How to Setup Your Website for Direct Advertisers

Banner advertising

There's definitely a powerful allure to building up traffic to your website and having an ad network do all the work for you. But it goes beyond allure. There can be some significant advantages to going direct.

What are the main advantages of targeting direct advertisers?

• 100% revenue share
• Premium advertising rates

Ignoring your operating costs, the margins on your direct ad sales are 100%. That means no 30%+ kickback to Google or the other big players required. However, to be successful with direct advertisers, your ad sales are going to be primarily niche targeted.

What are the caveats of selling ads direct to advertisers?

The most obvious is the difficulty. Ad networks make everything seem easy. You drop in a snippet of code and turn your traffic into revenue. But selling ads direct to advertisers requires selling. The redundancy in that last sentence is on purpose.

It's about selling.

That makes you responsible for a lot of tasks: Identifying advertisers, reaching out, making the sale, providing support and settling disputes. This all takes time, commitment, and skill.

Getting Your Website Set Up for Direct Advertising

#1. Use a Dedicated Advertising Page

If you have the traffic to even begin considering selling direct advertising, you have potential advertisers visiting your site. Thousands of major advertisers have reps scanning the web for niche advertising opps.

#2. Create a Media Kit

Your media kit will complement your advertising page. While you're not necessarily going to amplify your Public Relations reach, the media kit is still very helpful for potential advertisers.

#3. Get Data on Your Audience

If you really want to nail your media kit, aim for more user demographic data than:

Human, aged 20 to 65, with some type of Internet connection, and likes buying stuff

Remember, it's the niche sites that break open your advertisers' budgets. We're going to touch on this more in the next section on pricing. For now, I want to draw your attention to Quantcast. If you run Quantcast, you'll be collecting extensive data that helps to break down the demographic segments of your visitors.

#4. Make Sure the Price is Right

Oftentimes, your media kit will specify your ad rates. This will be broken down for the various types of ad placements you're offering. This is what is going to get you tracked in the spreadsheets of savvy advertisers looking for good niche sites. Just like you, they are going to be crunching numbers.

#5. Grab CPM Data at BuySellAds

BuySellAds is a marketplace where some publishers sell off their ad inventory. This is a great source to find out how others in your niche are pricing their CPM traffic.

#6. Choose Your Ad Server

Yes, this part would be kinda sorta important. When you sell your ads, you won't be Photoshopping and uploading them one by one. At least we sure hope that isn't what you had in mind!

You're going to need to select an ad server. That will keep things running efficiently. However, our recommendation would be that you choose one that makes it easy to backfill your ad inventory. If you're not selling enough direct ads, you do not want any dead air (or the digital ad equivalent).

When ad spots are open, you can fill this unsold inventory with AdSense or AdX ads. Remember, selling direct doesn't mean that you are swearing off ad networks for good. For almost all sites, the ad networks will continue to be an important component of their incoming ad revenue.

#7. Go with a Modern Design

OK, in fairness we occasionally see high trafficked sites that haven't had a design revision since say 1992. If anything is a testament to the power of great content, they are.

Making sure you have a modern design ensures that you send an immediate trust signal. It says that your site is professional. But remember that they are evaluating the ad placements as well. If you have a great looking site with quality ad placement real estate, you're going to win their business.

#8. Responsive is Modern Too

We're not here to give you a crash course on responsive design today. If you're not already familiar with it, responsive simply means that the site adapts itself to the size of the viewing device. And if your website is somehow on the internet, we know that mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are a major component of your incoming traffic.

#9. Monetize Beyond Simple Ad Placements

So we're not discrediting standard ad placements. They still generate revenue. However, there are all kinds of new innovations in the digital ad space. So not only may you discover that you'll do more revenue with them, they are going to be immensely attractive to your advertisers.

• Overlay Ads
• Hellobar Sponsorships
• Pre-Roll Video Ads
• Social Media Sponsorships
• Newsletter Sponsorships
• Native Advertising Articles
• RSS Embedded Ads

#10. Fill Empty Inventory with "Advertise Here"

Now before you take this suggestion as a command, remember that we are a continuous testing team. So this suggestion is that you try this out. What we're looking for is its impact on recruitment of new advertisers.

#11. Positive User Experience

You have to send the message to your prospective advertisers that you are professional. They want to know your users have a good experience. And they must have a good experience as well. It's about the impressions you make.

Are You Ready to Target Direct Advertisers?

If you've been thinking about different ways to increase your ad revenue, going direct is one possibility. As we indicated, it isn't for everyone. You have to have some significant established traffic to make it work.

Whatever happens, as your site scales in traffic, eventually going direct is an unavoidable necessity. 30%+ ad revenue sharing to your ad networks gets very significant as your traffic grows. Just remember, if anyone asks, you didn't hear it from us.

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Banner Ads Tips And Tricks

Banner advertising

Banner ads are also known as image ads and display ads. These are nothing more than image advertisements that you can't help but run into all over the internet. Banners are cost-effective and a great way to get your business image out there for the masses to see.

Banners have been used since the start of the World Wide Web. It used to be easy to create an attention grabbing banner ad and get easy clicks. However, the internet is much more competitive now, and people want to interact with banners that do more than just grab their attention.

A good banner ad should:

* Be relevant to your web site. Let your customers know just what it is you are marketing, especially if you are looking to gain customers from your marketing niche.

* Be professional. Pictures can say a thousand words: make your graphics and colors pop. Remember, you are running a business, so keep it neat and professional.

Before you start creating your banner ads you need to consider a few options available to you:

Size

Most websites have their own requirements about the size of banner ads. These ads are usually just the regular standard sizes that have been around forever. Just be sure you know what each website requires. You can use a graphic software program like Adobe Flash or Adobe Photoshop to find the correct ad size.

Plan to use two-thirds of your banner for your image (which is your value proposition), and the other third for your call to action.

Create A Strong Title

Your title, or heading, should be an immediate attention grabber. Create a captivating and short heading that reaches out to your niche market. Vary the colors and font sizes of your headings, and make it a valuable part of your ad.

Using Banner Ads Effectively

It makes sense to place banner ads on websites that already generate a lot of traffic. It makes even more sense to place these ads on websites that actually cater to your targeted market.

One nice thing about using banners is that you can easily measure the CTR (click-through rate). If your banner ad has a click-through rate of 7%, then out of a hundred impressions (times the ad was shown), 7 people actually clicked on your link. The higher your percentage, the more clicks you are getting, the more effective your banner ad is. It really is this easy.

Buying Ad Space

Now that you have created the perfect ad banner, it is time to put it to use advertising your website or blog. You could contact individual website and blog owners to discuss prices and terms, but this whole process is really a time-consuming and stressful part of advertising. Most website owners decide to hire an advertising network that helps them with the distribution of these banners.

Find an advertising network that you like. AOL Advertising, BuyAds.com, Google AdWords, and Right Media are just a few of the available networks. Discuss ad sizes with each network to see if your ads are in compliance.

If not, you may want to change them if you choose a company you like that wants something different from what you already have. Making necessary changes before advertising makes the whole process flow smoothly.

Banner ads can be affordable and cost-effective. However, large advertisers can easily spend in the range of $2,000 to $6,000 and higher. The cost of these ads is the main reason you need to create a banner ad that will appeal to a lot of people.

The more clicks you get, the more money you will make. A good banner ad campaign will see you recoup your investment money in no time at all, and hopefully leave you a handsome profit.

My name is Juan Rademacher. I have a keen interest in traffic generation because I find it's one of the greatest stumbling blocks newbies run into. Without traffic you DON'T HAVE an online business. Banner advertising is just one of the traffic options available to you.

To read more about how to generate traffic to your website visit: http://jarwinsmarketing.com/how-to-drive-traffic-to-your-website-fast/

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Make Your Banner Ads Stand Out With Banner Design Software

Banner advertising

In today's ultra-competitive times, advertising has become more important and doubly intense for brands than it ever was. With the rising of stakes coupled with the desire to get even an iota of edge over rivals, no brands want to get left behind in the race to success. Take for example the exiting scenarios in banner advertising where the desire to stand out from the crowd supersedes everything else.

This is why companies try their best to craft as attractive and visually appealing banner ads as none could. Creative designers are hired with great hopes and then fired for not bringing the right artistic imaginations to the core. Thanks to the arrival of a designing tool, banner ads are now a lot better designed than they ever were.

With feature-rich banner design software around, it has become a tad simple to create the design of own choice. It also packs in a big library of templates and themes to help you further.

There are a whole lot of other benefits that come with the software, including:

• Create a banner of your own choice - You'd feel great with this new-found ability of creating banner of own choice. You can simply create anything and almost everything to meet the discerning and evolved tastes of the marketplace.


• Create multiple designs and choose the best one - The software gives you a wonderful opportunity of creating multiple designs and then retaining the one that suits the needs the best. That way, you won't have to live to substandard designs that often damage the brand rather than helping it.


• You save a great deal of resources - The software gets integrated with websites so that anyone can create banners of choices. With that, the need of having a designer seems redundant and thus, you save both time and money. You become self-sufficient and look for increased ROI.


• Add, upload and change anything - The banner software comes packed with the ability to let you add text and arches effects. More so, it allows uploading of images, rotation of texts and images, changing of background, addition of shapes or clip-art and saving of design etc.


• It supports all major browsers - Creating an awesome design for banner ads has never been that easy. Thanks to the arrival of an extremely responsive tool, one can do it with utmost comfort. The tool is designed to support all major and popular web browsers around, together with Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox Google Chrome and Safari.


• It's accessible from all devices - One of the best aspects about the banner design software is its ability to be get accessed from all devices. So it won't matter whether you use mobiles or tablets or desktops, you will continue to enjoy the features and functionalities with ease.

Conclusion

It's thus obvious that your banner ads need to be the best to bring home advantages galore. As it's not worthwhile to take risks, you must trust only a tool that promises to fetch you the best of designs and results.

Yusuf Javed is the proud founder and director of Product Designer Tool - an innovative company that provides personalized and customized Banner design software to clients. A tri-national (citizen of the US, UK & India) and tri-lingual management executive with decade-long experience in Digital Marketing, he has vast experience in building teams, strategic planning and direct sales. In addition, he's also helped build multiple world class organizations during his professional career spanning across 3 continents.

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Exploring Ways of Making Money With Banner Ads

Banner advertising

If you want to make money with banner ads, then you have to go beyond the contextual advertising networks. In some cases, contextual advertising simply does not work and requires that you to exercise greater control regarding what is seen in the ad area. This is where you need to use the ad networks.

Compared to their heydays towards the end of 1990s, banner advertising payment rates have without doubt plummeted. However, there is a bit of good news for website owners searching for a reliable and flexible way to make money. These ads have evolved over time to bring with them many different options as well as variations for web masters.

When you team up with a top banner advertising network as opposed to intensive marketing to different clients, it saves you lots of time and gives you a steady income flow in the end. The amount of money that starts trickling in is a beautiful game of numbers - the more relevant advertisements you show, the more you make money with banner ads. Your work is just to implement certain codes in your banner area and the ad(s) will appear. When you associate with these networks, you will be referred to as a publisher or affiliate.

You however need to be careful when selecting a banner ad network; otherwise your effort towards making money with banner ads will stall. Many companies can promise the world, only to disappoint you when the return comes back as zero. Others may encourage very unethical advertising practices, and yet others may fail to pay according to the agreed terms and conditions. Even worse, some of these companies may fail to pay anything altogether.

Ensure that you read terms and conditions before signing with any banner ad company, at least so that you don't break the rules without knowing them. You want to make money so shop around carefully because payout rates are different between networks. Besides that, check for an ad network that offers different advertising creatives like pop-up, pop-under, interstitial and more means of making money from your site.

Although you may not generate a million dollars via banner ads, they are still good means to recover website maintenance overheads as well as stack some cash in the bank. Well, if you actually generate a million dollars from our pieces of advice, donations will be thankfully accepted. This may not happen, so the best approach here is to target a modest return.

For more information on money making tips, visit our blog i.e. http://wadebyrdonline.com/blog

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Creative Internet Advertisement

Banner advertising

If there is one thing that the internet has always done right it is internet advertising. Advertising on the internet is one of the most lucrative and popular ways of not just getting your name across, but getting a product or service across as well.

Millions and millions of people click on a website almost every second; that is plenty of advertising space for someone to snatch up. When you have a great advertising platform, your business can really take off and it can be a new milestone that you never thought possible that you could achieve. The more advertising that you see on a website, the more likely you are to click it. It burns into people's minds to the point where they feel compelled to click it and see what it is about. Also, the more creative your internet advertisement the more profitable it surely can be. It can be costly to have advertising on the internet, due to the popularity and ease it is to get it going, but once it takes off it more than pays for itself. The return on investment for internet advertisement is astronomical, and the more creative it is the better.

A lot of times, you will see people simply have one box on a website for you to click on as advertisement. Many people do not realize that the more creative you can make your internet advertisement the better off you can be. If you have a lot of different little boxes, maybe a few links and video links, and even some logos and banners across the webpage, that shows that not only do you care about having your voice heard, but you really want people to click and explore for themselves. This type of love and passion for advertising, and this type of investment, is surely to pay off as people see you investing in yourself so they will want to as well. The website will, in its own way, advertise itself and really take off without you having to do much about it.

All you need is a site name inside of a logo, or even include it in special cells inside a website, and you can see what it will do for you. The some websites shows examples of how it can look and how effective this type of internet advertising can be. Give it a try for yourself and see why everyone loves this type of marketing and advertising.

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5 Bandit Tests to Increase AdSense Earnings

Banner advertising

Our approach will be a 5 arm bandit test for these factors:

1. Left Side vs Right Side
2. Above the Fold vs. Below the Fold
3. Embedded vs Adjacent to Content
4. Different AdSizes
5. Mobile vs Desktop (Separate setup)

Before you go off Googling pictures of seniors who bodybuild, let me explain the analogy. Let's start with why a bandit test gets its name, what it does, and how it will help increase your ad earnings.

Did you ever see the slot machines at a casino? You put in your money, pull a lever, and wait to see if you win something. Those handles are the "arms". And the machine itself is the "bandit". It's not much of a secret that these machines rob you blind - unless you own them.

How is bandit testing different from A/B testing?

Let's keep it simple. With A/B testing, you create two or more versions that you want to test. You send equal amounts of your traffic to each. At the end of the test, you pick a winner. From there, you direct all traffic to the winning version. They call that "exploring" and then "exploiting".

There is a little problem in here though. During the course of the test, the losing variations are getting lots of your traffic too. That means they are wasting some of it.

So a bandit test still compares different versions. But it directs most of your traffic to the version performing best from the outset.

You get to test out new variations like a/b testing, but you reduce the amount of traffic sacrificed.

The eventual losers get less of it to waste, and the likely winners get more of it to turn into ad revenue.

"Exploring" is the testing variations part. "Exploiting" is a bit harsh perhaps. Because what it really means is leveraging your traffic in the best way possible.

Stand by for another negative label. They call the bandit algorithm a "greedy" approach. But that's just an industry term. It means we want to focus our resources wherever we think we're going to get the best results.

Bandit Arm 1 - Left Side vs Right Side

Many UI designers will talk about F and Z patterns. This relates to how a user reads your page. A lot of research happens here. Researchers want to know where they focus. And they use eye or mouse movement tracking to figure it out.

Many web design templates provide navigation or advertising on the left or right side of the page. So this also becomes a good testing opportunity for your ad units.

Where are they looking the most? Where are they clicking ads the most?

Bandit Arm 2 - Above the Fold vs. Below the Fold
You have heard the "above the fold" mantra for a long time now. It started out as an insistence:

Everything important on a page has to be visible without scrolling.

But we have gotten wiser. Being above the fold or not is now a meaningful testing opportunity.

So we'll take that into consideration as well. How do your ad groups perform when positioned above or below the fold? Test it.

Bandit Arm 3 - Embedded vs Adjacent To Content

The traditional ad setup was to include advertising in vacant areas of the page. They could be within your header, footer, and side navigation. It was an attempt to keep them away from your main content. Beyond clutter, it also promotes a clear separation between content and ads.

Smart ad optimizers started to think more in depth than just F and Z patterns. If we expect the user to focus on the content, then why not bring our ad units within the content space? Embed them.

There is also adjacency. That is more like traditional advertising placement. But the key here to explore embedded content and other creative ways to place your ad units.

Bandit Arm 4 - Different Ad Sizes

Size might matter. But we just don't quite know which size without testing. Almost every ad network has many different ad unit sizes and dimensions. There is quite a variation. Compare traditional banners to skyscraper formats or video embeds.

So the type, size, and dimension of ads are also important factors for testing.

Bandit Arm 5 - Mobile vs Desktop (Separate setup)

This is the hot zone here. Mobile versus Desktop. Mobile usage is exploding - as we all know. That means no serious web publisher can do well long term without factoring in mobile traffic.

Separate apps are a bit out of scope here. But we can focus in on testing either responsive or separate mobile versions of your site.

With responsive, the design and structure is built to recognize mobile devices. When the smaller screen sizes are in use, the page layout and content can change. The layout may change. Some content may even disappear.

By contrast, a separate mobile site setup is another version especially for mobile devices. With this method, you design a version that is only for target mobile devices. It's not tethered to the responsible web version. It's built specifically for mobile.

To implement these tests start using AdNgin today. Or get more info first.

AdNgin lets online publishers increase ad revenue through perpetual testing. Use our platform for free and see your AdSense revenue increase by upwards of 30%.

AdNgin is Google AdSense T&C compliant

Contact us here: info@adngin.com

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New Hot Property - Outdoor Media

Banner advertising

India's population is steadily becoming urbanized and modern advances have penetrated even the rural areas. That's why it is easy to find many farmers engaged on their phones, even so on Whatsapp. Advertising in contemporary times is seen adapting as well. Today old compliments the new, so to say. New technology combined with old ideas has created success stories. Outdoor media allied with other mediums can be very beneficial.

One particular industry that could benefit most from out of home advertising would be the e- commerce websites. One of the fastest growing sectors and it is projected to keep growing. It has transformed consumer behavior (one of the greatest feat of social engineering). Everything today is simplified, from hailing taxis to sell old washing machines. All can be done by sitting at home.

To cash in on the growing market, many companies have begun to unleash a media buying 'blitzkrieg'. It is now normal to see daily newspapers featuring e- commerce advertisements. So much so more space is allotted to ads than there is to news. In fact some papers get fatter just before the festive seasons. Like in many instances these pages are flipped right over or torn away. Although very effective, it is still not enough.

In today's world there is more room to be creative as work can be easily out sourced to professionals thousands of miles away. At a much cheaper rate than compared to the past when doing such thing was impossible or very difficult.

Outdoor media or out of home advertising is a tricky fish, if not done properly, it may slip out of hand. Basically, advertisements need to compliment the reader (consumers!)

Duration

It can be identified according to seasons, festivities etc. E.g. when the winter arrives winter care manufacturing companies begin to advertise for their product because there is a demand during the season. Outdoor advertising can create a huge impact on the consumer. In some cases it can even remind the consumers about the approaching winter season. Same goes for festivities. Outdoor media can remind people about the big festival in a less intrusive way because; it does so without invading an individual's personal space.

Connection

Consumers can be attracted but they need to be persuaded. One dot can be put on a board and it will be noticed by as many commuters as any normal ad would. What needs to be done is content has to connect with the consumer. Content has to be so engaging that it will retain the viewer till the end. So brilliant and convincing, even if someone is selling sand in the desert, the consumer would buy it.

Location

Don't just buy advertisement space. Sometimes one advertisement location can pull more traffic than 10 less prominent ones. Outdoor media relies heavily on the location, depending on the product prominent location changes. An expensive soap will sell better in affluent areas of the city than the less affluent ones. So better to advertise only in the area where people can actually afford to buy the product.

HoardingIndia realizes these individual needs and according sets a plan to benefit the client using out vast outdoor media network. We believe in Nash Equilibrium and work for the mutual benefit of both the parties.

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