Private Ads Selling: Myth Or Reality?
We’ve got a couple of questions from people wanting to know how to draw advertisers to their blogs. I suppose this question was born from reading some “advice” on high traffic blogs, that the best revenue stream for a blog is private ads selling.
Let’s put it the other way around: let’s suppose you are an advertiser: you run your own business and you want to advertise it. You agree to reinvest part of your profits back into advertising every month. This could mean that you eat less, you drink less, you don’t go to Maldives on vacation, with the sole purpose of putting that money in advertising your business.
Now think: given what I’ve just told you, would you agree to buy an ad box in my sidebar? Would you pay me $30 a month for it?
Your next question: “what are my benefits of advertising in your sidebar?” (please argue this if you think it’s wrong)
Me: well, you get all my 10000 readers per month looking at your ad, clicking on your ad and buying your product.
Stop! Would you believe this and pay the $30 a month for a sidebar ad?
I’ll show you the figures for two of the affiliate banners in the sidebar of my other blog:
This is the NeverblueAds report for March:
These are the two banners (circled with red in the photo):
You can see that those banners were shown to readers more than 22,000 times each during a month’s time. One banner had 72 clicks and the other one 78. Do the math and you’ll see that the CTR is about 0.3%.
Conversion rate? The conversions column shows zero overall, so none of the persons who clicked did the action which would have entitled me to get the commission. If you paid me $30 and you got on average 75 visitors, this means you paid $0.40 per each visitor. And you don’t even know if those visitors had a specific need for your product. Probably they didn’t.
If one of those banners was yours, wouldn’t you have paid me $30 for nothing?
Remember, it’s your personal business. You probably would like to get some benefits from the advertising you buy, right? Investing the same amount in a PPC campaign would have probably brought you at least one client. Why? Because when you advertise on search engines, your ad shows only for the searches on keywords you choose. The person who finds you has a need. The more specific the keyword, the more specific the need, thus the bigger probability for you to make a sale.
John Chow may be a scammer, but he’s not stupid. If he invested the money he pays monthly to Google AdWords in buying private ads on your blogs, his face would be everywhere. But no! He is spending that money to attract fresh blood, people who are new to making money online, and who use search engines to find what’s this all about. He is not interested in your blog readers, who probably already read his and are already subscribed to all services he promotes.
Is Private Ads Selling A Myth?
On small blogs, I’m sorry, it is. It can work, but only bloggers who become authorities in their field manage to make money online from selling private ads. And even those bloggers with good traffic and thousands of subscribers have the sidebars full of affiliate banners, which you may think are private ads. If you look at our Sponsors section in the sidebar, you may think we’ve sold some spots. False! Those are either ads we gave away for free, or affiliate banners (which means that we get paid only if somebody clicks on the and buys something).
I agree, a good “advertise here” page may help, but I wouldn’t spend my money on useless ads, regardless how great your sales pitch may be. Figures speak, and without solid backup figures you’re lost.
What If I Have Big Traffic?
OK, if you have big traffic despite the fact that you are not an authority, I’d ask you to show me the referrals split. If your blog is highly related to my product and if your traffic comes mainly from search engines, I might want to buy one of your sidebar spaces. But if your traffic comes from StumbleUpon or Entrecard, I’m sorry, I’m not interested.
As a conclusion, I think it is a waste of time trying to drive such traffic to your blog with the hope that it will become more attractive for advertisers. This time could be more efficiently invested in researching keywords before you write a post. If you want to see what I mean, you can take a look at this article on how to choose keywords for your articles (this article is dated, as Wordtracker is not offering the tool I’ve used for free anymore, but the process of finding good keywords is the same, no matter which tool you use). Writing with keywords doesn’t mean you have to write about mesothelioma lawyers and payday loans, you know? It simply means that the same article, on the same topic, can be written to be found in Google for keywords with big number of searches, or for keywords nobody’s searching for. That’s your choice.
Why let odds decide for things you could actually control?
Researching those keywords takes less than striving to drive traffic from Entrecard and it brings you more benefits.
Are you considering keywords when writing a blog post?
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[...] Private Ads Selling: Myth Or Reality? You probably would like to get some benefits from the advertising you buy, right? Investing the same amount in a PPC campaign would have probably brought you at least one client. Why? Because when you advertise on search engines, … [...]
It depends why you are advertising. Affiliate banners often have a low click through rate and poor conversions. Since my banner is one of the free ones you have placed, which I very much appreciate, we have had 23 clicks from your site to epiblogger. That is 23 people that have seen our blog and looked at an average of 2 pages. But that is 22000 people that have seen my logo, and the name. That is great for our branding and helping get the word out.
Hi Lee, I also appreciated that you allowed me to put the banner on my site.
Indeed, it is good for branding, but you should consider that more than 60% of those 22000 came from organic search, looking for things which are not very much related to blogging or internet marketing. If I were an authority in your niche, the effect would have been much bigger. And it always depends on the price you have to pay.
great blog entry, thanks. I have got a nice blog. After reading your article I am thinking about blog sponsoring. But where to find a sponsor is the key question?
I’ve got a feeling that you are spamming our nice blog. Otherwise you’d know by now that this is exactly the point: where to find sponsors.