Increase Direct Ad Revenue

If you have been blogging for a while, you know that selling ad space directly to the advertisers on your blog can become one of the lucrative sources of revenue for you. When you have started selling ad space on your blog, you always want to sell off all the available ad space or ad spots on your blog to make the most out of direct ad selling. In this article, I'll be sharing with you the techniques that I have used to maximize my blog direct ad revenue. These have been good ways for me to maintain and increase my blog ad revenue. I hope you'll find them useful too:


Create an Advertising Page

An advertising page is basically a page that tells what ad space you are selling. It usually describes everything you are offering (text link, banner ad, sponsored review, etc) with price details included.

With an advertising page posted on your site, the visitors who are interested on placing an ad in your blog can find the advertising info they need immediately. This will potentially generate some fast sales for you.

Writing an advertising page isn't very difficult. The content of advertising page usually starts with an introduction, followed by the info of the ad options you are offering and lastly providing your ordering details and also your email address for the prospective advertisers in case they need to contact you to get more advertising info.

You might want to see example of advertising page before writing one fir your blog, you could take a look at my advertising page at:

If you need more examples, you can visit other blogs that have an advertising page posted. By looking at other blogs' advertising page, you'll get an idea of how to write your own advertising page.

The important information you must include into your page are the introduction, your blog traffic stat or other stats, (e.g. Google ranking, Alexa ranking, etc), The ad options you are selling with price details included and details of how to order an ad spot on your blog.


Set the Right Price

It's important that you are charging reasonable prices for the ad spaces you are offering for sale. This is not just to appeal your prospective advertisers to advertise on your blog but also to keep them as your long term advertisers which will ensure steady ad revenue for you.

It seems to be easy task to set the prices for the different ad spaces you are offering. The assumption is that the banner ad on highest position such as banner ad on the header of your blog should be charged at a highest price and ads on the lower location such as at the sidebar should sell at a lower price because ad on higher positions will generate more traffic for advertisers. Well, this isn't always right.

An effective way that can help you set the right price for each ad space you sell on your blog is by putting up your own affiliate ads (Clickbank, CJ, etc) on the ad spaces of your blog to test the click-through rate and traffic before opening those ad spaces for sale. The testing period doesn't have to be long; just one week is good enough.

Once you have tested each ad space, you would know the average daily clicks of each of your affiliate ads that placed on the different ad spaces on your blog and so you can set the price accordingly. Let says your 125 x 125 banner ad which places on the top right sidebar of your blog get an average daily unique clicks of 10. This means the advertiser who places a 125x125 banner ad on your blog is estimated to get 300 unique visitors (10 x 30) monthly. So you can decide what is the reasonable charge for a banner ad that generates 300 unique visitors for the advertiser each month.

If you think each unique visitor that you direct to your advertiser should cost $0.30, then the price for a 125 x 125 banner ad on your blog will be $90 per month (300 x $0.30). $90 for 300 unique visitors every month, seems reasonable enough right. But you certainly can charge more if you are in a highly profitable niches such as Forex, debt consolidation and etc.

By setting your price based on the traffic level, you can also avoid over-charging for different ad space on your blog. For instance, a 468 x 60 banner ad on the header of your blog seems to be expensive than a 125 x 125 banner ad at the top right sidebar because the 468x60 banner ad is located at a higher position. However, when you test the traffic level, you might find that the 125x125 banner ad is actually attracting more traffic than the 468x60 banner ad. So, the 125x125 banner ad was supposed to be expensive than the 468 banner ad.


Post Testimonials on Your Advertising Page

You know the Internet users like to find supporting information about the product or service they're interested before really buying it. It's no different when it comes to buying ad spaces on blogs. The real testimonials from your previous satisfied advertisers are much like supporting information which will convince your potential advertisers to order an ad spot on your blog.

Testimonials often are short and sharing the real positive advertising experience on your blog. These are certainly powerful supporting information that can convince your potential advertisers.

So how you can get real testimonials from the advertisers?

If your blog has generated a couple of sales for some of your advertisers running an ad campaign on your blog, they are the happy advertisers willing to give you a testimonial if you ask for one. The satisfied advertiser may occasionally contact you to tell you that they are happy with the result from the ad campaign they run on your blog. You may reply the advertiser and invite him/her to publish a testimonial on your blog advertising page. You will include the advertiser's name, photo if possible and the advertiser's website link. The advertiser will certainly be happy to send you back an testimonial because they can include a link in the their testimonial.

Another way is to send a thank you email to the advertisers who have advertised one month on your blog and decided to renew their ad campaign on your blog. These are probably satisfied advertisers as well. Your email will thank them for renewing their ad on your blog and invite them to publish a testimonial on your blog. Tell the advertisers you'll be including their website link in the testimonial. You might then get one or two replies from them with a testimonial for you to publish on your blog.


Provide Helpful Customer Service

The prospective advertisers can be your paying customers. Many advertisers often like to ask questions before they place an order. So, make sure you read their questions and give the answers that they are looking for.

Also advertisers often like to test the click-through and conversion rates. This is to find out the performance of their ads. When they aren't satisfied with the result, they'll request for ad changes. Thus, you should allow ad changes on anytime. This way the advertisers can test different ads and landing pages to get the performance that they expect. When the advertisers are freely to request changes, they will probably renew their ads. This will secure your ad revenue.

Moreover, you might think about running discount campaign from time to time. It's helpful to boost up your ad sales. Also offering something like one week trial or two week trial could also push the advertisers to order ad space from you.

The above are the techniques that I have applied to maintain and boost up and blog revenue. Hope these techniques will work on you as well.