Selling Ad Space is a fantastic approach to making money online and supplementing your monthly income to monetize your website. We’ll go through some of the greatest strategies for selling website ad space in this article so you can start generating passive revenue.
What Does Selling Ad Space Mean?
Designating accessible areas of your website for ad hosting is a requirement for selling advertising space. These advertisements can be in the form of videos, sponsored material, or banner adverts. In fact, both on desktop and mobile, advertisers spend close to 50% of their programmatic budget on video advertisements, according to eMarketer.
Publishers have a lot of potential, regardless of the ad type. By showing the appropriate advertising to the right viewers at the right times, publishers can passively make thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the size of the website and the speciality.
Benefits of Selling Ad/ Ad Space
Making Money
Selling ad space is the answer. It’s a technique to virtually immediately turn a popular website into a money maker without having to make any major adjustments to your company.
Because bloggers and other content producers frequently lack a tangible good or service to sell, selling advertising is most common among them. Ads, for example, are typically not beneficial for e-commerce websites or SaaS company websites because they are more likely to harm the business by driving customers away from the site.
Building Connection
You establish long-lasting relationships with potential sponsors when you get in touch with them. Particularly if you are cautious in your approach. Get in touch with a few people you already know (or are at least familiar with) and offer them a 30-day free ad place. If both parties gain from the partnership, you might propose charging a fee to run the advertisement.
Control over Income
When you sell ad space, you decide the terms. You can receive payment in advance for the duration that the advertisement will run. You are not paid here based on how well the ads perform. Instead, just like you pay for space in a magazine, you are selling space on your website.
That means there will always be a certain amount of money flowing in each month as long as consumers keep renewing their advertising contracts with you. A website’s fixed income is a really great offer.
Leverage Site Traffic
It would be wise for you to capitalize on any site traffic you may already be getting. It’s a smart idea to sell ad space even if you currently sell things, use affiliate links, or work to expand your email list. You diversify your sources of income and take full use of each and every visitor.
Things to Consider Before Selling Ad Space
High-Quality Traffic
Before selling ad space becomes a viable option, your website must receive a respectable volume of traffic. Of course, the rule is not always true. Advertisers tend to think in terms of huge traffic, but what they truly want is a high conversion rate. Therefore, an advertisement on your site would be just as wise an investment as one placed on a site with more traffic provided it is carefully targeted and would appeal to your advertiser despite having low traffic.
Location of Ad Zones on a page
Designating ad “zones” on your website is crucial. By doing this, you demonstrate that you are only providing a finite amount of space on your website for advertising, increasing the value of each ad space.
No more than one to three regions of your website should be used exclusively for advertisements. The header, footer, and a piece of sidebar are popular options. Ads in the middle of postings are sometimes alright, but please don’t overdo it.
Price of Ad Space
The amount you charge for advertisements mostly depends on the incentives you are providing to your advertisers. If a lot of people visit your website, you can reasonably charge more. If your website is young, you should generally maintain your prices lower to make it less risky for advertisers if they don’t see a significant return on their investment.
Finding Advertisers
How to discover customers who are willing to pay for advertising space on your website is something else you need to consider. To begin with, you might wish to inquire about putting an advertisement with companies and coworkers you already know. This can assist in swiftly filling your website with advertising. In the long run, though, you want advertisers to approach you rather than the other way around. Making it clear that you accept advertisements by creating a dedicated advertising page is an excellent idea.
Types of Ads You Can Sell
Cost-per-click Ads
This speaks to the method by which advertisers pay for the adverts they order. These advertisements may also be known as PPC, or pay-per-click, adverts.
The cost of each ad (and subsequently the campaign) is determined by the cost per click when an advertiser chooses to run CPC advertisements. That essentially means that the advertiser pays a fee to the ad host each time someone clicks on their advertisement.
The majority of websites display cost-per-click advertising, which is the most prevalent sort of advertisement. Since ads are only eligible for payment when a user clicks on them, they are sold on a per-click basis.
This ad format’s popularity can be attributed to the fact that it benefits both publishers and advertisers equally. In order to enhance sales or generate leads, advertisers can leverage the traffic that is sent to their websites. The traffic the publisher sends can earn money for them.
For advertisers who have a good sales funnel but are unsure of the effectiveness of their ads, these ads are incredibly helpful. It makes logical to only pay for clicks if they anticipate that many people will click on the advertisement and subsequently make a purchase, but they don’t anticipate that many people will do so.
One drawback is that you can obtain a very poor click-through rate for ads on your website if there is little traffic or if your ads are not placed in relevant places. Many website owners, however, easily get around this by optimizing their WordPress advertising.
CPM Ads
Ads that are sold based on how frequently they are shown are known as CPMs (cost per mille) or cost-per-thousand impressions. This means that whether or not consumers click on the adverts that are displayed on your website, you get compensated for doing so.
CPM advertisements are more advantageous than CPC ads for advertisers who have great commercials but subpar sales funnels. With a CPM model, a highly converting ad might receive more clicks for less money since CPM ads are often less expensive than CPC ads at the unit level.
CPM advertising frequently falls short of producing the same amount of money as cost-per-click ads on their own. If you have a popular website and avoid placing adverts too close to your content, they can be a sizable source of cash.
You direct traffic to an advertiser’s website, but you are only compensated when a visitor takes a specific action. Any action could count as this one, including buying anything, downloading software, opening an account, etc.
Affiliate Programs
Affiliate marketing platforms provide you with a special URL with your referral ID. After that, you can use this URL to make banners and images, or directly insert links into your articles.
Payment is depending on the viewer’s behaviour, like CPC and CPM adverts. Advertisers can be much pickier about the actions they want to be taken with affiliate ads, though. An ad might state, for instance, that they will only be compensated if a customer purchases one of their goods.
The advantage of using affiliate advertisements is that you will be paid far more than you would with a cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand ad. You can enrol in affiliate programs for the various goods and services you want to market. The commission rates, terms, and conditions that apply to each item, service, and affiliate program are unique.
Only when a visitor completes the required activity in accordance with the conversion objective does an affiliate get paid or receive a commission.
- Earn money for leads. If a visitor converts to a lead—for example, by signing up for a free trial or contacting a sales representative—the affiliate will be compensated.
- Profit from sales commissions. Every sale the affiliate generates through the link results in a commission paid to them. This is applicable to a wide range of goods and services.
- Earn money for clicks. The affiliate is compensated per click regardless of whether a lead or sale is generated. Since not all clicks result in leads, this strategy is not very popular with advertising.
Flat Fee
You can sell ad space on your website for a certain length of time with flat-rate ads. Depending on how much traffic your website typically receives, you can set the pricing for your adverts.
Because it is the most straightforward pricing model available, it is well-liked by advertisers and website owners who value simplicity. Flat-fee ads ensure that there are no financial surprises for website owners and advertisers in the future.
Website owners can predict exactly how much money they will make at the end of the promotional period thanks to this sort of ad, which gives advertisers more impressions and clicks.
How to Sell Ad Space Effectively to Make Money
Use Form Builder to Create Announcements
The simplest approach to begin selling ad space on your website is frequently to just make an announcement that you have ad space available.
You avoid the middlemen and work directly with ads by doing this. Additionally, it allows you complete control over pricing and gives you the greatest degree of freedom — you can establish any conditions you like, pick the advertising you want, etc.
Any plugin that enables you to construct forms on WordPress can be used as a starting point. Basically, what you’re doing is making an ad space ad for advertisers, like a banner that reads, “Advertise with us!”
Remember that selling ad space directly gives you complete control, but it also requires more time investment. Since you’ll be directly in charge of maintaining your advertising space, you’ll need to set up a time to respond to inquiries about advertising, which may take away from the time you had planned to spend on other tasks.
Additionally, there’s always a chance that an advertiser who already claimed an ad space may make it difficult for you to collect payment, will make late payments, or do anything similar. Although there are always ways to stop this, such as requiring upfront payment, you’ll need to be aware of it.
Approaching Advertisers Directly
There’s always the option of approaching advertisers directly and asking whether they’d be interested in purchasing available ad space on your website if you’re really ready to get started and put in some effort. The risks and rewards of responding to direct advertising inquiries will still apply, but you will go to the advertisers rather than the other way around.
However, if you already have relationships with advertisers you know are trustworthy, this might be a sweet spot where you have a lot of control over the cost of ad space and terms while exposing yourself to fewer dangers. With the correct connections, getting some advertising hosted in a matter of days may be as simple as sending an email to a partner company.
You can earn a lot of money with little effort if you can persuade companies that provide high-quality goods and services that website users would enjoy to place advertising on your website.
Make it Automatic
Direct communication with an advertiser is no longer essential to sell ad space. The most effective technique to monetize a website today may be through automated advertising networks, which have become more and more well-liked. Google AdSense is one well-known service.
There are millions of companies and websites in the AdSense network. In a nutshell, Google displays advertising on websites that are relevant to the user. In addition to screening the websites and advertisers, Google also matches the advertising with the websites and manages the payments.
Setting Up Banner Ads
As mentioned earlier, in order to sell ad space on your website, you may need to advertise it on pages on your websites. After allocating ad zones on your websites, you need to show potential advertisers that there are available ad spaces on your websites. That’s why you need banner ads.
The best plugin to create these banner ads is AdSanity. It gives you creative control over the banner ads, allowing you to create anything you desire. To create banner ads, here’s what to do:
- The first thing you need to do is install and activate the AdSanity plugin. To do so navigate to Plugins > Add New. Search for “AdSanity” and click on Install. After installation, click on Activate.
- Go to AdSanity > Create Ad to create your first ad. You can design any type of advertisement using AdSanity.
- You can include the ad code offered by an advertising platform like Google AdSense, construct a self-hosted ad, or a local ad.
- Upload a banner image and other images if you are running a local advertisement. Enter the ad code if it is a third-party ad.
- You can schedule the advertisement to run for a specified amount of time or for as long as you like under the publish meta box.
- Click on the publish or update button to save your changes
To display the ads anywhere on any page:
- Go to the Appearance > Widgets page
- Click the ‘Plus’ icon in any widget section, like the header or sidebar to open up the widget block menu.
- click on the AdSanity Single Ad widget to add it.
I hope that this article would be useful in teaching you how to monetize your WordPress blog. Now that you are aware of some of the best strategies for selling ad space on your WordPress website, you may do so in order to supplement your income or turn your famous website into a full-time business.
