How to Price Advertising?

Welcome to Sponsored Advertising 102!

Have you ever wondered why an advertiser didn’t follow up after you submitted your ad space rates?

Why you’re not getting buyers at all?

Why an advertiser says your rates are too high even though you’re charging what others in your niche charge?

Why advertisers ARE jumping to buy ad space from you?

You could be charging too much or too little in the case of the last option – even if you’re charging what “everyone” else charges.

Today I’ll share how to determine what to charge.

Whether you’re a multi-topic blog or niche blog, you can successfully sell ad space and sponsored posts and be profitable at it, as long as you’re honest, you know your audience and you’re providing value.

Update 12/6/2013. I apologize for the lateness of this post. I scheduled it for yesterday and then played nursemaid all night to sick kids not realizing the post didn’t publish. Because I spent 3 hours this morning trying to get this post to publish, a newer version to publish and then my blog to work which all broke due to a plugin, I’m behind schedule. The affiliate marketing post will publish on Monday December 9th, 2013.

What to charge for ad space

As I mentioned in Sponsored Advertising 101, when working on a client’s search engine marketing campaign, I will seek out blogs who’s audience is the client’s target market. For example, if my client in a tennis wear line, I will seek out opportunities to work with blogs that create content for tennis players. If my client is a pet store, I would like to work with bloggers who create content for pet owners.

Once, I’ve found compatible blogs, I will filter my list based on media kits, which involves crunching numbers. It all comes down to dollars and sense (not cents) and the client’s budget.

But filtering based on media kits isn’t as simple as who charges more or who has the most traffic. Cause you know, that would make my life too easy. Instead we must look at where we’ll get the most bang for our buck.

There’s a formula I use to determine where we’ll see the most ROI, and I’m going to share that formula with you so you can use it to determine your pricing.

Here’s the formula: -4 = (-4y-8)/(y+2).

Now I’m sure many of you are very good with algebra and using this to determine your pricing is going to be a piece of cake.