Selling your ad space

A couple of months ago I’ve decided to start selling a part of my advertising space directly. My initial price was pretty low, but still higher than what I would normally get with Adsense for that particular ad block. Overall it was a good choice. Of course there are some disadvantages: you have to talk with each customer and keep track of their ads and payments. All the things that would be automatically dealt with by a 3rd party (such as Adsense/Adwords) you have to do yourself. Note that you need a decent amount of traffic and Page Rank in order to convince other people to buy something on your website.

The first problem you will face is finding potential advertisers. Depending on your niche you may post your offer on a large forum such as Digital Point, or you may display a message directly on your website. So if you have a website with Barbie games it probably isn’t a good idea to tell your 10 year old visitors that you are selling ad space. If you are a bit more desperate, sending emails/messages to people who might be interested is another solution.

One thing I learned the hard way is the importance of discounts. My initial thought was that I was asking for a very low price and that would be enough. It also meant that the payments were easy to manage (4 months was 4*price/month). Unfortunately this isn’t the case. Most advertisers asked for a discount when paying in advance. I ended up reducing the already low fee just to keep their business.