This is part four of my private ads miniseries. I have talked about whether or not new blogs should have ads, where you should place your ad on your blog, and advantages and disadvantages of different ad sizes.
Your overall social popularity or size of a blog is one of the most important things to advertisers. You want to have the ability to influence a certain group of people because that appeals to advertisers. Usually advertisers are looking to promote themselves to a specific target audience. But what if the problem becomes that you do not have a high social popularity or a huge size of a blog?
That is the question many bloggers ask. Blogs are becoming more popular everyday and so that makes traditional media gain interests in advertising on them. There are many steps that you can take to make your blog appeal more to advertisers.
How to Make Your Blog Attract Advertisers
Consistently contact advertisers to try and look for ad buyers. Don’t limit your ad selling potential by relying on advertisers to contact you.
Create an advertising page on your blog so that people that are interested can find out more information. You want to try to keep this above the fold and try to make it a graphical image or tab. This makes it an easy way for people to click and get advertising information. Plus it’s an easy way to contact you for more information and rates.
Make sure to keep your ads specific to your blog. If your blog is about electronics don’t try to sell pet products. I know this is common sense but just a little reminder. It may make you look like you’re an amateur when it comes to putting advertisements on your blog and could scare away advertisers.
Make sure you have the mind of a business person. Try to improve your site’s perceived income value. You could create a store to go with your blog or anything else on the side to make it seem as if the popularity of your blog has allowed you to go in different directions than just writing articles. You can always include a job board also. Adding these things can improve your site’s perceived income value which is important to many advertisers.
You can always get guest bloggers to write for your blog. Perception is everything when you are trying to sell yourself to advertisers. At least try to make it seem as if you are a community blog or are trying to build a community. You want to become an online publication or community blog because advertisers like that.
You can always throw up a free bonus ad for advertisers. If a company realizes that they are getting traffic from your blog to their web site then they may decide to advertise for you later on. Once you take them off as a free bonus ad they will realize that they have lost traffic which was from your blog. They might also just feel like they should advertise because you were so kindly allowing them to have a free advertisement running on your blog for a while. Just make sure to make it a direct URL without tracking tags or affiliate tags.
Social proof indicators are also another way to persuade people to advertise on your blog. As much as they can be incorrect at times, most advertisers widely accept them and would more than likely check them out even if you don’t show them yourself. So why not use means of social proof such as your RSS feed subscribership, Twitter readers, Alexa rank, Technorati rank, and others. Be as truthful as possible so that if an advertiser would research your social proof indicators themselves then they would find exactly what you proposed to them. Once you have the trust of an advertiser, you have a better chance to make the sale.
Make sure to show them all the banners they can pay for. If you do not have any paid placements on your blog at the time then throw in a free bonus ad, house ad, or partner ad. You want your potential advertisers to be able to see how their ad might look and where their ad will be seen on your blog.
Make potential advertisers think your blog is good for ads. You want to make sure the advertisers perceive your blog as “allowing them to get traffic from advertising”. If you currently do not have any advertisements on your blog then it will be difficult to make a sale. If you need to throw up free bonus adds to make it look like your blog is advertiser worthy, then do so. It really is a good to do anything you will give you that much better of a chance to make a sale.
Focus on a specific topic and try to become an authority figure. Try to spread your opinions and research by contributing articles to blogs, newsletters, online magazines, and other things. Try to get interviews by other bloggers. You want to prop yourself up on a pedestal so that you look worthy of having advertisers on your blog.
Building a community around your site is one of the things that every blogger should absolutely be doing. Bloggers need to make sure they’re actively engaging in dialogue with other bloggers in your niche. Allow users to generate content for your site, engage in dialogue on forums, comment on blogs that are in your niche, and be active on social media sites.
Show your statistics on your blog. Make sure to go in more depth about your statistics so advertisers can get as much information as possible. You can include this on your advertising page. This is more than your social proof indicators that I talked about above. Show your monthly unique visitors and total number of impressions. You could easily get your statistics for your blog if you are using any sort of stats plugin in WordPress.
Use demographic information to give potential advertisers a better explanation of who your audience is. Potential advertisers want to know more about your blog than just the basics. Being able to give them the most information possible is a plus so try to figure out what your demographic information is to give you the potential of getting a large amount of advertisers. Try to find out you’re male or female percentages and your average age of readers. You can also find out information about single/married, number of kids, geographic, etc.
Make sure to include an about us section. Advertisers will of course want to know as much information about who you are and what your site is about. They will of course want to know why you an authority figure on what you are writing about. I talked about becoming an authority figure above. It’s not really if you are one, but it’s an advertiser perceiving you as one.
Keep your blog professional. Try not to talk about yourself too much. You do not want to scare your advertisers away. They’re looking for a blog that is for a specific topic or industry. That means they want you to talk about it otherwise it will not feel like they’re advertising on a blog that really has a topic or goes within an industry.
I went over many ways to make your blog more attractive to advertisers. There are countless ways to do this but you can just take a couple hours out of your day to fix the ones that you can do right away. Other ones will take time but in a couple of months of doing them you should see all of your hard work pay off.
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My name is Franklin Bishop and I'm an expert on Blogging, Social Media, and Internet Marketing. I started this blog to help people looking for information on those subjects.
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Nice article! I am always thinking about creating a blog to make a little more cash but I’m finding out that the more I read the more I will know before I began. I do not want to scare people off if they are thinking I am only trying to make money. Like you have said before on your blog, they have to perceive you as a person wanting to help them even if you’re only trying to make money.
Yeah, I think people mainly worry about content though.
Sometimes. People can be easily persuaded by a simple but nice design. They can also be persuaded if you have other comments on your blog so that might make them want to be a part of your blog.
Exactly. Perception is everything. It is hard to ever have a popular blog if people do not perceive good things from you.
Nce… I think it’s better to not show subscriber count. Let people wonder how many subscribers you have.
I completely agree with you. Although it might help you in some instances like getting advertisers, you should just make people wonder how many subscribers you have.
Great info! My blog is pretty new and not consistent enough with traffic to charge for advertising, but I’m definitely bookmarking this for future reference. Stumbled too!
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Thanks for stumbling it. You don’t need a lot of consistent traffic to charge for advertising. If you have comments and other proof of people coming your blog and might persuade advertisers to pay for an ad unit.
I need to ramp up a little bit more on advertising myself and geting advertiser to my site too. I also need to tweek my site a little bit more and add a few things to make it better.
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Great post. Another thing I think is that never make your potential advertisers feel that they could get something that you yourself know they can’t. I mean most people always make an attractive advertise page only to fake stats in which e.g 10,000 page views became 10,000 uniques. When the advertisers see that the advertisement on your site underachieved then they’ll be more likely not to come back anymore.
indeed. i read that advertisers continue to lean heavily on proxies like alexa, pr, rss, that sort of thing, so it’s clearly a good idea to show these off if you’ve got good numbers.
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hmmm… that last comment post hung…
anyway, i was just saying that since advertisers continue to rely on proxies like alexa, pr, rss subscribers, that sort of thing, then it really is a good idea to show these off if you have the numbers…
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