How to Sell Ads Online > Show Detailed Traffic Statistics (4/7)

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.

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Posted in Advertisers, Features, Publishers, Sales, Tips | Comments

How to Sell Ads Online > Provide a Self-Service Ad Management System (3/7)

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.

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Posted in Advertisers, Media, Publishers, Sales, Self Service, Tips | Comments

How to Sell Ads Online > Hire a Dedicated Sales Person (2/7)

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

A good sales rep is worth their weight in gold. However, how do you know if it’s appropriate to hire one, how to hire one, and when to do the hiring.

When to hire

First of all, don't hire a rep too early.  Doing so can literally bankrupt you. At the low end, a direct sales rep can cost around $50,000 a year. An experienced, sales rep can set you back $80 – $100k plus compensation.

In other words, you'll need to be selling over 1mm impressions at $5CPM every month just to cover the costs of a junior rep.

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Posted in Advertisers, Publishers, Sales, Tips | Comments

How to Sell Ads Online > Have an Outstanding Product to Sell (1/7)

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

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.

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Posted in Advertisers, Facebook, Publishers, Sales, Tips | Comments

How to Sell Ads Online

Need advice on how to sell ads online directly to advertisers? Then this series of guides and recommendations is perfect for you.

In each guide, we'll list some action points for you and explain the effect they can have on potential advertisers.

Hopefully by the time we are done, you will have a better perspective on

1. Whether you are ready to sell advertising
2. How to attract advertisers, and
3. How to sell them advertising in a mutually sustainable way.

Okay, let’s get started.

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Posted in Advertisers, Launch, Publishers, Sales, Tips | Comments

Receive payments directly from advertisers with PayPal, Authorize.Net and USAePay

I love these new feature announcements.

Due to popular demand, in addition to PayPal, you can now receive payments directly from advertisers if you have an Authorize.Net or USAePay account.

This is a great new feature that demonstrates our commitment to making it easier for you to receive payments directly without paying commissions to advertising middle men, and only dealing with the payment processor of your choice.

You can learn more about Authorize.Net here and about USAepay here.

Posted in Authorize.Net, Features, PayPal, Payments, USAePay | Comments

The login screen now supports Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and more

Anyone can now sign into any Trafficspaces ad platform with a Facebook, Twitter, Google/Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, or Blogger account. Yep, that’s right – advertisers no longer need to fill a signup form.

This feature has been on our todo list for over 4 months, and was constantly postponed and postponed again until we finally got our act together and implemented it.

It is ridiculously simple to use. For example if an advertiser has a Facebook account, they just need to click on the Facebook logo and they’ll be redirected to Facebook to login and connect their account to your ad platform. No passwords, no forms. That’s all it is. They are logged in – as simple as A-B-C.

It makes it easy for advertisers to get started so you won’t lose any potential advertiser because of the pain of filling yet another sign up form.

Go on, try it out in the demo. Kudos to RPX for helping us make it possible.

Posted in Advertisers, Facebook, Features, Google, Twitter, Yahoo | Comments

The Free Trafficspaces Package is now available

As most of you already know, we launched Trafficspaces to give publishers more control on how to manage their ad inventory. Since then, we have received tons of emails about our free 7 day trial and suggestions on how to make the platform serve you better.

We’ve been asked frequently to provide a free version of the platform and we are happy to say it is finally here.  The Free package is designed for those of you who prefer extending the trial further than 7 days.

As many can testify, having your own customized ad managing platform allows you to

• keep 100% of your ad sales,
• develop a closer and trusting relationship with your advertisers.

It is a win-win game. You get to keep 100% of your ad revenue and provide your advertisers will with an easy-to-use branded ad manager. You’ll build a strong relationship with them which encourage them to continue buying advertising from you.

So what are you waiting for? Try the free package today and let us know what you think.

Posted in Advertisers, Facebook, Features, Google, Publishers | Comments

How to Set Your Ad Prices Via a Real-time Auction Like Google and Facebook

Chris Petersen has a successful blog. He generates millions of page views monthly, which he currently monetizes with Google AdSense and a couple of other ad networks.

He also gets about 10 – 20 emails from advertisers every day. Requests range from “Send me your price list (or rate card in advertising lingo)” to “Can we get a 40% discount if we commit to advertising for 6 months”.

Poor (and I use that term lightly) Chris just wants to write content so he does a quick search on Google, and discovers a little tool called Trafficspaces. Great. Now, advertisers can just book their ads online and get their discounts automatically. Problem solved. Err, no.

It turns out that Chris doesn’t really know what price to sell his ad spaces – $10CPM for the home page leaderboard?, $0.10 per click for the text ads near the footer? To compound the problem, it turns out that his advertisers all have different opinions on what the “right price” is.

Solution – use an auction. Duh! Google does it, Facebook does it. Of course, it makes sense. Why didn’t I think of that before.

This story is pretty common, so we’ve added auction-based pricing to Trafficspaces.

Here is how it works:

1. You set up your minimum price, and the incremental amounts that advertisers are allowed to bid.

2. At checkout, the advertiser specifies their budget and their max bid price

3. For every impression that is served, the ad server runs an auction and the ad with the best bid and performance wins. Simple.

Now you have the elegance of Facebook and Google Auctions for a fraction of its price.

Posted in Advertisers, Auction, Facebook, Features, Google, Publishers | Comments

Techcrunch Switches to Self-Service Ad Platform and Validates Trafficspaces’ Business Model.

Today, a friend of mine sent me a link to an article that confirms that Techcrunch, the leading tech blog, has decided to dump its long term ad partner in favour of a self-serve ad platform.

This is great news because it validates what we’ve always believe in – self-serve ad platforms rule!

All the fanfare aside, it is good to examine why Techcrunch made this decision.

In my opinion, there are two fundamental reasons:

1. Increased Control/Transparency – With Federated Media or any ad network, there is a Chinese wall that shields Techcrunch from its advertisers.
   
   This may not look like a big deal when you are a small blog but as a growing business, it is important to understand your customers and build a relationship with them. Systems like Trafficspaces allow you to do just that. Our API even allows you to get a data feed of all registered users and integrate it with your own system.
2. Increased Profit – This one is quite obvious. Get your own self-serve system and keep 100% of your ad sales revenue. It makes economic sense especially during these uncertain times.

In summary, there is a clear trend toward systems like Trafficspaces. We see it in the quality and quantity of enquires that come in every day. We welcome it and are prepared to satisfy the demand.

With the help of our existing users, we’ve launched a simpler ad campaign workflow, flexible pricing, discounts, coupons, branded storefronts, direct payments into your account and lots more.

Thanks everyone and keep the feedback coming.

Posted in Advertisers, Publishers, Self Service | Comments