This is the seventh and last part of the How to Sell Ads Online series.

This final article builds on the last discussion on providing a self service system.

The concept is simple.

Since human beings take the path of least resistance, if you make it easy for advertisers to get their job done, they'll do it over and over again.

So how do you do it?

1. Standardised ad zones

The most popular ad units on the web are leaderboards, medium rectangles and wide skyscrapers. They work well for banner ads, text ads, and video ads.
There is a high chance that an advertiser will already have portfolio of ads in these sizes. Remember familiarity breeds acceptability.

2. Simple workflow
Your self service system needs to be easy to follow. Don't assume that because you think its intuitive, everyone else will. You'll often be surprised how people interact with web sites.

Test the system with non-technical person that represents your typical advertiser (like your grandma…no, just kidding) . If they can create a campaign in under 10 minutes without your assistance, then it's a winner.

3. Ad templates
These are pre-built ads that allow advertisers to modify colours, text, images etc. Having them on your system makes a new advertiser's job massively easier. Find a system that comes with its own templates and allows you to create new ones that are tailored to your advertisers.

4. Clear actionable reports
Information overload can be overwhelming. Information without clear advice on what to do next can be as useful as no information at all.

Your reports should communicate the most important things – fulfillment (how much of the requested impressions have been delivered), performance (click through and conversion rates) and if your ad server can do conversion tracking, then you should show their Return on Investment.

5. Rock solid customer service
Nothing beats great customer service. It doesn't matter if the advertiser is Universal Studios or Joe the Plumber.  Make everyone fill like they are equally important to you. Reply emails quickly and provide online help.

Summary

We wrote this series as free advice to all publishers out there regardless of experience. Hopefully you’ve picked up a tip or two along the way.

If you take one thing away, it should be that

more small business advertisers are coming online and you need to make it easy for them to advertise with you

One tool that can help you is Trafficspaces. Facebook has cracked the code, and so can you. Get started today.
 

Related posts:

1. How to Sell Ads Online
2. How to Sell Ads Online > Have an Outstanding Product to Sell (1/7)
3. How to Sell Ads Online > Show Detailed Traffic Statistics (4/7)

This is the sixth part of the How to Sell Ads Online series.

One of the first questions that come to your mind of when you want to sell online advertising is – how much do I sell it?

$10 CPM?, $1000 per month? $1 per click? Which is best? 

How much to sell it and how to sell it have become a paradox.

You are torn between discovering how to price it correctly without scaring away advertisers and pricing it too low and leaving too much money on the table.

Here are three options.

1. Copying others

One option is to do a quick scan of your sites related to yours and figure out how much they are selling their ads.

The problem is they are probably in the same situation as you. It doesn't matter how large they are. Even the experts haven't gotten pricing down to a T. Most people won't even publish their prices. So you are back to square one.

2. Manual negotiation

Another option is to stick a form on your site and ask potential advertisers to contact you. Bad.

It's funny how Google doesn't stick a form on AdWords and require everyone to call or fill a form iin order to negotiate the price. Sure they don't publish a price for each ad placement but they have a much better approach. Well, thank goodness they do. 

3. Run an auction (recommended)

Google just lets the market determine the price – through an auction. It turns out that this is pretty much how majority of prices are set. It is simple – Supply and Demand – Economics 101.

Running an auction is a rapid way to get feedback on how much the market is prepared to pay.

This is where using the right technology matters a great deal. Google built theirs. Facebook built theirs.  Heck, even Plenty of Fish has just built theirs.

But wait, before you run off and start coding away or put a job ad on Rent a Coder for someone to duplicate systems like Trafficspaces, I’ll urge you to search around for an existing ad manager that can allow advertisers to bid for your inventory.

The auction model should be simple. Advertisers have a budget which is usually fixed but the price they pay for each click or each impression can vary. Your ad manager should allow multiple advertisers to key in their preferences and then it should show the relevant ads with the highest bids automatically. 

That way, everybody wins.

Action Points

1. Find an ad manager that lets advertisers bid in a real time auction. If you don’t find one, only then should you build one.

Effect

1. Increase revenues through optimized pricing. You’ll also get a better idea of how much demand there is for your inventory at any given price or as the economists call it, the price elasticity of demand.

Related posts:

1. How to Set Your Ad Prices Via a Real-time Auction Like Google and Facebook
2. How to Sell Ads Online
3. How to Sell Ads Online > Sell Exclusivity (5/7)

This is the fifth part of the How to Sell Ads Online series.

Advertisers are jealous.

Why? Well because all things been equal, given the choice between having only their ads on your site or sharing it with a bunch of other advertisers (and possibly competitors), they'll go for the former all the time.

It's a good thing because armed with this information, you can adjust your sales strategy to attract them by giving them what they really want.

This article highlights three great ways to provide them with exclusivity and increase sales.

Roadblocks

Roadblocks are very effective in creating brand awareness. The idea is to show ads from a single advertiser on a specific ad zone exclusively for a fixed length of time. It usually lasts for at least a month and can extend to a whole year.

TechCrunch has had a series of road-blocked 125×125 ads on their site for as long as I can remember and they are pretty popular across the blogosphere.

Companion positioning

This ensures that only one advertiser can have their ads show on a page at a time.

From a user’s perspective, when a page is loaded, all the ads belong to one advertiser. If they refresh the page, all the ads may belong to another advertiser (or the same one). There is never a mix and match. Personally, as a user, I find this approach makes a site a lot less cluttered and helps me notice the brand easily.

Takeovers

The ultimate in exclusivity. Advertisers love them. Designers have a field day with them.

Gawker Media is having a ball with them. It takes companion positioning a step further by changing the general theme of the site. The background image and colours, border colors, and sometimes, even a themed logo.

In summary, advertisers love takeovers are because they get guaranteed exposure to your readers.

Action Points

1. Survey your advertisers to see if they would prefer exclusivity or shared inventory.
2. Search Google for an ad manager that can manage both models for you. 

Effect

1. Command higher prices for your inventory and reduce clutter for your visitors.

Related posts:

1. How to Sell Ads Online
2. How to Sell Ads Online > Let the Market Determine the Price via an Auction (6/7)
3. How to Sell Ads Online > Have an Outstanding Product to Sell (1/7)

This is the fourth part of the How to Sell Ads Online series.

The product you are selling is your traffic so clearly, you need to describe it.

If you were buying a book on Amazon, you'll want see the full description, picture of the cover, reviews from other readers, and perhaps even browse through a few pages of the book.

Unfortunately, your traffic is not a book so you really can't show a picture of your audience. Well you could, I guess, but I’m not sure how effective that’ll be. However, what you can do is describe it through analytics.

By analytics, I’m not referring to all the bells and whistles site analytics you get on Google Analytics,  Statcounter etc. I’m referring to just the stuff that matters to advertisers i.e. the metrics that describe who your audience is.

As explained in the "Have an outstanding product to sell" article, it is important to segment your audience and show advertisers the niches that advertisers can target.

Quick example – as an advertiser, I'll like to know how much of your traffic is relevant to me. Simply saying "I have 10 million hits" is not good enough.

If I run a restaurant in Downtown Boston, I'll probably be mainly concerned about the traffic in Boston, not Venice Beach, LA or in London or Bombay. You get the point.

How to segment your traffic

It is even way more valuable if you can segment your audience by their demographic makeup, or by their interests like Facebook does.

At the very least, start by showing advertisers where your audience come from. Show them the impressions, unique visitors and average time spent.

If you can show this information across all the niches, then you are onto a winner. Naturally, you’ll probably need some software to work out this information for you.

That’s where a good self-service system comes in. Ideally, your advertisers should be able to specify their preferences and see only the analytics that they care about. You can also include the metrics in a media kit but nothing beats interactive analytics.

One last thing, it is very important to let advertisers know the source of the data. It helps to give your stats legitimacy. Anyone can make up numbers and say "yeah, I do 5mm US uniques a month" but when it is reported by a 3rd party, then it feels legit.

It is similar to how the reviews on Amazon help you decide whether you should buy the book or not.

Action Points

1. Get an analytics solution that can do this for you. It is even better if the analytics come with your ad server.

Effect

Giving advertisers the visibility into your traffic does two things:

1. It helps them make intelligent decisions, and
2. It makes them feel more confident that they’ll get a Return on Investment (ROI).

Both are essential for maintaining a sustainable long term advertising relationship.

Related posts:

1. How to Sell Ads Online
2. How to Sell Ads Online > Have an Outstanding Product to Sell (1/7)
3. How to Sell Ads Online > Sell Exclusivity (5/7)

This is the third part of the How to Sell Ads Online series.

To run an ad campaign, advertisers (small and large) need to go through the following processes - 

• strategic planning,
• creative development, 
• media planning,
• media buying,
• ad trafficking,
• performance tracking,
• optimization (a/b testing), and
• reporting.

Now, this is how it affects you.

Direct sales only

You may find that you spend up to 6 hours every month liaising with advertisers, handling billing, signing agreements, testing their creatives, booking the campaign, monitoring it, and preparing the reports.

If you've just hired an expensive $80000 sales rep, you really want them laser focused on serving big ticket advertisers e.g. movie studios, big pharma, national retailers etc. They may run just ten campaigns a month but those ten could represent $500,000 in revenue.

Direct sales + Self service

On the flip side, you may have 100 requests from smaller advertisers, each with an average of $1000 to spend.

There just isn't enough time to help every one of them manually but you don't want to leave $100,000 on the table. This is where a self service system comes in handy.

A self service system allows smaller advertisers to book, pay for, and manage their campaigns online, without little or no manual involvement from you.

These systems are not new. To be clear, we are referring to systems that the publisher control (especially of pricing, billing, branding and relationships) and not the ones that operate like ad networks e.g AdSense, Adbrite or BlogAds.

The most notable self service system out there is Facebook Ads. There are other examples like Myspace's My Ads, Reddit, Plenty Of Fish etc.

No self service?

Without one, you are left with just the good old "contact us" form, which turns away more people than you think. If they do contact you, then you have to either turn them away or run a low value campaign manually. 

So do yourself a favour and invest some time in optimizing your sales process.

Action Points

1. Before you go off to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to create one, search on Google for off-the-shelf solutions.

Effect

1. Complete optimization of your sales funnel.
2. Increase revenue.
3. Improve advertiser satisfaction while you focus on marketing and building relationships.

Related posts:

1. Crenk.com Feature: Trafficspaces – the Self Service Ad Management Platform
2. Techcrunch Switches to Self-Service Ad Platform and Validates Trafficspaces’ Business Model.
3. How to Sell Ads Online > Hire a Dedicated Sales Person (2/7)