Your content touches the lives of thousands. You have subscribers on nearly every continent. You write to a tight, popular niche, and you understand your audience. Yet despite all this, AdSense is letting you down. Or maybe you’re an up-and-comer and you’ve heard that securing private advertising clients is the key to making a killer profit.
The truth is, yes, finding direct advertisers can be more rewarding, but only if your blog is truly ready. Know this: for every advantage, there’s a potential roadblock.
What’s In It for You?
It’s true that ad networks have access to lots of advertisers. It’s also true that all you have to do to monetize your blog is slap some code on your site and be done with it. But, cutting ties with your ad network rids your site of ads that probably aren’t very well targeted to begin with and frees up space for more relevant ads. Instantly you become head of marketing, treasury, and customer service.
An immediate benefit of taking on these additional responsibilities is that you can establish your own policies. Additionally, you’ll get to decide which forms of advertising you’ll accept, and you can screen ads that your visitors might find offensive or annoying. There’s more: never again worry about your site monetization going up in smoke if an ad network decides arbitrarily that you’ve broken the rules. Breath free knowing that there isn’t a long, sharp corporate sword hanging over your head.
When you take your place in the captain’s seat, you get to name your own prices. While the amount of money that you can command is tied to your site’s traffic and other metrics, you don’t have to share it with anyone else. As you establish your reputation, you can command higher prices while securing more business.
The Importance of Niche
Before you take full control over your site’s monetization, it’s important that you can clearly describe your blog’s niche. Put simply, your niche is the overall topic that you center your blog around. There are several levels of niche focus. For instance, a sports blog that focuses on football caters to sports fans at the surface, yet it also caters to football fans in particular. Therefore, this blog focuses both on the sports niche and the football sub-niche. In this example, the blog owner’s advertising clients would be purveyors of football products first and general sports goods second.
It’s important to potential advertisers that your blog be tightly centered on a niche. This makes it much more likely that your visitors will be receptive to your client’s advertisements. This is precisely why some advertisers prefer individual blogs over big ad networks.
If after taking stock of your blog you find that you aren’t focused very tightly on any one niche, you may want to hold off on offering advertising space. Once you decide what you want to focus on, you can steer your blog in that direction. You may find that you lose some readership, but if you post useful, quality content, you’ll likely make that up and then some.
Major Requirements
Traffic - Aside from a narrow focus on niche, there are several key prerequisites that you should be concerned with. The primary requirement for offering space directly to advertisers is consistent traffic. At a minimum, your site should enjoy 3000 daily visitors. Smaller levels of traffic can work if your niche is highly targeted and popular. If not, and if you haven’t surpassed the traffic threshold above, your energies would be better directed toward building traffic. There are several metrics that you should focus on building at all times, including number of RSS subscribers, Alexa rank, and Google PageRank. Advertisers take all of these factors into account when selecting a blog to work with.
While not strictly required, a prominent presence on Digg and StumbleUpon will help your case immensely. These sites provide social proof that your Web space is popular. Similarly, if you’ve set your blog up to collect email opt-ins, definitely mention this to prospective buyers, providing your average opt-ins per month. Advertisers may use this figure to get a sense of how many warm prospects you can bring to the table.
Delicious is another user-powered Web service that can bring value to your proposition. Search Delicious for your own site to find out which posts their users have bookmarked.
Finally, a high authority score on the blog indexer Technorati will definitely help your case. This search engine assigns each blog in its index a score between 0 and 1000. Known as the “authority score,” this metric denotes an influential blog in its niche. The higher the authority score, the better. To determine your authority score, simply search for your site on Technorati and look for the green “Authority” link in the results.
Design - Advertisers tend to invest their own money to ensure that their banner and leaderboard ads are visually appealing, and they expect the blogs that they do business with to look just as good. If you haven’t updated your design since the early days of CSS, spending some money on a face-lift will pay dividends once you begin searching for clients. If you’re working with a WordPress theme, chances are that your site came out of the box with a modern, responsive design, but it can never hurt to ask around for objective feedback.
In addition to an overall pleasant facade, your site must be advertisement friendly. If you have no data about how your visitors interact with blogs similar to yours, studying heatmaps can give you a good idea. A heatmap is a screenshot of a particular Web page that’s colored to reflect where visitors point their mouse or click the most. The most heavily trafficked parts of the page are colored red, followed by orange, etc.
You can also use an Ad Revenue Optimization tool to experiment with different ad locations size. With this feedback, you can quickly optimize your advertising positioning. This data is extremely valuable, as you’ll be able to dispense with “common wisdom” and position your advertising on-page in a manner that solicits more interaction from your particular visitors. In the end, advertisers want to see that your design strikes a balance between their wants and your visitors’ needs.
Payment Processor – You’ll require a reliable means of accepting payments before going into business for yourself. PayPal is frequently used by small business owners because of its flexibility and low fees. This service makes it easy to invoice customers and to create “Pay Now” buttons. Note, however, that you must have either their “Premiere” or “Business” account to accept payments that come in through “Pay Now” buttons. Both of these account types are free; you pay a small fee when someone places an order. The PayPal Business account comes with a debit card with which you can access your balance immediately as opposed to waiting for it to arrive in a bank account.
There are several alternatives to PayPal, including Amazon Payments, Authorize.net and a merchant account. Ultimately, which payment processor you choose will largely come down to personal preference. The core requirements are that you are able to send invoices and receive payments.
Ad Server
An ad server is back-end software that rotates your ads and collects all-important data such as impressions and click-throughs. Your Ad Server is absolutely critical, as it manages your core service. Not only does it allow you to track individual clients’ campaigns, it also produces reports that your clients can view. Tracking visitor engagement with ads in this way is a fundamental part of the job.
Examples of popular ad servers include ADTECH, AdZerk, BlueStreak, DoubleClick and Google Ad Server. Free solutions are available too.
Additional Requirements - You should also have a page on your site that notifies potential advertisers that you’re accepting new clients. Link to this page from your homepage. Many advertisers peruse popular blogs looking for this notification. Make your link short and sweet, such as “Advertise Here” or “Accepting Advertisers.”
Additionally, you will find it helpful to craft a template letter to send to prospective advertisers. This template should be brief, and at most it should contain a brief introduction followed by your core statistics. Close with a call-to-action and a link to the payment page. It’s important that you customize the message as much as possible when you actually send it out, however.
You’ll also find it beneficial to create and maintain a short PDF report that contains data on your niche as well as your core statistics. You should send this PDF to anyone who contacts you regarding advertising. This will allow them to quickly determine if you might be a good fit for them.
Once you step out on your own, you can’t afford to wait for advertisers to come to you. A great place to look for potential clients is forums–Internet marketing forums in particular. If you establish yourself on these forums, you’ll be able to advertise your blog in your signature. Be sure to mention your niche and the fact that you’re currently accepting advertisers, but always follow all forum rules regarding self-promotion.
Is This Business Right for You?
The final–and perhaps most important–requirement of all: commitment. You’ll have to take time away from writing to market yourself, build traffic, provide customer support, negotiate prices, run reports and send invoices. To complicate matters further, you can’t let the quality of your writing fall or else you risk losing traffic.
You should also be aware that advertising clients can be a fickle bunch. You may find it difficult to keep them interested long-term. Some advertisers may hop from start-up to start-up, always seeking a deal. Others might have unrealistic expectations, wanting instant results or unobtainable click-through rates. For optimum results, try to lock down long-term contracts, but understand that advertisers will still want exit clauses established that are based on click-through rates and other performance indicators.
Finding Clients
As you endeavor to find clients, it’s important to keep in mind that you’re going to hear “no” more often than not. This is the case in more or less any business. When you get turned down, it’s best to view this as getting one step closer to finding the client that will say “yes.” This is especially important when you’re just starting out. There are simply too many factors beyond your control to take a “no” personally.
Backlinks - Sites that link to you have already given your site and its content a figurative thumbs up. Some of those sites may be businesses that are in need of Web real estate to rent. You can search for your own backlinks at Open Site Explorer. Most of the sites that link to you will have a “Contact Us” page. When corresponding, be sure to mention that they link to you, and let them know that you are currently seeking new advertisers.
Google AdWords - Perform a search for your own niche and take note of the Google AdWords results that appear at the top of the page. When corresponding with these site owners, let them know that you have a popular blog in their niche, and tell them that you’re confident that you can offer them a deal.
Forums - Popular forums often have their own advertising schemes. Clients of these smaller programs may be more open to renting space from a blogger directly. It’s very important that you only contact businesses that are advertising products that fall within your niche.
Direct Competition - You should become familiar with all of the other popular blogs in your niche and take note of how they are monetizing. If your blog’s traffic data is as appealing as your competition’s, there’s a good chance that their clients will want to know about you.
Spam Concerns - On the whole, you must be careful not to spam advertisers. Don’t send multiple messages and don’t attempt to “hard sell” anyone. Simply let businesses know what you have to offer and the best way to get in touch with you.
As you utilize these sources to find leads, you may find it helpful to save prospects into a spreadsheet. Include information on their main keyword, where you found them and whether or not they are already advertising on your direct competitors’ sites. This will help you better organize what is likely to be a fairly large list of potential business.
It’s important to realize when searching for clients that if you aim too high, you’re not going to find traction. Don’t try to go out and snag the biggest businesses in your niche. Chances are very good that if you had the sway to tempt them, they would have already contacted you. The key is to start with smaller businesses, build revenue and then reinvest as much of it as possible into your site.
Turning Prospects into Clients
There are a few powerful tips that you can employ to maximize your chances of landing your prospective clients. Presenting an organized case for how you will improve their business is essential.
Keyword Report
First, identify all of the keywords that pertain to your niche. These can be general or specific, as long as they’re relevant. Of particular significance are keywords that are contained in the products of your potential clients. Once you have your list, you can check how you rank for each keyword with services like Traffic Travis and Rank Watch. Many of these services have free versions with which you can check one keyword at a time.
Once you know how you rank for each keyword, simply codify this data into an organized and visually appealing report in PDF format. This will illustrate to your prospect at a glance what you have to offer them, and will warm them to your pitch.
Demographics
Advertisers are extremely focused on demographics. If you can offer them evidence that your audience is a good match for their product, they’ll be much more likely to give your service a try. One of the most effective means of collecting demographic information from your visitors is to offer an incentive in exchange for completion of a short survey. While this may have a small up-front cost, the data that you glean can go a long way in securing your first clients.
Services such as Rafflecopter and PunchTab make it easy to offer incentives on your blog. SurveyMonkey, FluidSurveys and Formstack all make it easy to post unobtrusive surveys on your blog. There are also survey solutions available for WordPress in the form of plugins. The primary information that you want is sex, age, ethnicity, median income and employment status.
The Business
Sadly, it isn’t enough that you have a popular blog. You must be clear on what sets you apart from everyone else. Are you an authority in your niche? Do you receive more than 100,000 visitors per day? Do you have an unusually large number of repeat visitors or a huge opt-in list? Ask yourself if you would advertise on your own blog, and why. Your answer is your selling point.
This selling point will likely be different from those of the competing blogs in your niche, and that’s a very good thing. It gives advertisers who have tried those other sites a reason to try your service instead.
Once an advertiser expresses interest in doing business with you, you may find it advantageous to offer them a free trial. Allow them to test the waters for a few days or a week. At the end of the trial period, you can pull a report from your ad server and send it to them. Nothing hits harder than these numbers: impressions and click-through rate.
Pricing
Keep your prices competitive. At first, you may want to cater to several clients at low prices rather than a handful of clients at high prices. Working with several companies insulates you from economic downturn and protects you, should some of your clients choose to take their business elsewhere at the same time. Keep in mind that there are up-and-coming blogs in every niche. You’ll never have a lack of competition.
The flip side of the above argument is that you should avoid starting out with your prices set too low. Every industry has its “cheap” clients. It may seem like a good strategy to work for them initially, but if you do so you may get a reputation as the inexpensive solution. That will be a problem should you ever want to increase your prices. If you do decide to significantly undercut the competition, it’s imperative that you market yourself constantly and provide impeccable service.
One effective strategy is to strive to strike a balance between these two points of view when starting out, and then raise prices only after you’ve collected several testimonials from happy customers. Ultimately, if you can set yourself up as the premier advertising real estate in your niche, you’ll find that you charge more for your services but have fewer clients. The clients will be larger companies, however, and these companies will tend to be more stable and less demanding overall.
If you have less than 100,000 visitors per month, you can also charge a flat rate as opposed to a CPM or CPC model. In a package deal, you guarantee the advertiser access to your blog space for a certain amount of time, typically a month. The price depends on the length of the contract and the size of the ad. If you’re doing all you can to grow your blog’s traffic, your customers will likely get good value out of a package deal over time. Another reason to go with a flat rate at this juncture is that few small business owners have a clear idea how a CPM model works.
If in doubt on pricing, you can always use the tools provided by Google AdSense as a barometer. However, keep in mind that your selling point is that you have more targeted traffic than the big ad networks, so don’t undersell yourself. The examples below provide general guidelines for small to medium blogs. Finding a price that works will take time. Unfortunately, every niche is different, so arriving at universal prices is impossible.
Keeping Them Coming Back for More
Aside from how well your audience responds to your clients’ ads, the other factor that will determine if clients stick with you is your customer service. You want to always provide top-notch service, and you want to do so without being asked. Never wait for a client to request something. The more you can anticipate their needs, the more likely they are to stick around.
Client Data - Always have your clients’ conversion rate data handy. If you’ve chosen a robust ad server, this data should only be a few clicks away. Provide reports to your clients on a regular basis. If you’re sure that a report will be late for any reason, tell the client as soon as possible and explain why.
Traffic - You can provide immense value to your clients simply by doing what you’ve been doing all along: building traffic. Don’t get so focused on running your advertising business that you lose sight of the fundamentals. Being active on social media, forums and other blogs will help pull in new readers. Guest posts on other popular sites in your niche are handy tools for shunting traffic back to your site. A note of caution, however: you should only submit high quality content to these sites as associating low quality content to your blog can hurt your traffic. If you have a level 2 or above Yahoo! Answers account, you may want to answer questions that fall into your niche and link back to your site.
If through these efforts you receive a genuine and significant increase in traffic, be sure to tell your clients. Demonstrating that your blog is growing is an effective means of keeping advertisers interested. Additionally, as you are running a business, avail yourself to advertising networks such as Google AdWords if it makes fiscal sense to do so. Even with a limited AdWords budget you can bring in both new readers and new potential clients.
Troubleshooting Poor Traffic - If you’re having trouble building traffic or if you’ve fallen in the SERPs, you may want to review the content on your site and ensure that it is unique and of high quality. Google’s recent updates, known as “Panda,” “Penguin” and “Hummingbird” are focused on filtering results that Google considers spam or low quality. If you suspect that someone is pilfering your site and reposting your posts without permission, you may want set up alerts through the Google Alerts service. This free service will send you an email anytime your content appears online.
Unfortunately, it’s entirely possible to have only grade-A content on your site and still feel the effects of Google’s recent changes if you have low quality backlinks. Links from sites that exist solely to link to other sites are known as “link farms.” Google takes the position—whether accurate or not—that anyone with backlinks from link farms must have purchased them, so you will want to rid your domain of those backlinks right away. To help you do so, Google maintains a backlink disavow tool. The tool is simple to use, but the process can be time consuming.
Premium Content - If you have evergreen content that you know will bring in a lot of traffic, you may find it useful to hold it back until you have several clients. Your clients will appreciate the consideration, and you will benefit from the additional eyeballs on your clients’ ads. If you’ve purchased premium content that contains information that will be extremely useful for your audience, let them know ahead of time when you plan to publish it. Then inform your advertising clients and you can also offer premium ad space on the page.
Client Feedback - Your clients will let you know whether they’re happy or not. Listen to them. Try not to take client feedback personally, and be as objective as you can when weighing their comments. Always respond to customer inquiries promptly, and if you can’t respond right away for whatever reason, let them know. Every customer interaction determines your future with that client.
Promotions - This business tends to have high client turnover, so it is essential that you give your clients value. Offer promotions as often as you can afford to do so. Surprising loyal customers with a 10%-off coupon is a great way to build the relationship.
Not all bloggers will want to step out into the cutthroat world of direct advertising. Some of those that do, however, will be rewarded with a steady income stream derived from their passion of writing and interacting with a loyal audience. If you choose to step out on your own, review this article and others as much as you need, and only make the transition when you feel you’re absolutely ready. The possibilities are truly endless, and if you’re willing to work hard and keep at it, you can achieve success in direct advertising. Good Luck!
This article is an original contribution by Ankit Oberoi.
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Article source: http://www.business2community.com/blogging/direct-advertising-bloggers-0685703
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