How to Sell Ads Online > Have an Outstanding Product to Sell (1/7)
December 16, 2009 – 9:58 pm How to Sell Ads Online > Have an Outstanding Product to Sell (1/7).jpg)
This is the first part of the How to Sell Ads Online series.
You need to make sure you have something to sell. Your product is your audience so you need to clearly define who they are and why they are a right fit for advertisers.
Ideally, you should also have the ad targeting technology that will help advertisers reach specific groups of people.
Facebook has been really successful with this. Its Facebook Ads was launched after the social network had reached critical mass. It had a robust social graph and tonnes of information on who its users were and what they were interested in.
Crucially though, it had also built the technology that could help advertisers segment the huge traffic, and reach specific interest groups.
Critical Mass
How do you know if you’ve reached critical mass? There isn’t a magic number. Frankly, the better you are in segmenting your audience into specific niches, the more effective your sales pitch will be.
Don't worry, if advertisers were only interested in raw, unfiltered traffic, they’ll all be bidding on ad exchanges. See Mediapost's view on why today's ad exchanges are not working.
Know your niche
The value has always been in the niche so it doesn’t matter if you only have 100,000 hits a month from 20,000 users. If those users are female, 18-30, living in Wisconsin and interested in soccer, then there’s an advertiser for that!
You may find that you have just one niche or multiple niches in your traffic. Segment them into marketable blocks and pitch them separately. There is more on segmenting your traffic later.
Placement, Placement, Placement
Another important part of pitching the right product is the location and ad placements. Make sure you have visible ad zones in prominent spaces. Top right and top center are pretty good spots.
Action Points
- Do an audit on your traffic. Get to know them, who they are, where they are from, and what their interests are.
- Reduce clutter and sell visible ad zones.
Effect
- Your site (and its audience) becomes clearly differentiated from the millions of sites on the web.
- By reducing the number of sites that “are look like you” to advertisers, you can stimulate demand, and ultimately command higher prices.
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