You’ve spent some time in the blogging trenches and amid the millions of words you spit out every day one word starts to really crystallize in your mind. Money, dinero, cheddar, green, bills, dough, cash-dolla-dolla, chances are one (maybe not cash-dolla-dolla) of these words have popped into your head at some point in time during your blogging career. Here it comes, you want to MONETIZE. Say it. Write it down. It’s okay, we knew it would come to this! Usually the first step bloggers take to monetize is by selling advertising space. Which is followed by the next big question, HOW MUCH?!
When figuring out how much to charge for your space there are a couple factors to take in account which can help you come up with a worthy sum of money.
1. Check out the competition: Take a gander at blogs in your niche and see what type of dough brands would have to put down to advertise with them. It may give you a rough idea of how you should situate your practice.
2. You could charge a price based on how many impressions you get i.e. a fixed price per thousand of views.
3. Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs Journey suggests charging X dollar per month and dividing that count by 10. X being the number of your daily visitors. You could follow his equation if you fancy!
4. Use an Adsense heatmap to see if you should charge differently based on hot spots on your blog real-estate. Perhaps an ad in a prime location should be worth more.
5. Make an info sheet for your advertisers. An info sheet is key! Marketers are unnaturally obsessed with metrics. Literally, they eat them for breakfast with a side of Greek yogurt and Honey Bunches of Oats. Be sure to include all of that metric goodness when setting out to write your info sheet. Metrics should include: advertising options, rates, site rankings, site traffic, a reader profile, audience details, and examples of how you can help increase their business.
6. There will be a ramp up period, instead of having to deal with tons of empty ad space (which can make your site look like an undesirable place to advertise), reach out to friends, relatives, etc. who have products that would compliment your blog. You can offer them (or other acquaintances) free advertising space for a trial period of a month. If they end up profiting, then they can decide if they would like to continue the service at a cost.
7. If you are already using Adsense and are interested in direct advertising, check out what you are getting paid on average. Take that number and double it! Google takes half of your profit, with direct selling you get to reap the benefits of a full profit!
8. REMEMBER NOT TO UNDERSELL YOURSELF. Umm, excuse you, your blog is awesome! Don’t forget it! If you charge too little, advertisers will think that that abnormally low number is a reflection of the return they will get from advertising with you.
9. Lastly, you can also sell the concept of helping a brand on multiple avenues rather than just sidebar advertising. Such as you could include a package deal which includes a sponsored posts, a certain number of tweets, etc.
All in all advertising is generally an easy way to start to strike up a profit for your blog, especially if you have traffic! You have nothing to lose and only a heavier wallet to gain!
Leave a Reply