Making money online through Adsense and other ad networks

If you are tired of AdSense, Chitika, Text-Link-Ads, YPN or just about any online ad networks that cuts a big chunk out of your ad payout, you may want to consider acquiring for your site some direct advertisers.

However, doing that is not as easy as it sounds. A host of factors should be considered before you can directly communicate with advertisers and get your full ad payout.

Yaro Starak's latest Blog Traffic King newsletter update talked about the introduction to the know-hows of getting advertisers to directly sponsor your site. One of his bits of advice include that it would be easier to get direct advertisers if you have at a certain traffic range.

I generally advise bloggers to consider selling direct advertising at around $50 a month for a banner campaign or a text link once you have about 500 visitors per day. You can start earlier and charge less, even $10 a month just to get you some cashflow - it never hurts to try - just be careful to consider what value you offer advertisers.

Advertisers usually want traffic or leads or exposure and if you can't deliver this then you probably shouldn't sell ads directly. You want to foster a long term relationship with advertisers so they become dependent cashflow sources, and to do this you must deliver results for them. If you make them money they will of course continue to support your blog.

If you already have 1000+ readers then you definitely have the potential to start making a consistent income from direct ad sales. You could generate as much as $1000 additional in-come from selling banners and text links directly to advertisers and this money doesn't have to come at the expense of your current monetization strategies. You can still use ad brokers and Google AdSense AND sell ads directly to brokers.

Also, if you want another direct ad sales model, Amit Agarwal proposed another method of knowing how to charge direct advertisers:

"While advertising rates may depend on lot of factors like site traffic, your niche, ad placement and even visitor demographics, we can use contextual advertising programs like Adsense / YPN or impression based programs like Adify or TribalFusion to estimate the advertising potential of our blogs.

Say you have a 125x125 space in the left sidebar where you are seeking advertisers. Run an Adsense campaign in that space for a week and track the performance using Adsense channels.

After a week, get the average CPM value for that space (this data is available in Adsense advance reports under eCPM).

Armed with the Adsense CPM figures, you can easily quote rates that are 20% lesser than Adsense."

Which do you think  is better?

image from Funny Part