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1 begin

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INTRODUCTION So, you want to make money blogging? Then get thrown out of your ad network -- it worked for me. Before you can make real money from your blog, you have to stop forfeiting all of your profits to an advertising network. This guide contains everything you need to start building your own relationships with advertisers. You will learn to find sponsors that appeal to your readers, and to foster partnerships that meet your financial goals without assaulting your ethical convictions. You can do it without any experience in advertising, public relations, sales, or marketing, and it is much easier than you think. Regardless of what kind of writing you do, how long you have been doing it, how many readers you have, and whether or not you are ready to take the plunge into a network-free existence, this guide provides the steps you must follow to best meet the financial goals of your blogging business. Have we met? I’m Anna. My blog is called ABDPBT. There, I write about myself, my family, technology, shopping, and personal finance. Recently, I have become so interested in the topic of making blogs more profitable that the personal finance section of my blog is now wholly devoted to that topic. I have experimented with various forms of monetizing

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my own blog, including selling private advertising, product placement, and (of course) running display advertisements through a well-known blog advertising network. Some of these experiments — along with some more controversial posts I wrote concerning the business practices of a particular advertising network — landed me in some trouble. Before long, I found myself without an advertising network and solely responsible for tracking down new revenue sources on my own. At nearly two years of full-time blogging, I felt like I was starting from scratch. But as it turned out, getting kicked off that network was the best thing that ever happened to my blog. If I had not been thrown out, I might never have left, and it was costing me dearly to stay. I was handing over 60% of my revenue to somebody else -- and sacrificing full editorial control of my content for the privilege -- all in the service of promoting huge conglomerates with questionable business practices. The simplicity of posting ad network code and cashing bimonthly checks had lulled me into a costly apathy. I put off a full exploration of other methods of monetization because it was easier to just post the code and forget about it. Does any of this sound familiar? If it doesn’t yet, it might someday soon.

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No third party network is ever looking out for your best interests. You have to look out for yourself.

Don’t get me wrong: there is a time and a place for network ads. At present, my blog features a combination of privately sold ads and some space sold through a network. But what I have learned from my experience is that, if you really want to be successful as a professional blogger, you must always be experimenting with different methods until you find the magic combination that brings money into your business. No third party network is ever looking out for your best monetizing interests. You have to look out for yourself, and I want to share with you how. WHY YOU SHOULD BE SELLING YOUR OWN ADS While print media still languishes in the Great Recession, online advertising continues to grow in popularity. Still, even the best blogging ad networks take a large cut of the profits from the publishers they represent. There is a good reason for this: it takes a good amount of work to get advertising slots filled. It is not difficult or intellectually taxing work, but it does take some time and effort. Advertising networks rely on the fact that most online publishers do not know enough about the practice of selling ad space to quabble over commission percentages and fill

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Bloggers with low traffic are always hit the hardest by low fill rates and high commissions.

rates. Compounding the problem is the fact that the pricing structure of online advertising is so convoluted that few people understand it well enough to question if they are getting a fair deal. And finally, there are still many online publishers who are so grateful to earn any money for doing something they love that they will agree to any kind of percentage points offered. This is the kind of thinking that leads many newer bloggers to assume that joining a larger advertising network is the best and only strategy for monetizing their blogs. In reality, the newer bloggers are the ones who are hit the hardest by problems with fill rates and low commissions. But since the numbers are so low with smaller bloggers, the amount of money being lost is often unnoticed or considered trivial. No matter who you are, you are selling yourself short if you have not tried to sell your own ads. When you are selling your own private blog advertising, you cut out the middlewoman and her profitshares, editorial controls, and unpaid or “house” advertising for which you are not compensated. You also eliminate the complications that arise when your advertisers are chosen by third party advertising clearinghouses that do not know or

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A blog needs a million page views per month or more to net $50,000 per year from network display ads.

understand your readership. You are the best person to consult about the tastes and proclivities of your readership -- not a sales representative for an advertising network. And this is why you are the best choice for a person to track down the brands that will most appeal to them. Selling your own ads makes a full time blogging income more realistic. The plain truth is that most bloggers will never reach the traffic needed needed to make a full time income from display ads provided by a network. A blog needs a million pageviews per month (if not more) to net $50,000 per year from network display ads. This does not take into consideration seasonal fluctuations in ad budgets, fill shortages, or possible changes to commission rates. Even if you do become the next blogging superstar, it will take you a while to make it to one million page views per month – and let’s hope the ads are there when you finally do. Because of the bleakness of those statistics, the greatest minds of the business blogosphere have declared that an income based on blog advertising revenue is a pipe dream. While I agree that relying on one source of revenue for any business venture is a mistake, many online marketers have neglected to explore how profitable advertising can be once the blogger decides to go to work for herself.

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I am not suggesting that you immediately ditch your advertising network and go it alone. But if you want to make blogging into a career, you must line up several income streams. And one of the easiest and best ways you can start doing this is to learn how to sell your own blog ads.

2 basics

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PREREQUISITES Before you start approaching advertisers, there are a few housekeeping matters to take care of first. How would you answer the following questions?

Do you have a decent blog design? Are your sidebars filled up with a bunch of worthless crap? How many readers do you have? How many pageviews per month do you have?

Design Your blog design does not have to be a masterpiece, but it should function correctly and load quickly. Make sure that things look tasteful and clean so that when potential advertisers check out your site they are not put off by bad aesthetics or technical problems. A word on internet memes and other superfluous sidebar buttons: if you want to sell the idea that advertising space on your blog is valuable, keeping extra buttons in the sidebar is shooting yourself in the foot. I have a strict policy: if it is not promoting me or an advertiser who has paid me for the privilege of appearing on my blog (or a charity I am

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When is the right time to start selling ads? As soon as you can convince an advertiser to buy one.

promoting), I do not put it in my sidebar. Adopting this policy for yourself might not win you many friends, but it might help you sell some ads. Decide what is most important to you and go with that.

Readership and Traffic When is the right time to start selling private blog ads? As soon as you can convince an advertiser to buy one. The question of when to start selling is difficult to answer with any kind of accuracy. My gut feeling is that it is never too soon, both because online influence is a slippery thing to measure and because even when you fail at selling an ad, you are gaining so much experience in the process that it is still worthwhile. Having said that, it is probably going to be difficult to sell advertising if you are still struggling to get 10 readers per day. A number thrown out at a blogging conference I attended last year was that you should have about 100 regular readers before trying to sell your own ads. This number is arbitrary, but it is a start. The unique thing about a blog audience is that conversion rates (i.e. the ability of an ad or a placement to result in some desired action – a sale or a click, for example) can exceed the rates of traditional advertising. If you have a larger

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Good click-through rates increase over the 100,000 pageview per month mark.

readership, it will always be easier to convert, since numbers are on your side. But this does not mean that you cannot sell with lower traffic. If an advertiser’s goal is strictly to get a good click-through rate from an ad placed in the sidebar, they will mostly be interested in approaching blogs that average over 100,000 pageviews per month. When I first started blogging, I purchased ads on several popular personal blogs in the parenting community, and my goal was to gain new readers, so I paid careful attention to click-through rates. During that short experiment, I found that blogs did not convert well in clicks beneath that range. However, smaller blogs can still offer various forms of value to advertisers well beneath that 100,000 pageview mark. Beneath that mark, there is still value in gaining exposure for brands, as well as strengthening SEO for smaller vendors (I discuss this at length below). And placements within the content column are valuable to vendors regardless of a blog’s monthly traffic. The trick is knowing what strengths to emphasize when you approach potential advertisers. If you think your traffic is not yet high enough to attract advertisers, I encourage you to first get all of your design and technical issues addressed as you are building traffic. Set

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about finding more readers by commenting on blogs in your niche. Run a featured blogger ad, guest post for a larger blog, become more active on Twitter, go to blogging conferences and network, increase your blogging frequency. Above all, continue to put out high quality content that makes people want read your blog. There’s plenty of other work to do while we are waiting for your ideal readers to show up.

CREATING A MEDIA KIT A media kit is not a requirement for driving ad sales. But you are likely to have an easier time convincing advertisers to sign on with you if you present yourself professionally. A good media kit helps to construct this image, and will do a lot of the selling for you. An advertiser should be able to look at your media kit to get a quick overview of your blog’s content and the kinds of readers it attracts. Including statistical information (how many pageviews per month, how many people, where the people are coming from, number of RSS subscribers, etc.) and the socioeconomic makeup of your audience also helps the advertiser to determine whether you are a good fit for their brand. You can gather information about your readership through running a poll or by installing code from Quantcast, an online company that compiles audience profile information based on IP addresses.

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You do not have to list all your ad rates in your media kit; however, the more information that you make easily available on the web, the more time you will save yourself down the line in back and forth emails with wavering prospects. This is why I recommend including prices, along with ad types and sizes offered in the media kit. For an example of a media kit, you can check out the one I created for ABDPBT here. CHOOSING AD TYPES AND SIZES When deciding what types of ads to offer, you should always attempt to balance the goals of your potential advertisers with the needs of your readership. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to what size ads you should offer. However, bear in mind that private ad sales are often made with smaller businesses (who often have matching smaller budgets). Even if you price larger ads at affordable rates, it’s possible that smaller businesses will just not have the artwork ready to fill the space. The ad sizes I initially offered fit my blog design because they were the same sizes I used with my former ad network. I quickly figured out that these sizes were not as effective with the kinds of advertisers I solicit for private ad sales. It does not seem to matter that these sizes are offered at reasonable rates, I think there is some kind of psychological block that

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Small vendors tend to like small ad spaces, even if the larger banner spaces are affordable.

small businesses have towards having a large ad like a rectangle or a skyscraper. They are just not used to being able to afford it, so they don't look to buy it. It might also be possible that they do not have the artwork to accommodate big ad sizes, so sticking small might be an easier strategy. As a result, I updated my media kit to emphasize the smaller sizes of ads I offer. The larger sizes are still available, but I’ve downplayed their importance. Another tip for choosing ad sizes and placement is to pay attention to the tendency that people have to be motivated by scarcity. If you decide how many slots are open to advertisers ahead of time, you can then send out pitches that emphasize “only one slot left” as a means of getting people to take action more quickly. During my second month of ad sales, I offered some discounted rates and emphasized that there were only a few spaces left in which to advertise. This resulted in quicker decisions by most of the ads that were actually purchased, and I received fewer of the “maybe at some point,” follow up emails. People felt more inclined to make a decision right away about whether or not to advertise.

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There is a school of thought that suggests that you should only offer ad sizes that are compliant with IAB standards on your blog. You can see what the standard sizes are here, but the most widely used choices include:

Source: Internet Advertising Bureau

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In theory, I agree that we should only offer IAB standard sizes for blog ads. However, in practice I see most bloggers adapting their ad sizes to the sizes of their sidebars and the overall aesthetics of their blog. As long as you can help the advertisers change the size of their ads with an image editing program, I do not think it is essential to be strict about which sizes you are willing to sell. If you are unsure about how well advertising is going to work on your blog, one way to experiment is with a page of special discounts or “marketplace” ads. These kinds of advertisements are appealing to the reader and helpful to get advertisers interested in the long run because they show that readers will click on ads and will generate leads from your site. Gabrielle Blair used this model for creating long-term goodwill with advertisers when she first considered advertising for her blog. Not only did she want to demonstrate to advertisers that her readers would be interested in their products, she was also very hesitant to do anything that might upset the community she had worked hard to establish on Design Mom.

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Always ask for just a little bit more than you expect to get. If it does not work, you can adjust later.

The main goal of a marketplace ad is to generate long-term goodwill with an advertiser, and you might receive slightly less compensation for running these types of ads on your blog. But make sure your pitch asks for a bit more than you expect to get. You can always counter with a lower offer if the vendor says that your ad prices are too steep. Below, I’ve compiled more tips for getting advertisers to take a swing at your pitch.

THE PITCH Your best asset in getting advertisers to sign up with you is a well-worded pitch. A pitch is just a basic form email that you will be using to send out to your potential advertisers. Your pitch should explain why you’re writing to the vendor and why they should be interested in your site, give them a general idea of what your site is about, tell them your traffic, and convince them of why they should sign up to advertise with you. Ideally, the pitch is as short as possible while still managing to accomplish all of those things, and it should always play up the best parts of your blog. For example, if you don’t have a lot of traffic, but you do have a lot of Twitter followers, you’ll emphasize that influence. Below is the basic format of the pitch letter I use for ABDPBT:

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I am contacting you today because __________ carries several brands that are favorites of the

ABDPBT.com reader, and I'd like to invite you to get in on the ground floor of ABDPBT’s private

advertising sales venture. Known as “The New Yorker of Mommyblogs,” ABDPBT has grown into

four separate sections (personal, financial, shopping, and tech) to reflect the parent as a whole person,

and is now offering affordable display banner advertising and innovative branding and partnership

opportunities such as sponsorship of RSS subscriptions, display banners within RSS subscription

feeds, product placement, sponsorship of social media tools, and text advertising to fit any budget.

For more information on specifications of advertising and prices, please see the ABDPBT Media Kit.

Discounts are offered for multi-month purchases.

ABDPBT.com receives over 100,000 monthly page views, and has over 1,000 RSS subscribers.

Quantcast.com has profiled the average ABDPBT reader as being highly-educated, affluent, and

geographically concentrated around large metropolitan areas. My readers are interested in new

products that make their lives easier, innovative designs, and products that incorporate a pleasing

design aesthetic into everyday life; they do not mind paying more for a product, provided they are

convinced it will deliver superior quality.

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The more specifically you customize your pitch, the more likely it will turn into an ad sale.

Interested? Great! Please notify me by email directed to advertising@abdpbt.com, and I will reserve

your spot. Thank you for your interest in ABDPBT.com

I use this basic format for all of the pitches I send to advertisers, but tweak it for the different companies so that they know I’ve actually taken a look at their products and chose them for a reason. For example, in the pitch I sent to Shirts That Go, a small company that makes kids t-shirts with trains, planes, and other transportation vehicles printed on them, I specifically mentioned how much my son loves trains and how I thought he would love their products. The more specific customization of your pitch that you do for each advertiser, the more likely you are to actually create a sale.

PRICING One question I always get from bloggers sticking their toes into the private ad sales arena is how much to charge. This is a difficult question to answer because private blog sales are kind of like the Wild Wild West at present. A logical way of doing it, assuming you are currently running CPM ads, would be to look at how much you are getting for that space and then break it up into a per month basis. This is what I did with my own site when I was first guestimating how to price out ads for ABDPBT. For example, I was running a

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Price depends as much on who is buying as how much they are buying: it can reveal why they are buying.

160 x 600 skyscraper ad on most of my interior pages that was yielding about $400 for 100,000 impressions in a month. So given that, I figured that this would be a good price for a month, $400 for a 160 x 600 skyscraper. If I wanted to figure out how to price out 125 x125 buttons, I figured that a skyscraper is about 4 125 buttons (in terms of space), so I figured about $100 each, right? Well, yes and no. This works in terms of rough numbers. But the market does not work that way. You have to take into consideration what other people in your niche are doing. As more and more people delve into the private advertising arena, this will bring some continuity and some additional problems. You also have to take into consideration what the person who is buying the ad is using you for. If it is a small Etsy shop owner, they are using you for publicity and the only thing you have to take into consideration is how much are they going to be able to afford to spend, and how much are they looking to get back in terms of return sales. That has to be your guiding principle in how much you ask them. The direct contrast to the small Etsy client is the larger company with the keyword-bearing links. These are the ones that you want to jack up the prices for, because what they are

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The big companies using you for keyword ranks should pay more than the Etsy shop owner.

using you for is your page rank. They don’t really care where on the page you put their ad, they are just hoping to leech off some of your good page rank so that their own page can get a better rank in Google, and what they are buying is expensive – do not be afraid to charge them a lot for it. But be careful: it’s one thing to sell an ad or a text ad, but selling a link is a little trickier, because if it’s not done in a particular way it can land you in trouble with Google. Most importantly, if you are ever unsure about why a company is interested in your blog, or get a bad feeling from them, just say no. There are always other advertisers out there. Never be afraid to walk away from a deal. Regardless of what anyone has told you, the only way to know how much you can charge for ads on your blog is to experiment. When I spoke to Gabrielle Blair about this, she told me that she would gauge how well she was priced based on responses to her email inquiries: if she wasn't getting much response, then she knew her prices were too high. This is in keeping with my own experience as well. I am much newer to the advertising sales game than Gabrielle, and I have about one third of her traffic, so I expect much less of a response, but if responses to my email inquiries start to drop below 2%, then I know I need to drop prices. Gabrielle is at a point now, several years later, where she has repeat

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Nobody knows how much to charge for ads on your blog except you and the market.

customers, and is able to keep her prices pretty constant, and her ads are well-priced for the small vendors that make up her advertiser base. Because of my personal finance section, I get a lot of inquiries from keyword-interested clients, and as I noted above I have a different set of criteria for dealing with them than I do with other advertisers: they tend to want long-term contracts and are not afraid to pay higher prices for premium placements. This is not going to be true of every blog, but it underscores my point: you are the expert on your blog, and you have to experiment to figure out the pricing.

Don't Be Afraid To Change Prices To Get Things Moving. I sold a few ads at the original prices as posted in my media kit. After about a month, I had the following statistics to show for my efforts in directly soliciting advertisers:

6.4% responded in some way to my solicitation; 3.2% expressed interest in buying an ad, either now or in the future; and 1.3% actually purchased ads.

Given that this was my first month selling private ads, and based upon what I understand about the return rates of advertising sales, these rates are not as discouraging as they may appear. On average, you have to send out a lot of emails to get an ad sold. But the flip

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side is that the longer you are blogging, the more often people will approach you and want to buy an ad without you having to do any footwork at all. After my first month, I adjusted my rates slightly and ran a “sale” to encourage ad sales. Some people are stubborn about their advertising rates and keep them the same regardless of market conditions. I am not one of those people. I believe in adjusting to the market, just as if you are trying to sell a house. This does not mean that you need to sell yourself short or accept a lowball offer from some advertiser who is just being cheap. But you do need to be realistic about the value of your sidebar. Your sidebar is worth what people will pay to get onto it – there are things you can do to increase its value, but just asserting that it is worth X dollars is not going to work. Making less money than you hypothetically would have made in a perfect economy is way better than making no money at all. Also see: get over yourself. When there is a run on your sidebar space, you can always raise prices again.

FINDING POTENTIAL ADVERTISERS Every audience is different. Similarly, every advertiser has different needs and expectations from the advertising space they are looking to buy. When attempting to compile a list of potential advertising leads, you need to pay strict attention to who your

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readers are and what kinds of products appeal to them. In some cases, the tastes of the blogger are in line with the tastes of the readership, but this is not always the case. Similarly, though it is usually a good idea to stick to advertisers that fit with a particular niche – for example, baby bottles for a parenting blog – there are situations where this is not a good idea. The most obvious would be putting an ad for baby bottles on a blog that talks about breastfeeding exclusively. You are the only one who can make these kinds of decisions, so keep that goal at the forefront of your mind while compiling your list. Below are some of the places I’ve found potential advertisers.

PR Pitches If you’ve been blogging for any length of time, there’s a good chance that you’ve started to receive a good amount of email from public relations firms. You might have read many posts complaining about how annoying these pitches are and how ill-suited they are to individual blogs. Well, I never complain about pitches myself because they are an opportunity for me to find connections that might be of use to me later. This is something I learned from Gabrielle Blair of Design Mom, who told me that she saves the pitches she receives and divides them up into two different categories:

Pitches From Small Businesses Pitches From Large PR Groups

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Save emails from small businesses and send them your pitch letter later to try to sell them an ad.

A pitch from a small business that fits your readership should go into a vendor list that contains the email addresses and other information for potential advertisers who will receive your pitch email. Gabrielle told me that she would send these kinds of emails out “regularly, inviting vendors to advertise on Design Mom," as well as notifying them of special deals, like lower prices for buying multiple months at once, or seasonal promotions, et cetera. While pitches from large PR companies are not usually suitable for advertising leads (if a company is big enough to be using a PR company, they are probably going to buy big chunks of ads through a network), they ARE suitable when you’re trying to find sponsors for parties, conferences, or other events. Most PR and marketing groups represent a ton of different clients, and there's bound to be one that is right for your site at some point, even if the one they are pitching, that day, is not. Gabrielle says that a "PR list is a great way to reach out and let lots of different of different brands know about sponsorship opportunities."

YOUR OWN READERS When Jordan Ferney of Oh Happy Day decided to sell her own ads, she put up a post asking for advertisers. Not only does a post like this give your readership a heads up that

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you're going to be featuring ads (if you don't do this already), it also gives the small businesspeople in your audience a chance to get in touch with you about possible sponsorship deals. You never know how many potential advertisers there may already be in your regular audience, who might already be looking for a chance to reach your audience.

Magazines (Advertisements) Many magazines have smaller advertising sections towards the end that feature ads from smaller vendors. A good way to find some new advertisers is to troll magazines that concern your niche or similar issues, and look for advertisers that have spent money on magazine ads. This suggests that they’re in the practice of paying for advertising, and might be more willing to pay you for placement than other companies who are looking to get a free mention in your blog.

Magazines (Content) Traditional magazines often feature various online vendors for products mentioned in their editorial content. Whenever I’m flipping through a magazine, I’ll jot down the names and vendors of products that seem like they are a good fit for ABDPBT. If the company

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has a PR company listed on its website, then I will usually figure this means the company is too big to solicit for an ad, and then I will add them to my potential PR Contact list, or just move on to the next listing.

Other Blogs (Advertisers) One way to find companies that are not afraid to use blog advertising is to troll other blogs and see who they have advertising for them. Any blogs that sell advertising on their own potentially carry with them a list of vendors you can approach about blog advertising. Since they are all prospects who are currently featuring ads, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in buying an ad right away. However, you might catch them a few months after their ad stops running, when they’re starting to feel the withdrawal from having an ad running on a blog. That’s the time to strike.

Other Blogs (Content) I get a lot of advertising leads in the course of my regular blog reading. Whenever there is a product or a brand mentioned that sounds like a good fit for ABDPBT, I will first determine if it is likely to be a smaller vendor, and if it is, I will look up their information

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and add it to the list. Blogs that are in your niche and particularly concerned with products from Etsy or handmade items are good prospects for these kinds of leads.

Conferences (Contacts & Sponsors), Other Small Businesses In Your Area Whenever I go to blogging conferences, I am on the lookout for small business owners. Sometimes I will meet them at parties, and sometimes they will have served as a partial sponsor for an event or other opportunity. Small businesses tend to promote each other. Get in the habit of looking for cards at the check out areas of small businesses in your area. Baby stores, indoor play gyms, local restaurants that are known for being kid-friendly and that are locally owned – you will notice that many of these places have an area designated toward the front for other smaller, locally owned businesses that are trying to promote. If they have a web presence, and particularly if they have a product to sell, these are good prospects to pitch for ad placement on your site.

Related Searches On Google Whenever I find an advertiser that works well on ABDPBT, I will try to find other businesses like it to approach as potential advertisers by running a related search on Google. All you need to do is enter “related:” before the name of the business you are

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looking for in Google, and this will spit out the names of several other websites that are “related” to that term.

Often times these include other small businesses or shops that carry similar items.

RECORDKEEPING There are a lot of moving pieces in a private blog ad sales outfit. I use a Google documents spreadsheet to keep track of all of my advertisers’ contact information, including: contact names, email addresses, and phone numbers; start and end dates for

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campaigns; invoice and billing status; and how I initially came into contact with the vendor. Another spreadsheet contains potential advertiser leads, and indicates whether I’ve contacted somebody, if they have responded (and how), and whether or not they bought an ad. Where an advertiser has declined to buy an ad but made reference to a possible interest in the future, I will make a note of this so that I know to follow up with them later. It is essential that you keep good records so that you are not soliciting the same company more than once unless they have indicated that they would like to hear from you again. Remember that each email you send out into the ether contains your brand name on it, and you do not want it to be associated with spam. I use PayPal because it is all web-based and easy to use. PayPal charges fees, but I view these as premiums I pay in return for them doing some of my recordkeeping. I have a set of invoice templates set up with PayPal for all of the various ad sizes and lengths of campaigns I offer, and they also keep records of email addresses and transaction amounts. Whenever somebody wants to buy an ad, it takes just a few seconds to invoice them through PayPal, and payments are usually just as quick.

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Occasionally a vendor will want to pay with a check. These are usually larger companies who need to go through some kind of accounting department in order to pay you. I usually agree to accept checks from larger companies as long as it is for at least three months’ worth of advertising space, and provided that the company is willing to wait until the check clears for the ad to start running. Never start running an ad for which you have not been paid or for which you have merely a promise of money. If you are up front about this policy, you can save yourself some headaches down the line.

3 negotiation tactics

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CLOSING THE DEAL Let’s say that you’ve got an advertiser who seems interested in buying an ad, but they are not totally convinced. They’ve responded to your pitch, or maybe they are the ones who approached you in the first place, but now they’re wavering. They’re not sure. Maybe they think your prices are too high, or they’re not totally sold on blog advertising. How do you go about sealing the deal with them? First, accept that you won’t win all of them. Try not to get too upset about it. It’s a numbers game and there are tons of small businesses out there. You will find advertisers so try not to get overly attached to any one product, no matter how fantastically well-suited to your blog it may seem. After you have become sufficiently detached, decide what approach you are going to take to convincing the advertiser to sign up by determining the source of their reticence. Before responding to their email, ask yourself if the source of their hesitancy is:

financial (the ad is too expensive)? political/social (they aren’t sure about aligning themselves with your brand)?

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There are many ways to make an advertiser buy an ad even if they are not sure it is “worth” what you are asking.

personal (have you not sold them enough on “you”)? The way to convince somebody to buy an ad with you is to subtly address their biggest concern without drawing attention to the fact that this is what you are doing. The second two sources of hesitancy are best addressed through references to advertisers who have been happy with your work before, or a clear discussion of what the advertiser can hope to gain from partnering with you. Do not push too hard, though – if the advertiser has political or personal objections to buying an ad from you, there may not be much you can do to change their mind. In those cases, it might be best just to reiterate how much you would like to partner with them, and leave the decision up to them. Financial concerns are a different matter. There are lots of ways to make an advertiser buy an ad even if they’re not sure it’s “worth” what you are asking. Below I have listed some of my strategies for addressing the concerns of your advertisers that stem from financial motivations. ADDRESSING FINANCIAL OBJECTIONS One of my first advertisers was a small vendor who was hoping to market his brand to bloggers in the parenting niche. Since his site was brand new, one of his chief concerns

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To address financial objections, you must first remove the option of the unpaid ad from the mind of the advertiser.

was increasing the profile of his site in the Google index. Before he dealt with me, this vendor had already had experience with running several giveaway promotions on other blogs for no compensation other than giving bloggers a few of his products in exchange. When he read my pitch, the vendor was impressed by my media kit and my site, and was interested in being featured on ABDPBT. However, he was hesitant to spend money on an ad, because he had never been required to do so before. His chief reticence in buying the ad was f inancial .

Remove The Option Of The Unpaid Ad The way that I sold this vendor on the ad was to explain that my audience does not respond to giveaways. Since this was the method he had always used with bloggers in the past, it became clear to him that, in order to be mentioned on my blog, he would have to buy an ad. It so happens that this is true – I experimented with giveaways in the early days of my blog, they were not particularly successful, and I haven’t done them since. But the other effect that using this statement had was to place my audience in a different realm from other blogs that this vendor had reached before – mine was an audience that does not have time for giveaways. They do not mind spending money, but if you want to reach them, you have to be willing to try something new.

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This technique might not work for your blog, but there might be another way of removing the option of the unpaid ad from the mind of the vendor. Maybe you don’t run giveaways because the content of your blog does not match the kind of giveaway the vendor is suggesting? Maybe you do not want to run a giveaway because you do not have time to do it? Maybe you have had a bad experience with giveaways in the past and as a result you just don’t do them anymore, and you’re terribly sorry, but the only way to get mentioned on your blog, you see, is to buy an ad.

The Power Of The Editorial Another effective sales technique that you can use (but that you should not advertise) is the editorial placement in the content column along with the purchase of multiple months of advertisements for sponsors that are very well suited to your audience. How it works is that you offer the vendor an ad and say that, if they agree to sign up for three or more months at a time, you will feature an editorial post introducing them to your readership as a sponsor of the site. This is a great thing to pull out of your back pocket in the middle of a negotiation because the content column is far more valuable than the sidebar and advertisers know this.

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The brand with the most expensive ad in a magazine is always also featured in editorial. This is how stuff gets done.

Always remember that it is in your best interest that your advertisers end up feeling satisfied with their advertising experience. As such, you should do everything possible to seek out businesses that you think your readers will like and want to buy from. Assuming you have done this, it should not be so difficult to go look at your sponsor's website and find cool products to feature in an editorial post on your site. This method is not effective for all situations. I would not recommend it, for example, if an insurance company decides to buy a sidebar ad and you run a parenting site. But if your objection to this method of selling stems from the blurring of the lines between editorial and advertising, I invite you to open up your favorite magazine and note that, more often than not, the brand with the biggest, most expensive advertisement will also be featured in an editorial. This is the way stuff gets done. Advertisers expect it. If you look around at other blogs that sell private advertising, you will notice that it happens regularly, even on sites that claim to have strict separations between editorial and advertising.

SEO: The best friend of the Small Publisher? An extremely effective tactic for convincing a small vendor to buy an ad with you is the sharing of your Google Page Rank and site authority through linking. One of the ways that Google’s algorithims work is to assess the value of a site based on how many links point to

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it that are from sites with good Google Page Ranks (e.g. 5 and above is great, 4 is good, 3 is still good but not as impressive, etc.) For a startup e-commerce site, increasing Google Page Rank is an essential goal. Some of the smarter business owners will seek to piggy back off your Page Rank through links from your site. When an advertisement is hard coded in your site (not through code or javascript provided by a network), Page Rank can transfer. This is a huge consideration for the small online business owner looking to buy advertising. Similarly, small businesses might seek to increase their rank in association with certain keywords through advertising on your site. How this works is complicated, and though you do not need to completely understand it, you should know that vendors might seek to use your Page Rank/keyword authority in this way. Say you are trying to sell an ad to a vendor whose online boutique sells, among other things, Splendid Littles, a designer brand of kids’ clothing. Often, when a consumer goes on the internet to buy a pair of Splendid Littles sweats for a baby gift, they will enter “Splendid Littles” into Google. If you are an online boutique who wants to make sure you’re among the first sites to come up in a search like that, you want to make sure there

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are lots of sites out there linking to you with Splendid Littles in the url. One way to do this is to buy ads that feature “Splendid Littles” in the URL, e.g.

http://onlinebabyboutique.com/splendidlittles.html This will increase the site’s profile in Google for that particular term, and potentially lead to several more sales down the line. A typical private ad will also transfer with it some of your Google Page Rank unless you add the “nofollow” tag to its html. This means, basically, that you are lending some of your site’s credibility to the advertiser site through its association with you. These are things that are very appealing to smaller vendors with their own URLs. (It will not work, however, for somebody who is selling things on a larger hosted site like Etsy or Big Cartel, because those sites do not have keywords associated with every little outlet that they feature.) And again, it only works when you hard code your ads into your site (either in the source files or via a text widget), not when you use the kind of script that ad networks use. If you are going to do this, you should be charging for it because it is a big selling point -- it is expensive, and it is risky. Above all, do not allow somebody to use you in this way without making them pay for it – charge more for this kind of a link or add a

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“nofollow” tag to cover your ass. As always, if you don’t feel good about a deal, then just walk away. A word of warning regarding using SEO for sales: there is a reason that you don’t see this mentioned a whole bunch on the web – Google does not want you to sell links like this because it can circumvent their AdSense program. If a site ranks high in an organic search for a keyword, then that means the site will not need to purchase the pay per click AdWord advertising that is Google’s bread and butter. As you might imagine, this makes Google mad. If you are coding your ads this way, know that there is some risk of getting into trouble with Google. Although I have located countless smaller publishers who appear to be selling advertisements that work this way, it is not clear how many of them actually understand what it is they are doing or that doing this could possibly land them in trouble with Google. This practice is still very much a grey area in monetizing on the internet, but I would caution you that advertising SEO benefits like Page Rank transfer publicly is not a good idea.

4 other options & conclusion

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As the blogosphere continues to grow, the opportunities for monetization continue to expand along with it. Brands that have been working within social media for a while are beginning to figure out that it benefits them as much as it does us to cut out ad networks and other middlemen when looking to engage directly with bloggers. The more you can position yourself to act directly as your own agent with brand partnerships, the more profit there is potentially for you. As your profile builds in the community, you can expect more and more of these kinds of opportunities to present themselves, but that does not mean that you have to wait for the big brands to come to you: there are plenty of opportunities for partnerships that you can initiate on your own even when you are in your early months of blogging. PRODUCT PLACEMENT One method of blog monetization that I anticipate making its way into the blogosphere is the kind of product placement deals that exist (often on the down low) between everyday brands like Starbucks and celebrities who are routinely photographed and appear in magazines in the course of their regular lives. These kinds of deals are quietly arranged and appear as though the celebrities are just terribly fond of their coffee/soda/jean store,

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but the truth is that they have a relationship with the brand and are compensated for being photographed with products. If bloggers can work out deals like this with brands with the same level of discretion, brokering the deals on their own without the bother and expense of using an ad network, it is possible it could be a lucrative venture that would circumvent FTC regulations, whether the FTC liked it or not (as the celebrities currently do). Though bloggers are not going to be garnering the kind of compensation that a celebrity might, there are many bloggers with audiences large enough to warrant this kind of brand engagement, and as more companies become social media savvy, I don’t think this kind of thing will be far behind. How can you anticipate these kinds of deals now and cash in on them? Well, product placements are a tougher sell at present because examples of these kinds of deals are few and far between, but there are a few examples of product placement deals in the blogosphere already from which you can draw guidance. I wrote about Design Mom’s product placement deal with Mayflower for my Personal Finance blog on ABDPBT, and more recently, I did my own product placement deal with The Treehouse Social Club in Los Angeles for my son’s third birthday party.

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Because of FTC restrictions, you cannot get away with these kinds of placements as gracefully as a photograph with a branded coffee cup, but there are less awkward means of providing disclosure than a paragraph that says “This is a sponsored post.” For example, I created a graphic for my son’s party that matched the décor of the party and the logo from the sponsor and put “Brought to you by The Treehouse Social Club.” This way, there is no question that the party is sponsored, but there is something less jarring about the disclosure being delivered via graphic than having to read it within the actual printed text of the post. Product placements are an exciting development and potentially very profitable. I think a well trafficked blog could get several thousand dollars for a good placement deal that included a few posts and a few tweets. Though I don’t know the exact numbers involved in Gabrielle Blair’s Mayflower deal, I do know that she got a free cross country move for a family of (then) five, with a piano, in exchange for three posts and a few tweets. I am estimating that is a move that would have cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, and the sponsor was very happy with the work. It was a genuine endorsement that couldn’t have happened any other way, and ended up with all kinds of endorsements from Gabrielle’s readers in the comments to the posts.

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Companies that understand the power of content marketing will pay a lot to get into the content column. You need to remember to price out your content column higher than your sidebar because of this. As you experiment with product placement, remember that there’s not much of a map for this stuff yet, and that every deal you make is helping to create it. To sell a product placement, you will probably have to pitch many companies, and you will really have to sell them on the concept of the blog and the power of social media. Don’t even try it without your media kit ready to go. You need to tell them about SEO and why your blog will help them with it. You need to really sell the concept of the social media marketing to them.

THE END: BUT NOT REALLY As I write this, the opportunities for monetizing blogs are constantly changing. Brands are becoming increasingly open every day to the possibilities presented by social media, and corporations are adding new positions to deal with social media innovation as we speak. In order to stay on top of how you can best profit from your blog, you need to stay on top of the conversation.

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If you have read ebooks like this before you are probably expecting that I am going to try to sell you something now. Like, the real secret to how you can sell blog ads is contained in the full report, which is behind a pay wall, and for $149, you can have access to that report. Actually, no. This is the whole secret. I already told you pretty much everything I know. Except this: I’m learning more every day, and so are all the awesome people who share all of their real, tried-and-true experiences with me everyday at ABDPBT Personal Finance. So if you want to keep up with everything, and share what you know, you’ve got to come by and say hello. We cannot wait to see you there. This ebook took me a lot longer to complete than I had anticipated, but I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, I have only one simple request:

PLEASE SPREAD NEWS OF IT FAR AND WIDE . . . Links are really important. If this has been helpful, and you think it deserves your endorsement, please consider linking to it on your website (use

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http://www.abdpbt.com/personalfinance/2010/08/23/abdpbt-free-ebook/) or send it on to anybody you think might benefit from reading it.