal to me, my site does not qualify or just simply do not work.

If you have been thinking of doing the same thing, you may find this information useful and tweak it to create your own advertising campaign.

Types of advertising offered
There are 3 flavours offered - Sponsored Posts, Text Links and Banner Ads. Sponsored Posts are a given. Get paid for blogging is the primary source of earnings for this blog. Up to 4 keyword links will be offered with a minimum of 200 words.

Text Links are very low cost listed anchor links which will be under a Featured Links header. I intend to offer 5 links for starters and if response is good, to increase the links to a maximum of 10, as I feel that too many links tend to dilute exposure.

Banner spaces are available in specific horizontal and vertical formats. These will have the highest visibility as they will appear on every single page near the top of this website.

Benefits of selling blog advertising on your own
Obviously, in cutting out the middleman, profits will be 100% instead of being shared. Sites like ReviewMe take 50% your revenue, while others take 30%. You can also decide the amount you want to charge and there is no waiting period for a minimum payout sum either.

Disadvantages of selling blog advertising on your own
Advertisers may be hesitant to deal directly with bloggers even though it costs much less, just as there are bloggers hesitant to deal directly with advertisers. You have to depend on your traffic or word of mouth to get advertisers. Hence for this reason, I am not writing off contextual advertising programmes completely. I might sign up for the better ones at a later time when there is much higher traffic.

Why I decided to sell blog advertising
It doesn’t cost anything except some time in planning what types of blog advertising to offer and typing out the details. Still, I have not actively promoted this avenue of income. The only promotion I have done is this post and the advertise page. I don’t expect much response at this stage but I think it’s a good idea to have the option ready. If and when advertisers do come in, minimal time and effort is required to place some html code on the page. You would also already have a PayPal account to enable advertisers to simply pay you with an easy click of a button.

How much to charge?
You don’t want to charge too high and appear to be not worth the advertising dollar, yet you should not undercut your market rate. How do you determine your market rate? If you have joined any monetizing website, you would see the rates for your posts, text links and other advertising options which are all based on PageRank and traffic rankings.

Although different companies may peg your rates differently, they serve as a good guide on how much to charge. I would guess it makes sense to charge about the same or slightly lower to make it worth the advertiser’s while.

I also pondered over whether I should also offer banner design services since I am a graphic designer by profession. Perhaps I shall later on, if there is a demand for it. More details can be found on the advertise page.