If you are looking to sell private ads or sponsorships on your WordPress blog, this is a great way to make some extra money blogging! Not only does adding ads to your blog serve as a way to make money but you can sell private ads or sponsorships and make even more per ad.
When you first create your WordPress blog, it is important to consider the purpose of your blog. Depending on the subject matter of your content, or even if you plan on using your WordPress website as a way to sell products and services, you are going to want to target other businesses that have similar products, services and goals as your blog. This is the best way you can reach the target demographic for those industries and actually succeed in having your blog followers click on the ads. For example, if you are doing a blog about home improvement, but showcase ads from private sellers or businesses about web hosting, you are trying to target two entirely different audiences. This is not only going to hurt your blog following, but your followers are not likely going to click on the ads of your site. Chances are the private businesses and sellers are going to realize this and won’t even want to pay you to put their ad on your site because the return won’t be good enough to justify paying to have the ad.
The lesson to be learned here is to appeal to ad sales with companies that offer similar products or services that go along with your blogging content or compliments your own products and services for sale. After you’ve decided on your blogging purpose, you can continue learning more about how to sell private ads or sponsorships for your website. If you don’t already have a large following and lots of web traffic to your WordPress blog, you need to get started building a strong following. This means you need to get your blog noticed and increase your search engine ranking. One of the best ways to do this is through blogging SEO (search engine optimization). SEO is pretty easy if you know what tools to use. There are a few like the All-in-One SEO pack that help you with all of your SEO needs. You might also want to consider using an SEO friendly WordPress theme to help increase your search engine rankings.
Once you are getting a large following, or at least a very dedicated following, you can begin selling your ad space via private ads or sponsorships. You then need to decide on how much you are going to sell private ads or sponsorships for each month. Some blogs selling ad space will charge a monthly fee, while others will charge an annual fee, or whatever works best for your company. When you approach businesses about selling your ad space to them, refer to branding as well as raw traffic numbers as selling points. You can also throw in a couple of extras like mentioning their company name in a few blog posts as well as other content throughout your site.
After you sell private ads or sponsorships, you need to determine exactly where you want to place your ads. You also need to determine the number of ads. If your ads are taking over the blog page, it is going to look too cluttered and confusing for your followers. Overloading your website visitors with ad is the worst way for the ads to be successful. You have to find that balance between featuring just the right amount of ads to still attract followers and make money, but not too much to confuse or overload them with ads. You can choose to put your ads at the very top of your blog page, the sidebar but toward the top of the page or in content that you publish near the top or at the bottom as a call to action. If you are interested in selling private ads or sponsorships, this is the way to go. You also want to consider putting information on your site, so that businesses can seek out ad sales from your site directly.