Not long ago I talked about how to monetize your website, turning your passion behind your personal blog into an income stream. Obviously one of the biggest ways to monetize your website is to get other businesses to advertise their products or services in front of your audience.
Let’s dig deeper into that idea and talk specifically how to find advertisers for your website.
Have Page for Advertisers on Your Site
Before we go on the offensive, let’s begin by creating a dedicated page on your site specifically for potential advertisers who visit your site.
It’s up to you to determine how visible you want a link to this page to be, whether you put it in your menu, your footer, or via a link on your site’s About page if you have one.
You can also go with a tried but true method of displaying a sample ad which reads “Your Ad Here” or some variation of that.
This lets all visitors know that advertising is available on your website, and the ad can link to your advertising page.
The page should give potential advertisers a crystal clear idea of what kind of content you post, your posting frequency, your audience demographic and volume statistics, etc.
It’s essentially a snapshot marketing report for your website to effectively convey to advertisers why they should spend money advertising on your site.
You don’t have to go into specifics on your rates on that page, but include your email for handling advertiser questions and state that site statistics and rate information is a quick email response away.
In the same vein, you should have a current Google Analytics (see how to add a website to Google Analytics) report ready to give to potential advertisers so they know exactly who will be seeing their ads.
Ad Selling Marketplaces
There are a lot of marketplaces and services which are specifically made for connecting webmasters/publishers like you with advertisers.
Many of these services even automate much of the process, including collecting ad revenue, swapping out ads, etc.
These options include:
A lot of these options are especially WordPress friendly, offering specific plugins for their clients to make managing the ads on your site easy.
While you get more control by tracking down your own leads, it’s very beneficial to check out these kinds of marketplaces to cast a wider net.
Check Competitors
A great place for how to find advertisers for your website is to look at your direct competitors.
Even if you’re not a business and we’re just talking about your personal blog, that blog still exists in a specific niche. That niche has other people creating similar content to yours on some level.
Assuming you want people to visit your website (which I’ll take for a fact considering you’re on this website), these other webmasters are your direct competitors.
Do a Google search for the kinds of keywords you’re targeting to find similar blogs in your niche.
For the ones which have ads on their sites, make note of who the advertisers are and where the ads link to.
Get in touch with those advertisers and offer your website as a potential platform for them to advertise on. In that email, mention your traffic stats, your audience, the kind of content you post, frequency, etc. similar to the advertising page on your site.
This is your pitch to get them to advertise on your site.
I talked about this in a recent post on how to see how much traffic a website is getting, but you can use a service like SimilarWeb.com to get a traffic snapshot on your competitor to see how yours and their traffics stack up.
You might be surprised to find that you’re getting more traffic than that competitor, something you can mention in that email.
Companies Behind Products You Use
Odds are, you use a product or service related to the niche you write about.
It’s possible that you’ve even mentioned it in the past on your website.
If this is the case, reach out to that company to see if they have any kind of digital advertising system in place for affiliates.
Mention that you’re a happy customer yourself and would like to promote the same products or services you use on your website.
This personal touch and motivation is a step better than simply reaching out with ad placements in mind and can help sway an on-the-fence advertiser in your favor.
Many of these companies are members of existing affiliate networks and promoting their products and or services is as simple as signing up for the network they use.
Affiliate Marketing
Lastly and to continue on that last point, affiliate networks (one of my 51 website traffic sources) are low effort ways of how to find advertisers for your website and start putting revenue generating ads on your site without sometimes even having to contact the advertiser.
In Conclusion
From spying on your competitors/peers to simply making it clear that you’re open to advertising on your site, there are many easy ways for how to find advertisers for your website.
Many new advertisers will want to do a trial run on your site to see if its worth their investment.
With that in mind, once you have advertisers displaying ads on your site, you need to work even harder to grow your traffic in order to attract more advertisers and more importantly retain existing ones.
It’s more difficult and costly to court new advertisers than retain existing ones. Demonstrate to them that you have an audience worth investing in, and grow that relationship over time to see a steady stream of income to your site.