Business Builder Report

Selling advertising space on your blog requires some preparation. Advertisers want to pay for qualified targeted clicks. So it makes sense to optimize your site for keywords relevant to both content and advertiser. Just because you get an AdSense account does not mean that the clicks you sell to Google is a cost effective way to earn ad income. It just isn’t.

Traffic is a key factor in getting paid for any type of advertising. As a publisher you need to earn dollars, not pennies from ads, if you want to make any meaningful income from click through on your site. At start up publishers are faced with low traffic and no high paying ads.

In order to know what high paying ads to place on your blog, you need to find out how the PPC search engines are ranking your content for relevance. The way to do this is to start with ads from Google, Yahoo or another PPC network.

Every time you visit your site the ads will rotate. Just because you can’t click on the links doesn’t mean you can’t find out who’s ad is being placed on your site. To find out the type of advertiser you are drawing just copy the link to your clip board, paste it into your browser and visit the site. If you land on an affiliate sales page that is exactly what you want and here’s why.

The objective is to attract ads from affiliate marketers. If the PPC network is placing ads for affiliate products, then once you know what they are you can sign up for the program knowing that the keywords on your site are drawing a certain type of advertiser.

The more time you put into research of the sources of advertising the more likely you are to identify the highest paying affiliate programs. The two main benefits of this research process is that you discover PPC ad copy ideas and the products that have the highest payouts. The next step is to increase traffic.

SEO and article marketing to get organic traffic are the first two things to do to prime your traffic pump. Paid advertising to drive traffic to your site comes after you have sources of advertising that will make economic sense. The easiest place to get high paying ads to start is ClickBank and Commission Junction because they likely will manage the programs identified in the research above..

Yes, they are aggregators for affiliate programs, but with a few simple twists you can turn those affiliate programs into high paying advertising on your site. It is free to sign up and get your affiliate account. The next thing to do is survey the CB and CJ products for ones relevant to your site content as indicated above.

Some of the affiliate programs will have links on the site to a page for affiliates to get banner, text and email advertising ready to place. Pick up the ad copy and banners where available. Pick the sizes from the IAB ad unit guidelines I posted last week that you think will fit your blog design.

If the affiliate program has no creatives to offer, then copy or take a screen shot of the sales page header and product images on the site. After that it is just a matter of cropping or scaling the images to IAB specs and finding a place for them on your site. Although there are other sources of advertising you just need one or two to start up.

Warning, do not open up your wallet to buy advertising yet. There is one more absolutely essential step to prepare. To find out what most marketers talk about but few explain check out http://WebAdTutor.com.

Filed under: Online Business | Click title for copyright chain of custody.

Every ad campaign will have an inventory of at least one ad. The ad will be shown in at least one place. Every click the ad gets will direct a visitor to another desired action on your landing page. Up to this point the click stream is external. If the visitor chooses to enter your site then you take custody of the clicks. The ad has successfully delivered a visitor to an internal sales process.

The objective of an advertising campaign is to manage the external content and course visitors follow to your landing page. The ad content management system includes the creative assembly of text and images designed to meet the specifications of placement in the channels the ads will be shown in. The course visitors follow includes information about their ISP, keyword search terms, and location of the ad channel.

Most common formats are text ads shown in channels of distribution operated by search networks like Google and Yahoo. Next in terms of volume are classified text ads. Less common but more targeted are 6 lines 60 character per line ezine ads. Text ads are of different sizes or formats account for at least 61 percent of total revenue in the ad market as indicated in “Advertising Prices and Ad Budget Planning” published here in the BBR on May 24.

The next largest channel of distribution by format is banner ads. At 14 percent of the market, graphic banner ads should be a significant part of your advertising campaign. The Interactive Advertising Bureau that supplies the annual report of market data I use for reference also publishes guidelines for ad units.

See: http://www.iab.net/

As you expand and utilize greater creativity in your advertising campaigns, your ad CMS requires a plan to catalog both creative and placement location. The system I use to track creative inventory is by ad size and date of creation. For example, a Google text ad occupies a space about the size of a half banner so the ad file name would be text234×60-20090614. If it were a graphic banner then the file name would be 234×60-20090614. If there were multiple versions to be used in a split test then the file sequence would be 234×60-20090614-1, 234×60-20090614-2, etc.

The file folder would be named to describe campaign properties like waymore subscriptions. Sub folders would be named 234×60 with files 234×60-20090614-1, 234×60-20090614-2, etc. Using this method, you can locate and track your ad creatives by campaign name, ad size and date.

Tracking placement of your advertising campaigns is more complex. At first spread sheets will do the job but as you expand your contracts with different channels of distribution like Google, Yahoo, ezines, CPA networks and direct ad placements with publishers, your ad CMS needs to adapt.

There are a variety of tracking programs both free and paid that will help to organize placement location, click metrics, click stream data, and split testing. The main draw back is the limits associated with variety. As you expand your channels of distribution, software limits become more apparent and you may end up using several different programs.

The experience of using free and affordable testing and tracking options is valuable. However, the fastest way to increase ad value, reduce ad costs and get control of your online advertising campaign is to invest in the most capable software you can find as soon as you can. Otherwise, you spend time learning software that will soon be discarded anyway. A good upgradeable program that I use is Affiliate Prophet.

Filed under: Online Business | Click title for copyright chain of custody.