Believe it or not, it is possible to sell advertising on a blog or website with limited traffic and there are many good reasons why you'd want to do this.
While advertisers are most certainly drawn to big traffic numbers, they desire something else even more: high conversion rates.
There are plenty of websites that have limited traffic but which sell a huge amount of advertising. How do these websites succeed? Simple . . . they deliver the right type of customer to the right type of advertiser.
Getting Started
Before you do anything else, be sure to research your website data so that you can pitch it effectively to potential advertisers.
Using an analytics tool, such as Google Analytics or Clicky, the things you should be finding out are:
- What are your most popular pages?
- What pages do people stay on the longest?
- What keywords do people use to find your website?
Using these statistics, you should be able to get a picture of what interests your visitors and following on from that find the advertisers who would pay to target people with these interests.
Quiz Your Visitors
To get an even more in-depth idea of your visitors’ interests, why not use a poll or survey, which will help greatly towards assessing where your advertising focus should be.
To get the best results, keep things short and sweet, and offer an incentive for replying, such as a free eBook.
Polling services include SurveyGizmo, PollDaddy and Twtpoll (for Twitter).
Monitor Your Mentions
A great way to find out what interests your audience is to track what they say about you (and in what context) in forums or on the likes of Twitter. Use Google Alerts to get emails everytime you, your site or a keyword is mentioned online, or use Twitter's search to track mentions in tweets. It's also useful to track in Twitter which of your posts gets a lot of retweets.
Finding Your Advertisers
Once you have a good understanding of your website visitors, you need to get out there and find the right advertisers.
While i've told you that advertisers will deal with low traffic sites, you do need to have some visitors (500-1000 daily visitors as a minimum). The more highly targeted your audience is though, the more play you have with regard to your numbers.
In terms of likely advertising sources, Google is very useful. Look for websites that currently link to yours which offer a product or service you could advertise. Additionally, if you run Google AdWords, make note of the advertisements that show. Google has already determined that they are a good match for your site. Approach the advertiser directly with your own proposal.
Next, look at people who comment on your posts. Again, are they a potential advertiser?
Finally, research websites with similar content and find out who is advertising on those websites, as they would probably be interested in advertising on your website too.
Approaching Potential Advertisers
Once you know your website visitors inside out, it's worth putting together an advertising package to present to your potential advertisers.
Here are a few things you may want to include:
- List the interests of your website’s visitors, so advertisers know they are a good fit with what they are promoting
- Outline your website unique visitors, page views, average time on site and bounce rate. Advertisers will want to see how your site has performed over a number of months. Additionally, the longer your traffic stays on your site, the higher the chance that ads will be seen and clicked on.
When contacting potential advertisers, keep your email personal and look like you've done your homework on them. This will increase your chances of getting a positive response.
Keeping Your Advertisers Happy
Once you've attracted your first advertisers, you need to focus on keeping them happy, to ensure a continued long-term relationship.
Make sure you deliver information on how ads are performing. Do this by using an ad management service, which will have built-in reporting that sends advertisers updates on how their ads are doing.
Also offer exclusive deals to your existing advertisers, such as reduced rates on extending the length of their advertising period and special rates for advertising in your newsletter.
Remember to get feedback. Your advertisers will appreciate that you care, and you will hopefully receive useful information that you can use to improve your advertising strategy.
Read the second and last part of this article here.
