Direct Advertising Sales for beginners

Selling ad spaces on a blog/website is the best ways to make money online, when your blog is young and has low traffic you can use some advertising networks, but once your blog has high traffic and good page ranks it is not wise to depend on 3rd party advertising networks to monetize your site. I've seen many blogs which have text ads on their side-bar, they sell it at $50 a month, but that blog gets only $25. The above example would have made it clear to you that ad networks eat away almost 50% of your traffic.




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An alternative to get full earnings from your site is direct ad sales. This means you sell your ad space without any brokers, this form of monetization helps you keep your full ad earnings and results in online freedom, but when there is something to gain, there is something to loose. I have discussed the advantages and disadvantages of direct ad sales below,

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The reason why most bloggers do not consider direct advertising is that it is not safe for them as some advertisers may ask for a refund and that may cause some disputes.

Advantages of Direct Advertising

• Choose your own formats and adspace - One of the first advantages of diret ad sales are you are free to choose your adspace and formats. If you are using a broker, the location of you adspace changes the rates and you won't have any options on the formats of your ads.
• Set your own rates - Not all brokers allow you to set your own price of your adspace, so direct advertising helps you set your ad rates according to your sites traffic and click - through rate. Most blogs with more than 10000 monthly pageviews charge upto $100.
• Direct relationships with advertisers - Sometimes when your advertiser seems very impressed with the click through rate and the popularity of your blog, he may want to establish long term ad arrangements. Which are very benefitial , as an advertiser may pay for 3 months at once.

Disadvantages of direct advertising

• Disputes with advertisers - These are the most common things when your selling ads on your own, this happens mostly when your advertisers get very less click throughs and want a refund.
• Finding advertisers - One advantage of using ad networks is that they have large number of frequent advertisers. If you are selling ads directly finding advertisers is pretty tough. That is why I said in the begining that direct ad sales is for blogs with high traffic. There is only one advertiser in every 10000 users.

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Should we consider direct ad sales

If you ask me, the answer is yes. Direct ad sales has much more benefits than ad networks. It gives you full freedom over your content and you have what ever you sell. Ask any blogger who has sold ads directly on his site and I'm very sure he would prefer it much more than ad networks.

The disadvantages are always there, but you'll have to deal with them as there is always something to loose, when there is something to gain. In all non-web businesses it is give and take, but on the internet it is give - give and take.


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Above I have made it very clear about the advantages and disadvantages of direct ad sales, so now it is up to you to make the decision. I have given ways to deal with the above problems below,

Using an Adserver

Adservers are hosted or self hosted servers used to serve ads on web pages, using this it will be easy to serve ads on your site without any tussle or any sales team. Some adservers include Openads, Shinyads and Zedo.
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Using an alternative ad network

When you have difficulties in finding advertisers your site may not be monetized, so to avoid this you can use some ad networks with adservers and the ads from these networks appear when there are no ads running on your site. This way you can be safe from any sorts of losses.

Maintaining a sales team

This might be very expensive, I had to think twice before writing this as it is not affordable to small bloggers and only big shots can afford it. It takes $50000 to maintain a sales team in India, but once you grow your blog and it receives plenty of advertising orders you can opt to this.

Posts in this series

I have made upto two posts in this series, to get updates about my future posts subscribe to my feeds.

1. Direct Advertising Sales for beginners
2. Creating and marketing your ad space