Chapter 7 - Finding advertising

So now you have your site and want to make some money with it. Making money after all, is the goal of most business owners.

So what can you do and where can you go to find ways to make money with your site? There are literally thousands of ways to make money with a site. For this book I will not list where you can get advertising, but what types of advertising you can use on your directory.

The first method, and the hardest, is to find your own advertising. This is the hardest method because it involves contacting companies through appropriate channels and offering your services to them.

You need to offer them a product (advertising) and an incentive (your volume and type of traffic). In order to be successful at finding your own advertising you need to keep on top of your statistics and inform potential buyers of changes. You need to give the potential buyer every bit of information you can about what you are selling (banner ads, buttons, inline, pop-up, pop-under, on-exit, on-click, hover, impressions, cost per click[CPC], cost per thousands impressions[CPM], ad locations, rotations, geography and anything else you can think of). This necessitates the business owner to become an ad agency and to product your own ad rate sheet.

So you ask, why not just send out a few hundred emails and at least a few of them will respond? Because that's called spam and is known as UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email). We deal with spam everyday, and we all hate it. Why would you want to contribute to the issue? Just because you think it's for a legitimate purpose doesn't make it right. This brings up the "appropriate channels" comment from earlier. You need to call companies and speak to someone live, or you need to send them a snail mail letter on your letterhead and detail what you are offering, what the price is, why they should advertise with you, and what you can do for them.

Yes cold calling still goes on today, and it's a practice that takes skill to do well. You can't be pushy, but you can't be wimpy either. And it takes someone special to alter their own selling habits to match those of the buyers habits. Once you have the contact made and have permission then it is acceptable to communicate via email.

However difficult finding your own advertising is, it is probably one of the most profitable. You set the ad rates, you set the contracts and payment schedules.

The next method of advertising would be direct selling. If you have a directory about fishing then you could sell things related to fishing. These could be lures, ebooks, DVD's, maps or almost anything else. Direct selling is a great way to make money, but not everyone wants to maintain an inventory and deal with payments, shipping, customer service and refunds.

The good news is that leads us to the next method of advertising which is referral or affiliate links. A referral or affiliate link is a link that takes the user to another site. When the user joins that site, or buys something from them you would typically gain a percentage of that sale. Of course the best programs offer recurring income, but single payments are good too.

You can add referral/affiliate links as banners, buttons or as listings themselves. Adding them as a listing is the most effective method. If you have 10 categories and have a referral/affiliate link as the top link in each category then you will start to produce some income once you start getting traffic.

You do need to be careful of some companies offerings, not because they are not legitimate, but because their clickthrough and payout rates are extremely low. Remember from earlier when I said that banner clickthrough rates are typically 0.18%? I've seen much much worse rates with some companies with payouts that are around 2% and the average product is priced at $8. Yes that means earning $0.16 on a single sale. You have to monitor your affiliate/referral programs to ensure that you are getting the best payouts you can and receiving the highest clickthrough rates that you can.

Of course since you're running a directory you can charge a fee to list users higher up in the category they are listed in. You can also charge fees for adding paid listing only features such as logo's, a phone/email directory, a map of their location, pictures, product details or even just a longer company description.

We can never forget the addition of banners provided by companies like Google, AdBrite, Yahoo and the thousands of other companies. These are all great forms of advertising but typically pay very low rates per click. On a site with a lot of traffic however, some decent money can be earned by this type of advertising. One of the best things about adding banners is that most of the ad companies will tailor ads for specific keywords. So if you have a fishing site, you could see an ad about boat motors when you're viewing the boat motors category, or clothing ads when viewing the clothing category. This can help to increase the clickthrough rate.

Next we have self promotion. This really doesn't make you any money directly, but it gives you targeted traffic to a different site of your own. On search engines such as Yahoo, Google and others, users typically click on the first three to five listings. If you list your site as one of the top three or five listings in a category then you are more likely to send visitors off to another one of your own sites.

This benefits you by getting more traffic to your own sites so users can click on more of your ads or to purchase any goods or products that you list for sale.

There really is almost no end to the types of adverting you can have on your site. Just remember that just because three ads on your site works well, that doesn't mean thirty ads will work ten times better. There comes a point when your directory begins to look spammy. An even balance of advertising will ensure your visitors enjoy their experience while earning you income.

Copyright 2008 Bruce Peresky - All Rights Reserved - No duplication permitted without written permission from the author