Selling advertising or sponsorship for your website

You won’t find a single contextual paid-for text link or ‘buy now’ button on the miggle.co.uk site, but we still make money from it. How? Because it acts a showcase for our services and from the interest that generates, we can convert leads into business. Other sites make money through e-commerce, selling their goods and services directly online. And then there’s the sites that make money through selling advertising or sponsorship, which is what this post is all about.

Before thinking about monetising your site it’s important to consider what your site’s purpose is, as well as what usage it generates. If you are considering selling advertising think about these points:

• Will adding advertising units dilute or obscure your content or product offerings?
• Will having a single site sponsor limit opportunities you have to make money out of more advertising clients?
• If you decide to run banner ads or text ads on your site, what might be the impact of running ads that don’t enhance the overall impression of your brand?

My view is that site owners should explore a variety of approaches:

• Firstly, look at where your site generates traffic. Which pages attract the biggest audience, which pages generate the most page views and which pages have the best page views per user ratio? What makes those pages popular? What additional selling opportunities might exist on that page?
• Secondly, think about how much money you might need to make on your site to make selling that advertising worthwhile.
• Thirdly, I would probably break my site up into two distinct areas. The high traffic pages which are key to my brand/service and which have a broad audience and the pages that are more specific to certain subjects which have fewer page views and users, but a more defined and niche audience. On these secondary pages I would try and integrate things like Google Adsense and maybe other third party networks which will sell inventory on your behalf. The downside of using these networks is that I won’t be in control of the advertising creative on my site, but I won’t have to worry about the relevance of the ads that appear, or about scheduling or selling the campaigns.

In my next blog post, I’ll go into how you can manage your own advertising inventory using OpenX and why you need to pay attention to IAB advertising standards.

Questions? Contact me at migglemedia and I’ll be happy to help.

The migglemedia team provide tools for clients to be able to manage both display advertising and text advertising. Clients can manage advertising campaigns internally, via a third party, or through migglemedia’s experienced team.
Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.