8 tips and tricks to create a killer “advertise” page for your blog
Posted by jbj on Sep 6, 2008 in Blogging • 22 commentsMost blogs are selling ads spaces, or at least, they try. During the last weeks, I visited many blogs and studied how do they spread the info about their ad spots sells. Here is 8 tips and tricks to create a killer advertising page for your blog and attract new advertisers.
Make your "advertise" page visible
This is a basic tip, but it has to be said, regarding the amount of blogs who hide their advertise page and simply display a link on their about page.
Most advertisers don't have time to loose by searching how they can advertise on your blog. There's billions of blogs, so if they can't access your advertising infos and price, they'll simply advertise on another blog.
To make sure that everyone can easily access your advertising page, add a link to your navigation menu or below your main add space.
Be clear about your price
Belive it or not, I saw many blog were the author ask potential advertisers to email him for giving out the price of an add spot. Seriously, excepted if your run a very popular blog, I doubt that many people will agree to waste their time by sending you an email to ask for the price of an ad space.
Even better, if you sells ads spots at a very competitive price, what about displaying the price below your blog's main ad spot?
Selling differents ads spaces? Describe each individually
If you're selling different advertising spaces (125*125px banner, text links, 30*250 footer ad...) you definitely should consider describing each of your space individually, just as Yaro Starak did on his Entrepreneurs Journey blog.
Create a clean table for your prices
I found this idea on Tom Riddle Wordpress Theme, called Wp-Maganews. His advertising page is just stunning, mostly due to the table displaying both ad positions and price for 1, 3 or 6 months.
Add a site plan to your ads page
Another great idea is to display a huge screenshot of your blog showing where ads are being displayed. Ads position is a very important factor for an advertiser, so the most precise your are, the better it will be.
Don't waste time. Add paypal links.
I already said it twice before, but advertisers haven't any time to loose and there's many other blogs that sells ad spots and links.
So if you want to stand out of the crowd, what about providing a quick "Buy it now" Paypal link, directly on your advertising page? This can also gets benefits from compulsive buying.
Though, you must think about being clear in the kind of ads you find appropriate for your blog. If you don't say a word about that, you can for sure expect requests for porn and viagra ads!
Your blog is popular? Say it.
Remember that you're are SELLING ads. So, you must convince your potential client that buying an ad spot on your blog will be good for him.
Always take screenshots when you hit digg frontpage, or when you're are linked by a popular blog, and make sure to provide links so the advertiser will be sure that there's no fake. This is a real proof of your blog success.
What about your personal experiences?
And you, do you have any tips to enhance your advertise page or attract new advertisers? Leave us a comment!
Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed my Google News Reader..
Matt Hanson
Thats a nice post. I’ve used some of the tips on my advertisement page and it looks a lot better. Thanks.
@Mac Apps: Glad you liked this post! Your advertise page looks good!
Great post, keep up the great work!
- John
http://www.designbump.com
I never knew how important it was to put up an advertise page. Thanks for the useful info. My website may not be as big as yours, but Ive created a simple advertise page that leads to my contact form. It’s located on the footer of my website at http://www.ipodstuffreviews.com. Is there a problem with putting it on the footer? Will advertisers still find it?
It isn’t really a problem, but footer links aren’t that visible. You should put it on your header, or your sidebar.
Hi Jean-Baptiste (or do you prefer jbj?),
I’m just about to launch my reworked theme and I’m about to try out direct advertising, so this post came at a good time. Thanks!
Hey Stephen, glad to see you on here! Jean-Baptiste, Jean and jbj are both ok
Good luck with your new theme, and glad to see that you found this tutorial helpful!
I don’t think that a good advertising page is very essential. I know of many websites that have an advertise page that consists of their email address to contact them for rate information and they have all their spots sold.
With that said, I think a well designed one can certainly help lure advertisers and is probably worth the extra work!
@Kyle: Sure some blog can easily sells all their ads spots without having a very well designed advertising page. However, I think that theses tips can help a young blog to sells its first ads spots.
Nice list. What do you think about dofollow/nofollow on advertisers links?
@Jamie: Good question. Personally, if I pay $40 or more for an ad spot, I’d like to have a dofollow.
Hey jbj really a very helpful tip specially for me as i am not much experienced in this designing field. i have just started my career. Thanks a lot and if their are some more useful tips for the people like me please post it so that we can get to how really we can make our website look good. and i just want to know that is their any particular place in the website where the ads should generally be. if yes then please let me know. once again Thanks a lot
and good work
@Swaran Singh: There’s a lot of places on a website where you can put some ads. In my opinion, ads should be visible, but never bore the readers.
On most blogs, ads are generally in the top of the right sidebar, and embeded in posts.
Thanks for the great tips on the proper way to advertise ad space available. I have been thinking about it for a while but wasn’t sure how to go about doing it.
I know I don’t have a killer “advertise” myself, all I do is to put the stats there and all the booking is handled by OIO Publisher. I simply love the idea of having a table of price list but then I’m struggling to create a table myself… do you have any thing to recommend?
Yan
On Cats Who Code we are just selling 125*125px adverts, so we don’t need a table right now, though I’ll use a html table to create it, and then styling it using CSS.
An “Advertising page” Wordpress plugin should not be a bad deal at all, I must think about it
I would like to add on another important factor on pricing. Some bloggers are overpricing their ads price for the amount of attention their blog gets. You need to have daily unique hits of at least 3,000 before thinking of getting a good price for your ads space.
Be reasonable for a start. If you are getting like 500 UV per day, then priced it at around $10 - $20 for a start. You can increase it as your blog gets more traffic.
Other than that very nice and detailed post.
very nice article you disclose some nice and useful tricks to really make advertiser stunned with options one is giving i am waiting for my stats to become that nice to make such a page, hope for the best
Very nice, I will definitely reference to this post on Evolve.
i have other blog, and i thought of adding my paypal link to my advertise page, but thanks for this post.
Hey, very interesting post.
My written English is not so good so I write in German:
“Lieber den Spatz in der Hand, als die Taube auf dem Dach.”
Yours sincerely
Luxus