Basics of selling ad space on your site - Part 1

Here are a few basic tips if you're trying to increase ad sales on your site, or if you're thinking about starting for the first time.

1. Know your audience
Do surveys asking people about themselves, and work out your site's demographics. If your site has some form of membership, or accepts donations, you should absolutely have information about those people. They're your most devoted visitors -- know who they are and what they're interested in.

2. Know your audience's value
If your site serves a niche, know how much of a niche it is. And if your site isn't very popular, make sure that there's something about your audience that makes them different from the audiences of other, more popular websites. Know your audience's value, and know exactly why I should buy on your website instead of someone else's.

3. Know your ad space's value
Once you've determined the relative scarcity of your audience, know how much to charge for your ad space. If only a small number of people go to your site (low reach) and you're charging a lot of money, your site had better be the only website on the internet they visit. Because, remember, chances are I can find your audience elsewhere. So price accordingly. Have a niche, and charge an appropriate amount based on the scarcity of your audience, and the reach to that audience that your site has.

4. Charge by the CPM
This is harder than charging by the week/month, but it gives some guarantee to your advertiser that people will actually see their ads. You might not be able to do this at first because it does take some management and administration, but it's something you should be working toward.

5. Be picky with your advertisers
If you become known for having pointless, irrelevant ads on your site, that space becomes less valuable to other, more appropriate advertisers because they'll know that your audience expects ads in those spaces to be irrelevant -- so why would they ever look at them? The ads on Penny-Arcade are an excellent example of being picky with your advertisers. Those ads are incredibly relevant to their enormous audience.

6. Use standard ad sizes
I know, I know, I've complained about standard ad units plenty, but this advice is for people looking for advertisers, not advertisers looking for brand new opportunities. Assume the advertisers you want already have ad units created and don't want to spend money making new ones just to fit into the ad space on your site. Be able to take ads they've used elsewhere and use them on your site.

More to come!!

I can find your audience elsewhere

The internet is not TV, or radio, or print. Lots of people may only watch one or two shows. Lots of people may only listen to one radio station, or only read one newspaper.

Nobody only goes to one website. Your site is not irreplaceable.

I can always find your audience elsewhere.

If you really, really value your website, and see it as a necessary site on my media buy, then you should be trying your hardest to convince me of that. If you see it as so important, so necessary, so irreplaceable that you won't bargain, won't facilitate, won't help, then you're off. I'll find your users somewhere else.

I always can.

Sell your site, not your space

If you're trying to get advertisers to buy on your site, remember that it's not about the space you have, it's about your audience. You're not selling blocks of space, you're selling what your site has to offer.

You're selling access to your audience.

So if you want advertisers, you need to know who your audience is. What they're doing online and otherwise. I don't care how much traffic you get, I want to know who those people are. Remember, if it were about traffic I could just buy ads on Hotmail and be done with it.

But it's not and can't be about traffic, and it's usually not about reach. It's about hitting a demographic. It's about finding the people most likely to be interested in the product I'm trying to sell them. And I need to know if your audience is in that demo. If you don't know that, then I'm not interested.

And that means that you also need to find the people most likely to be interested in buying your product. You need to be reaching out to advertisers with the information you have, and you need to find compelling reasons for them to buy on your site.

Too many publishers think that just because their site is popular, or has a niche target, that advertisers will suddenly be interested in buying.

I can find your site's audience somewhere else.

Nobody only reads one site on the internet. I can always nab them when they're checking their webmail. Come find me and tell me why it would be better for me to advertise to them when they're on your site, and then I'm interested.

Glossary: Reach

Reach: The percentage of your target demo that visit the website you’re advertising on.

If you’re looking to hit as many people in your demo as possible by buying on as few sites as possible, reach is your metric of choice. If your target is pretty broad, you’re going to be looking at buying on the big sites like Yahoo! or even Facebook.

But reach ain't everything.

If you have a very narrow target, you can still hit them usually by going on the big sites (my Yahoo! reps tell me that when you combine all their properties together they approach 100% reach), but it’ll cost you a decent chunk of change. Why not find a bunch of smaller sites that your demo visit, and buy on them for cheaper? That’s where % Comp UV comes in.