Selling Advertising

An important online resource for anyone that wants to sell (or buy) advertisements is the Interactive Advertising Bureau . At this site, you will find advertising standards and guidelines, industry stats and data, lots of articles about web advertising and much more that can be useful to read.

Also remember: If you run a relatively small web-site, you won't get rich selling advertisements. Several paid advertisements on your page will earn you roughly 3 cents each time the page is viewed by a browser. Even after 100,000 viewings, you will earn only $3,000. Often you will need to offer reduced prices, and some vacancy of your ad space is probable. For that reason, you can't count on much more than 0.3 cents in actual income for each page viewing. That gives you $300 for 100,000 viewings.

If you're thinking about selling ad space, you should always consider putting advertisements from Google on your site. This arrangement is called Google AdSense, and you can read more about it here: http://www.google.com/adsense/

As long as you have enough page viewings, you will still make money this way. And advertising income can supplement another income nicely. So here are some good tips for those who want to set up advertising sales for their web-site:

• Put a clear focus on one specific target group. The more specific your target group, the higher the price you can ask. And the more certain you can be of advertisers.
• If there are companies that are obvious, natural advertisers for your site, contact them directly. Consider offering them exclusive advertising rights (you won't sell ad space to their competitors).
• Consider alternatives to banner sales; maybe you can start a newsletter that has additional ad space? This is worth more to advertisers, so you can ask higher prices. You might even be able to offer sponsorships, which allow an advertiser to dominate an entire section.
• If you are aiming for mass-market advertisement sales, try to get into a banner ad network. (You will find a list of networks and recommendations at the site Banner Reviews). Selling ads is time-consuming, and distributors have dedicated salesmen in the market all the time. They take a commission on sales, but they can probably get you more advertisers than you could yourself.
• Check price levels in your market generally and particularly with your competitors. Set reasonable prices, but be ready to offer some rebates.

Advertisers expect you to offer them statistics showing viewings, clicks, etc. This means that you need an advertisement management system. If you are not in a distributorship (they have the system, while you just add a few lines of code to your page), you should check with your solution provider to see if they offer an advertisement module on the publishing platform. You can also buy one yourself. CentralAd, for example, costs $295.