How to Implement Advertising on Your Website Or Blog and Create Your Own Advertising Rate Card
By: Valto Loikkanen

Building your ad positions with the help of ad networks

Begin by joining Google AdSense, an affiliate program (or programs), and/or one or more ad networks where you can register and start displaying their ads in your site. Some ad networks have limitations or eligibility requirements that you must meet, like the number of visitors per week or Google page rank, but services like Google AdSense and most of the affiliate programs don't.

The next step is to design your ad positions on your website or blog layout on all the pages where you want to allow advertising, or directly on your website or blog template. Using these ad networks, you can get all your ad positions filled out and begin receiving advertising revenue.

Once you have chosen and created your ad positions, you are already well on your way to showing potential advertisers the type of advertising options you can offer, like where the ad positions are on your site and what ad sizes (various banner dimensions) are available.

Depending on which ad networks you use and what tools they provide, you will get lots of statistical information about how the ads are performing in different ad positions on your website. Given the ad network and settings that you have selected, you will also start to understand what kind of advertisements from which advertisers are starting to show up on your website or blog, and where.

Determining your advertising rates

Establishing your advertising rates will probably feel challenging. When determining your rates, you have many options for getting information, but the most important tip is to get it started somewhere. The easiest way is to start is to calculate the revenue you are receiving via the ad networks. The revenue from direct sales should be somewhat higher.

Using the statistical information that you receive from the ad network(s) you are using, you can identify the best-performing positions and target those when you first start to create your own ad rate card for attracting direct advertising on your website or blog.

You should also search the web to see what the average advertising rates are on other websites or blogs in your subject area. Understand that just like there are multiple ad types, sizes and positions, there are also many kinds of price models and revenue models, like CPI (cost per impression), CPM and CPT (cost per mille and cost per thousand), CPC (cost per click), and PPC (pay per click). Other rates are based on duration, like per week, per month, etc.

The right advertising rate depends very much on your audience and readers. The more targeted your website or blog is on a particular topic, the more valuable it is. So the right price depends on the volume of your visitors and the profile of your readers. The better you can match advertisers and readers, the better the relationship will be for you, your readers and for the advertiser.

Creating your very own ad rate card

After you have determined your ad positions, pricing models and advertising rates, you can easily create your own rate card. If you are looking for sample ad rate cards, you can find them in ad rate card directory, which has many rate cards created by other people. In this directory, rate cards are done based on a rate card template. You can use this template to create your own ad rate card. All you have to do is fill out a few web forms.

Advertise your advertising

After you have created your rate card, you should advertise your advertising opportunities on your website with a "view ad rate card" or "advertising details" link. To promote your advertising opportunities, you can also add your rate card to directory for free. Advertisers use rate card directory to search for sites where they can advertise.

Now you have opened the door for potential direct advertising on your site and created a professional way for advertisers to find your site, study the advertising opportunities you are offering and contact you easily.

Offering direct advertising opportunities on your site is not really a big or burdensome step if you already have some ad network ads on your site. Naturally you replace network ads with direct ads only if/when you get them. This way, all your ad positions are generating maximum advertising revenue all the time.

There are good, free tools for managing your ad positions and ads from multiple sources. A tool like openX, can automatically switch your ads depending on the given criteria. For example, you can have AdWord ads running in one position and then you can add direct ads into the circulation with a higher ad revenue value. After the CPM or duration has ended for that particular ad, the tool switches back to lower-revenue ad.

Selling and promoting your ad positions

The next step beyond opening the door for potential advertisers to contact you is to promote and sell your ad space (or have someone else do it for you), but that's only if you choose to go this far. Giving advertisers an option to buy direct does not mean that you have to start selling, too.

If you would like to sell, then you need to see which ads are performing well on your site, based on the ad networks' ad statistics. Contact those advertisers or their competitors directly to offer them your best positions with a fixed term. This allows the advertiser to "own" your best position and shut out the competition

If you are not so keen to sell, you can try to make a tempting offer, which lowers the barrier to contact you and get ads created. You could try to offer free advertising for one week, 10 CPM, or something similar to get things started.