How to Set the Right Ad-space Price for your Blog?

This is a question that I am sure many have asked themselves and there is no static answer as pricing determines by many factors. Some advertisers would pay a great deal of money for a link on PR7 with no traffic while others will be ready to spend a fortune if they know their ad will be viewed by millions.This brings us to a small guide I wrote especially for this purpose, which I hope will help you to generate passive revenue from your site.

Step 1: Determine Your Level of Popularity

So let’s start with factors you need to consider while selling ads space:

1. Google PageRank (for text links).
2. Traffic / Hits (for banners, primarily).
3. Technorati Rank (for blogs).
4. Alexa Rank (another inaccurate way to estimate traffic).

There are many other parameters, such as number of Del.icio.us bookmarks, Complete Rank, RealRank and others, but most advertisers will not dive that deep when picking a publisher, and moreover would not know what these numbers mean. Bottom line is, check your PR, traffic (Google Analytics would be the best evaluator), Technorati and Alexa rank, and move to step nr. 2…

Step 2: Check The Competitors

The easiest way to get started is simply by checking how much other sites change for ads space. While it would be a titanic work to go site by site and check, you can shorten the process by checking famous ads space marketplaces such as the ones by BuySellAds.com and PerformancingAds.com

This would be your golden mine as you have all the popular sites gathered under one roof and you can see not only the price they charge per banner, but also the ranking and number of sold ads. All you need to do it search the market place for your keywords, pick the sites that have at least 1-2 banners sold and compare its popularity to yours (remember that size matters and the smaller is the banner, the less it cost). If you set around the same price for your ads, as the other website that has the closest traffic and ranking to yours, same niche and a few banners sold, you are likely to have a few sales too, very soon.

It’s very important, however, only to look up to the sites that already HAD a few sales, otherwise the price could be unreasonably high, and naturally no one is willing to pay it.

Step 3: Beat the Competition: Give Better Value for the Money

While setting same price as your direct competitors can get you into the market and help you to get started, it does not mean you will get more sales, simple because advertises come to advertise with a certain budget, mostly limited budget and they check what site will give them a better value for their hard earned cash. Put yourself in the advertiser’s place, would you rather pay $100 when you know 30,000 visitors will view your ad, or would you pay $50 to advertise on another website that generates nearly 1 million of hits? Of course this is a very exaggerated example, but I hope you get my point.

Another important point is to put the ads on a visible, top viewed position, and not somewhere at the footer where advertisers would (rightly) assume that they will not be viewed or clicked.

Step 4: Let people know you Sell Ads

Deciding to sell ads is not enough to make a sale, you have to let people know about it. Sign up with big ads-sales sites like BuySellAds.com (yes, I previously disaproved of them but now that I generated over $300 in only 2 months through them without any effort, I definitely changed my mind!) and create a profile for your ads. Also, don’t forget to let people know ON your website that there is a slot for sale and make a post about it on the big forums like Digital Point and WebTalkForums.

Step 5: Rest on Your Laurels

If you managed to set the right price that is lower compared to competitors, and your site is worth advertising on, just enjoy seeing the ads revenue flowing in. Remember that to get a semi-decent PR and sell text links is MUCH easier than to draw a few hundres of visitors to your site every day and sell banner ads. Good luck!