1. Try not to choke your blog with affiliates, contextual ads and banners. Spring clean all those elements that don’t see the light of day or are rarely used. A lean, clean blog is an attractive blog to advertisers.
2. Place a prominent “advertise with us” link on your blog. I like to then offer a fairly comprehensive form asking for the advertiser’s requirements.
3. If you have no example banners on your blog, keep some samples to show your advertiser what can be achieved.
4. Make your site stats readily available.
5. Highlight special offer ad placements.
6. Know your audience demographic and make appropriate data readily available.
7. Give some background about you and your blog.
8. Make sure your spelling and grammar are up to scratch. I know someone who was refused a lucrative deal on the basis that his blog was riddled with poor grammar.
9. Ensure that your blogs functionality is up to scratch. Are there links that don’t work, or text over spilling the site boundaries.
10. Keep your blog focused. Being all things to all men may just preclude you from the more lucrative ad deals.
There are some key principles to follow if you want to attract direct advertisers.
Here are my key suggestions:
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A few bloggers have noted some experimental AdSense units appearing.
This one was recently mentioned on Problogger.
There’s nothing really significant about this other than to say that they look like a cross between a link unit and a normal ad unit. My gut feeling is that this development isn’t going to rock contextual advertising, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
The Inside AdSense case Study this week is on Fixya.com a consumer electronics portal. The key theme to take away (we’ve said it many times before) is that - “AdSense optimization is to continually test ideas and track the results.”
Use channels within your control panel or install Google Analytics to get a comprehensive grasp of what your traffic is exactly doing on your site. Work with that to see where your ad units are best placed.
Yaniv of Fixya.com says:
“There’s an added value in providing contextual ads in highly focused positions once you’ve gathered sufficient information on what the user is actually interested in, such as through a search query.”
Great advice…
Ad Formats tend to perform differently from site to site, but as a rule, the high rollers are usually to found in amongst the wider rectangular shapes.
These include:
300 X 250 inline rectangle
336 X 280 large rectangle
728 X 90 leaderboard
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