Could This Be Your Website's Big Ticket Item For Profits?

Posted 02-02-2008 : by Debbie Ducker
Category : Business and Professional Services
Subcategory : Web Development

When it comes to various ways of monetizing a web site it always seems to boil down to advertising of some type.

Whether it is banner/button ads, text ads, pop-ups or pop-unders, featured ads, etc. Selling ad space on your web site is a big ticket item that can bring huge revenue to your business on line.

The key to the value, of this advertising, is how many visitors you have on average each month. The more visitors your site gets the higher value the advertising becomes.

There is proof in this when you see headlines such as we saw when Google purchased YouTube for 1.65 billion. "Combining one of the largest and fastest growing online video entertainment communities with Google's expertise in organizing information and creating new models for advertising on the Internet."

Another reason advertising on your web site can increase in value is how many sites the advertising is shown on. Banner ads for example, with a simple script, can be shown on multiple sites at one time by placing a bit of code within the HTML source code of any page on your sites (or even other people's sites, via an exchange).

Also each different type of ad can be worth more than another type. i.e. Text ads cost less for the site owner to run, so they naturally are lower in cost.

While all the above is common knowledge and various information is ample on any search engine site for those wanting to find out what types of advertising to sell and how to price each one.

You will also want to consider a few things before deciding if this is even a viable route for you to take. Not to scare you off from this of course, but just to give you a few tips that maybe have not been covered in the pre-decision area.

Depending on how far you want to delve into the selling of ad space this can get quite complicated on what skills are required. For this article though we will keep it on the simple level of selling the most common ad space types.

There will have to be some creative innovation on your part.

You, as the seller of the ad space, may be asked about providing certain needed items or services for the transaction, that the advertiser may not have the skills to do, such as creating banners or writing ad copy.

It is likely if you are interested in providing this service you already have a background in advertising with the necessary skills to help if asked. But something to think about if you don't.

There will be some necessary intelligence required.

There may be certain technical terms you will need to be familiar with and understand what they mean. CPM and CPC to give you a couple of examples.

Now as I mention we are keeping this on the simple level. So knowing the above may never come in play. But it doesn't hurt to learn all you can about a service you plan on asking people to pay you for.

Your Site's Niche and Market Demand for Advertising

Another area in deciding yea or nay on this, is the market demand for what your web site targets? The higher the demand for targeted advertising that matches your site the more chance you have of getting sponsors for your available ad space.

Which in today's Internet world of many well defined niches, this also should not pose too much of a problem. But say your site's target market is something really niche defined such as only email marketing or ezine advertising, or something completely different like candle making or some other hobby... Then it stands to reason you need to find out how popular that is in the area of demand for purchased advertising.

Decisions on How to Manage Ads Sold

In some cases such as banner advertising, you may have a higher chance of sales if you provide a way for the customer to view how his ad is doing in the way of number of clicks received and, where applicable, how many of his purchased credits have been used. So choosing the right script to run your banner advertising will be important.

The same with text advertising. You could sell it at a higher price if you can make it targeted based. i.e. such as Google Adwords where their script brings up ads based on the content of the web page they are placed on or channels pre-determined by the site owner. Giving your customer the choice of what he wants to target will definitely give you an advantage.

Again there is a vast amount of scripts out there for this purpose and ample knowledge available on figuring out what is best for the type of ads you want to sell.

How to Take Payments For Ad Space

This could be one of you most important decisions. While many may think "I will just use PayPal". You will quickly find several people who will complain and say they do not use them. So in general my advice on this is to provide as many options as you can for receiving payments. And at the very least take Credit Cards direct through a merchant account and PayPal or something in the same area. There are many popular and highly trusted sites with the same criteria as PayPal.

One other piece of advice is to try and choose your ad distribution methods and scripts that are enabled to use the payment options you have chosen. This being a high demand feature from those seeking to sell advertising on their website, it should not be hard to find exactly what you need in the way of these scripts.

So all in all if you do your needed research enabling you to go into the area, of selling ad space, well informed, this could easily and quickly become your web site's big ticket item for profits.

Sincerely, Debbie Ducker

------------ About the Author ------------

Debbie Ducker is the owner of DuckerPromotion.com And author of many articles and How To marketing materials.

Get her free report on building and using an opt-in list here:
http://freereport1.duckerpromotion.com/

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Author's Name : Debbie Ducker

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