One of the best ways to make money online with your blog is to bring on advertisers that pay you to use the space on your blog. You’ll get a commission from the advertisers by putting their banners or ads on your blog and advertising their products to your readers. Some questions you might ask are:
- How do you find advertisers?
- Should you go with individuals or ad networks?
- What’s the best way to get started?
Traffic Matters
If you want to make money online by getting someone to advertise on your site, the first thing they’re going to want to see are your traffic numbers. If you get only 10 visitors per day, you’re probably not going to get many advertisers. They want to see that you have a considerable amount of traffic (visitors) to make it worth their while. If you have that, you can start soliciting advertisers. If not, focus on building traffic first. We like at least 10, 000 page views per month, but if you want to get into ad network, you will need even more (20, 000 for basic ads and at least 100, 000 for traditional advertisers).
In many ways it’s like a popularity game. People will respect you more, or in this case willing to advertise on your site if they see that you have a huge following. Politicians and corporations do it all day long when they seek to influence others through opinion leaders. Learn from them and be the central hub, then leverage your expertise into money.
Make It Easy For Advertisers To Contact You
Going back to answering the original question of how to find advertiser, one of the simplest things to do is make “advertise with us” a tab on your website. Advertisers will actually compose a percentage of your website’s visitors. Why not make it easy for them to contact you?
You can also publish a blog post letting your readers know that you are looking for advertisers and the spots and location available. If you have an email list (which you should), you can email your subscribers and mention you are looking for advertisers.
Go to the popular blogs in your niche (there are usually 4 to 5 major players in any industry), find out what companies advertise with them as well as which ad networks they use and contact them. Come up with a proposal of what they’re going to get and why. Basically you want to find and sell to receptive potential customers.
Join An Ad Network
Google AdWords is by far the biggest and most popular ad network for advertisers. On the flip side, the Google AdSense program is designed for publishers like you. It’s fairly easy to sign up. You’ll need a legitimate telephone and mailing address. Google will confirm on both.
Once approved for AdSense, you will then determine the size of your ad units which comes in different shapes. You can even add tags that will allow advertisers to target a particular ad – for example, a Leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels) in top center of your home page.
You’d most likely get paid by each click (CPC) instead of impressions (CPM) or the result of a sale (CPA). This is fine at the beginning. But eventually you want to reach the point where you will get paid simply by showing your ad to your customers. The advertisers would determine that based on the perceived desirability of your blog.