How to Make Extra Money for Doing Almost Nothing – Part 2

This is part two of my series on banner advertising, which again I believe it to be pretty easy money. I’ve gotten a lot of great comments on part 1, and I’m happy that I’ve started some debate about a few things, which you can read about in the comments section if you’re curious. Please feel free to add your own opinions to the discussion.

Moving on…I think the hardest thing for anyone to figure out is how much they should be charging for ad space on your website. What’s a reasonable price? What’s fair for both parties? Before I get into pricing, I’ll go over the types of ads you can offer first because those will have an impact on your prices too.

Types of Advertisement Space You Can Sell

You have the freedom to sell whatever space you want on your website. It can be any sized banner in any portion of your website, as long as you know you have the ability to place an ad there in the first place.

That being said, there are “standards” that most people are familiar with as far as size and placement is concerned. Usually, ads are placed at the top or in the sidebars, and the most common ones are the following:

• Horizontal Banners (728 x 90 pixels or 468 x 60): These are usually located at the top of your posts or even inside the header itself. They can be somewhat distracting in my own opinion because visually, they are directly competing with either your website title or post title.
• Vertical Banners (160 x 600 or 120 x 600): Vertical banners are almost always placed within the sidebar, but these longer ones can eat up a lot of space, so when we talk about negotiating a price in the next section, you’d better get your money’s worth. You potentially have room for 3 or 4 different ads within this one given space.
• Large Square Banners (400 x 400, 300 x 250 or 250 x 250): These sizes are usually within the content of your website, because they are a little too big for the header or sidebar areas. It can be difficult to establish some kind of deal with someone because your content will normally be featured one day, and then slowly drift away from readers’ view as you add more content. You may be able to work out a one-day deal, or plan to place the ad in your posts for a certain amount of the time, but I believe it’s rarely happens this way
• The 125 x 125 Banner Ad: Based on my experience doing business on the internet, I would say that the most popular form of banner advertising negotiated between two parties is the 125 x 125 pixel banner ad. It’s friendly to the eye and is large enough to place a decent ad on it, but it doesn’t take up too much room. Plus, it fits snugly into our sidebars and the overall design of most websites. This is the type of ad space that I sell, as you can see on intheleed.com in the upper right-hand corner.
• The Text Ad: Like the Google Adsense text ads you see on a lot of websites, advertisers can create their own ad text in a similarr fashion for your website. This is usually in the lower spectrum of the price range, since there are no pictures or graphics involved.
• The Product/Blog/Website Review: I put this here simply because it’s a type of promotion you can do for other websites for a price, but it’s not exactly “ad space” since it’s usually in an entire blog post or page on your website that gets hidden over time. I’ve never done this myself, but it may work for you.

Selling Points and Ideas

There are certain things you can tell your potential advertiser that will help you negotiate a larger price and ultimately seal the deal. Remember, traffic is important, but in addition to that, here are some of my ideas:

Click Reports

One thing I offer my advertisers is a monthly click report. I keep track of how many times their ad is clicked, and I report this to them if they want that service. Even though about half say they can keep track of the clicks themselves, just offering it to them makes you sound more professional.

How is this done? Well, for WordPress users, there’s a handy dandy plugin that helps place, manage and keep track of 125 x 125 pixel advertisements automatically. It’s called WP125 and it’s really an amazing plugin that I use on my blog. Another feature that I love about this is that you can determine when you want a specific ad to be taken down.

I’m sure there are other ways to generate click reports for outgoing links from your site, but this plugin really does the job for me. Here is a screenshot of the options screen for it:

Highest Clickthrough Rates

If you have a couple months of private advertising experience, a client might be interested in hearing what kind of clickthrough rates your ads normally have. I always mention a nice rounded number close to the number of clicks for the ad that has performed the best, but I make sure to tell potential clients that the number of clicks on their ad depends a lot on the design of it.

A “Discount” for Longer Periods of Advertising

Let’s say I have a client who wants to advertise a 125×125 ad on my website. I’ll always offer something that looks like this:

• $150 for 1 month
• $275 for 2 months
• $375 for 3 months
• (Average: $125 per month)

These aren’t the actual prices I charge (I’ll talk about this next), but as you can see, there’s an added discount for each additional month of ad service.

Why do I do this? Well, for the same reason women shop at Nordstrom Rack – discounts are hard to pass up. If I were to simply ask for $125 per month, I would most likely get a lot of advertisers who would “try it out” for 1 month to see what happens. With the multi-month discount, clients usually go for this because it “saves them money”, when in fact it’s exactly the same. You get paid for 3 months instead of just one. Also, if anyone wants a shorter term, you’d be making more than $125/month on that.

Out of the 6 or 7 advertisers I’ve dealt with in the past, only 1 has done it for one month only.

A Contract

I always use a contract for my advertising services, and I make sure to let a potential client know about it before a transaction. I do this for a few of reasons:

1. It makes me look more professional and gives the advertiser confidence that he or she is doing business with someone who will follow through after the transaction.
2. It also acts as a receipt that companies will need for their records, which they appreciate.
3. It protects me.

If you look up “sample advertising contract” in Google, you’ll find a whole slew of different templates or examples you can use to make your own. Here’s one that looks good, but please make sure you read and revamp the terms and conditions (the lengthy text underneath the invoice information), for your own website/company.

The “discount” you see in the contract is the amount saved from doing the “multi-month” advertising. It sounds kind of pointless, but seeing the $125 discount helps the cause.

Pricing

You might remember from Part 1 that I specifically said not to include your rates on your website. Why? Because each client is different. Your clients may just be regular Joe Bloggers who don’t have $100 bucks to spend each month – but you believe in their blog and want to help them out. Other clients may be multi-million dollar companies who are trying to get some internet exposure, who would be happy to fork over $2000 a month for a specific kind of traffic such as yours. Each inquiry you receive will be different, and you’ll have to use your good researching and communication skills, and maybe even a sixth sense in order to get the client to pay you the maximum amount he or she is willing to pay.

When someone is interested in buying ad space on your website, you should always, ALWAYS visit their website and just see exactly what they are all about. There may be many reasons why not to accept an inquiry from a client. It’s up to your best judgement – just remember that the ads you provide on your website ultimately reflect on you and your website to all of your readers. If you were advertising a naughty website, for example, I’m sure your readers would think twice about you and your website.

Also, don’t forget about the ad variations and where they will go on your site. Larger ads should cost more than the smaller ones, and banners at the top should cost more than ones near the bottom or below the fold of your webpage.

My First Ad

When i was first contacted about selling ad space on my website, I had no idea what my price should be. I first thought that $20 a month was enough, since that’s what I was making in Adsense earnings at the time, and that would have doubled my income.

Then I asked myself, why not $50? $100? $200? I really had no idea. So, I just said – what the hell – $200 a month. And guess what, it worked! Actually, they came back to me and asked to do a multi-month term with a discount, so in the end it came out to 6 months for an average of $150 a month. The contract was signed, $900 was deposited into my paypal account, and I placed the Ad using the WP125 plugin, set for a 6 month term. Sweet. (At the time I was getting about 6000 unique visitors a month).

Of course, if I had asked for $20/month, it would have happened in a flash, but I would have lost out on tons of cash and not even know it because I probably would have been really happy to double my income, not knowing that I missed out on a 4500% increase. Don’t low ball, but don’t ask for a million dollars either. Play it by ear, and don’t be afraid to earn some money. It’s like negotiating your salary at a job, but in this case, what’s the worst that can happen? They’ll say your price is too high and give you a counter offer. How scary is that?

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool “Trick”

Before I finish up (sorry this is much longer than I had anticipated), I’d like to give you a helpful trick that you can use to get a ballpark figure for your ad space that will prove that you’re giving your advertisers exactly what they want.

1. The first thing you’ll need is to figure out how many clicks a typical ad on your website would generate. If you have ads currently running, this is easy. If not, you may just want to take a guess based on outgoing links on your website, or a percentage of the traffic you get each month. For this example, let’s say you generate an average of 300 clicks per ad per month on your Mixed Martial Arts website.

2. Next, you’ll need to setup an account with Google Adwords if you don’t have one already. Don’t worry, you don’t need to pay anything, you are simply registering so you can access the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

3. Within the tool type in keywords that are related to your website and click “get keyword ideas”. (See picture below)

4. After you get the results, make sure you first go to the dropdown menu for “columns to display” and click on “Show Estimated Avg. CPC, which means “cost per click” in Adwords land.

5. You’ll then be able to see how much advertisers are paying Google each time an ad they place via Google Adwords is clicked which is linked to a certain keyword.

6. As you can see, they are paying about a dollar for each click. Even if your potential advertiser does not use Google to advertise, you can still go through this process and show them they how much they would pay, and how much they would save by advertising with you. I would probably offer an average of $200/month for a 125×125 ad space on your Mixed Martial Arts website, if you are indeed around 300 clicks per month. Fun times! Oh, and remember that the Google Ads are mainly just text only. Here, they get to custom design their own ad.

In Conclusion

Advertising on your website can be fun, and it’s the first chance that many internet hopefuls have to do actual business online with other people. It’s a good learning experience, and I hope this post helps you figure things out.

There really isn’t that much actual work involved – just a few business and research type things so hopefully you can add this to your internet income arsenal in the near future.

Best of luck to all of you!