How to make money online for everyone

These third party ad brokers dominate our monetization strategies because of the strength and trustworthiness of their brand as well as their advertiser reach, which gives them the leverage to demand a cut of our ad earnings.

Alternative profit schemes are not often considered because of the lack of know-how when it comes to direct advertising sales, which simply refers to the selling of ads directly to advertisers without the assistance of middlemen.

Do you really need to sign up with as many advertising networks as possible in order to make some decent money from your websites? When was the last time you actually sold a link or review through these brokers?

More importantly, why not supplement or replace these ad brokers with direct advertising initiatives?

As such, I’ve decided to start a series of articles on how to increase your direct ad sales revenues. In the next few posts, I will examine the steps you can take to increase your ad revenue without sharing it with ad brokers.

Topics covered will include learning how to determine the ad value/pricing for your site, ways to find direct advertisers, advertiser-oriented site optimization as well as various types of direct advertising options available.

I’ll start things off with a brief introduction to the pros and cons of direct advertising before going into suggestions on creating an advertiser sell page, which should be the first step you should take.

Benefits of Direct Advertising

• Set your own Ad Rates. Not all brokers allow manual price setting and this is obviously one of the greatest benefits of direct advertising. Another key point is that you can utilize variable pricing to fit specific advertisers.



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The Pros

• More money: The first advantage of selling your own ads is the fact that you will cut the middlemen out, increasing your revenue potential. Suppose you sell text link ads on your sidebar through a certain company, and the text links sell for $50 monthly. Since you are using the company network to sell the ads, they will eat 50% of the price, and you will end up earning only $25 monthly for each text link. If someone is willing to pay $50 for a text link on your site, though, it means that they are getting $50 of value out of it. Why, then, should you share that with someone else?
• Independence: Sure, large advertising networks have access to a wider pool of advertisers, and they have more credibility to close the deals. But if you have all the requirements in place (see the section below) and spend some time looking at the right places, I am sure that you will be able to sell your own ads just as efficiently as the larger networks.
• Flexibility: The third advantage of selling direct advertising is that you will have much more control over where and how the ads will be displayed (i.e., you can avoid intrusive advertising). Google Adsense is nice, but unless you blend it with the content – annoying some of the readers – you will get terribly low click-through rates.
• Credibility: Finally, having sponsors and direct advertisers on your blog might help your credibility. Even small and poorly crafted blogs can stick some Adsense units here and there. Having established companies that are willing to partnership with your site, on other hand, can signal that your content has quality and that the site is somewhat professional.

The Cons

• Time consuming: While selling your own ads has many advantages, it is no panacea. The first drawback of this monetization option is the time that it will consume. This time will be spent optimizing your website for the ads, finding potential advertisers, negotiating with them, and handling the administrative matters (e.g., making payments, tracking statistics, delivering reports and so on).
• Many requirements: Selling direct adverting is not as easy as making money from Google Adsense. As you can see from the section below, you will need to have a popular blog, a professional looking design, special software and the like.
• Unstable: Unless you close deals for very long periods, which is unlikely, you will find your self looking for new advertisers or optimizing your website to attract new ones every other month. The opposite is true for most advertising networks, where you just need to plug some code and they will do the rest of the work. (If your site or blog is just a hobby, therefore, direct advertising might not be the best option)