If you want to get the most out of your site’s potential income, when it comes to ads, then you’ll have to get your hands dirty and sell them yourself. And by yourself I mean not relying on Adsense or any other sign-up ad program.
Selling your ads yourself is a good thing, if you’re up to it. You’ll be able to charge either for a set period of time (say a week, for instance), or for a set number of ad views. You might do pay per click solutions as well, of course, but that’s probably not a good deal, and besides, that’s what the ad networks is offering as well.
By selling your ads yourself you can charge more. This by getting the attention of relevant advertisers.
Usually, a lot of time is involved in hunting advertisers, but some bloggers apparently doesn’t need to do that. John Chow just recently published a post where he offers two available spots, with contact information and everything. If that’s working out for him, then it’s great. Perhaps this is where advertising on blogs will be in the near future, with PR departments tracking relevant traffic and thus being exposed to these kind of posts. What I dislike about it, however, is that it takes space from the content. Still, maybe that’s a small price for a blog owner to pay, the discomfort of readers having to read your “please advertise with me” posts, I don’t know. I would probably try it myself, if I had a relevant blog with the right kind of readership.
And of course, John Chow and other blogging hotshots can probably pull a stunt like this. Heavyweights rarely play by the same rules as the little people.
Either way, most of us must hunt down our advertisers ourselves, and will have to continue do so if we want to take our revenue up a notch from what Adsense brings in. It’s bothersome work, but when selling that ad for ten times as much as you can get from various programs, then it’s worth your while.
Are you actively selling ads outside of the affiliate programs and ad networks? How does that work out for you, and what do you think of John Chow’s blog post method?
Originally posted on November 12, 2007 @ 7:00 am