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How To: Selling and Pricing Your Ad Slots
One of the toughest parts about blogging for money is trying to figure out how much to charge for advertising. Charge to little and you lose valuable income…charge too much and you may never get any takers. In the space that CN is in, I believe most of the “majors” are charging too little which helps them to sell out but reduces their total income and puts huge downward pressure on the 2nd and 3rd tier sites.
Online advertising marketplace BuySellAds has put together their “3 Golden Rules to Selling More Ads”. They discussing pricing models including eCPM pricing.
Ad placement is the second rule — different locations can mean placement premiums.
The last rule is content – as we know the better your content, the more you can charge.
If you are new to selling your own ads, you might try reducing the price a pinch below what you think is a fair price to check interest levels. Then as you get advertisers buying ads, increase the price little by little until you meet resistance. Also remember that many advertisers will want to negotiate so if you start low, you will wind up going even lower.
Share your pricing tips in the comments and I will add them to the post.
While we recommend that publishers take their eCPM into account, it’s not an effective way to arrive at a price, because advertisers don’t buy on eCPM – they buy on CPM. So while your eCPM might be $0.25 site wide, you could sell your inventory at $1.00 CPM.
If you are limited to just selling by months at a time, then eCPM is about the best metric you can use. If you’re selling directly on a CPM basis, we recommend looking at the listings for other sites of similar size and content – just like you would look at the MLS for a real estate listing. If you’re selling based on time, such as a month, then lower the CPM rate compared to a straight CPM buy, to give the advertiser a reward for buying a longer term campaign.
We give the same advice as above to new publishers with starting slightly “cheaper” and working your way upward. In the case of a user that is already conducting direct sales, it’s a no brainer.
If you’re really lost: take the average eCPM or monthly earnings you make from an ad network like AdSense, triple it, and use that as your base price.
We wrote a series about direct sales, what can be hard about it, if it’s right for you, etc at our blog: http://blog.isocket.com