The cast of Mad Men
A few weeks ago, I came across a four-year-old posting on Yaro Starak’s blog Entrepreneurs-Journey: Making Money From Your Website Using Advertising. Before reading his post, I thought that I would be happy with running Google Ads. I quickly realized that unless I would be satisfied with anemic revenues, I should look elsewhere. Yaro completely changed my mind about my monetization strategy for the sites that I plan on rolling out and made me reconfigure my launch strategy.
Change in Banner Strategy
First off, Yaro clearly recommends avoiding ad banner programs and I realized that the money would mostly come from selling directly to advertisers. To do that, I would need to create more monetization opportunities. With the Google Ads strategy, I only had two or three ad spot opportunites on each page – two 468×60 and one 300×250. I noticed that many blogs and start-up sites use the 125×125 – I suspect because they could be made affordable by masses at the $25 to $100 per month. So I’ve added eight 125×125 ad spots with the intent of rotating through them like John Chow does on his killer site JohnChow.com. I also made sure that all ads would be almost every page of the site. I’ve also added a directory section to create another monetization opportunity. These changes came in late stages of site design and I incurred a change request charge for them, but I think it will be worth it in the long-term.
One thing to note when selecting your banner sizes is that there are standard sizes to follow, as recommended by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). You can find the US standards here. Note that each country might have a different standard. For example, the 468×60 dimension is not supported in Canada. To find out the standards in your country, visit International IAB page.
Focus on Traffic
Yaro also made me realize that traffic and marketing to get that traffic would be tantamount to my success. Five hundred to 1000 uniques a day to make any kind of money? I admit that is daunting – especially when I site I highly respect like MomMadeThat.com is in the 400-500 unique visitors a day range and is a PageRank 4. Immediately, I started thinking about marketing strategies for my new site to help boost the traffic as quickly as possible.
Get Ad Serving Software
Now that I would be serving ads, I needed also to find software that would help me traffic ads. Yaro recommended phpAdsNew; however, since his post in 2005, the application has since become OpenX. I’ve signed up for their OpenX hosted account and currently have mixed reviews (they are sorting out a bug that only allows remnant or exclusive ads to be served).
I’m really glad I came across Yaro’s posting (hooray for the long-tail!). It made me change my approach, hopefully saving me from losing revenue from the get-go.
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