Most blogs today are monetized either in full or in part by banner advertisements. Bloggers who sell banner ads have a lot of options in terms of monetizing their sites. I first started selling ads on my main website by hard coding advertisers into my pages and then changing them manually each month. While this works, it’s not the most efficient.
When I started selling ads I wanted to handle everything myself, rather than using a third party service that would take a portion of the ad revenue. I was greedy! This is a personal choice that will vary from blogger to blogger, but I’ve since changed my approach and I’m now using a third party service on all three of my blogs. At a certain point the ease of this approach made it worth the money to go with a third party. I have no preference, and I don’t think any approach is better than another, it’s just a matter of what works best for you in your specific situation.
The following services will not only help you to display the ads on your blog, but they’ll also help you to sell ad space. Although they take a cut of the revenue, the idea is to save yourself the time of managing the ads and to take advantage of their marketplace to earn higher dollar amounts, which may offset the commission that they take.
BuySellAds
I started using BuySellAds several months ago on one of my sites. I was skeptical of the service at one point. Like I mentioned earlier, I handled everything manually at my primary blog, so I figured I would test out BuySellAds.
BuySellAds takes 25% of the ad revenue, which is reasonable, but their system makes the process easy for advertisers and for publishers. It’s nice to check your email and see that an ad has been sold and is already being displayed (you can set them to require your approval or to display automatically) without any effort of your own.
My experience with BSA has been very positive overall. The customer service is great if you have any problems, and it’s very easy to set up quickly. From my observations it seems like most of their market belongs to tech-related blogs or tech-savvy audiences. For bloggers who want an easy hands-free approach to selling ads, I recommend trying buy sell ads. One of the nice things about their service is that it’s not limited to 125 x 125 ads, you can specify the dimensions of the ads.
Performancing Ads
Performancing Ads was launched a few months ago, and they seem to have been pretty successful so far. Performancing, of course, is a Technorati Top 100 blog with a large and established audience of bloggers. I haven’t personally used the service, and the terms listed on their website are somewhat vague, in my opinion. With Performancing Ads you can either sell 125 x 125 ads, or you can participate in a traffic/ad exchange with other publishers. Published opinions of their service are very mixed.
Blog Ads
Blog Ads is an invitation-only ad network. Their commission of revenue is 30% for those blogs in their network. You can get accepted into their program by being sponsored by someone that you know, or you can contact them and they’ll notify you when a sponsor becomes available in your niche.
Ad Serving:
In addition to the marketplaces listed above, bloggers can also take advantage of ad servers that are available to help them manage and track results, although they will not sell the ads for you. Some of these options are more involved than the average blogger would need, as they are intended to be a comprehensive solution for larger sites.
OpenX
OpenX (formerly OpenAds) is a free, open source ad server with plenty of potential. It offers advanced inventory management and targeting tools as well as stats and reporting. It’s a great option for those who have serious online businesses, but probably more than what’s necessary for the average blogger.
Google Ad Manager
Google Ad Manager was launched a few months ago and has been perceived to be an “OpenX killer.” Google Ad Manager is also a free ad management service with all kinds of options. When it was launched I signed up for an account to give it a try, but I decided it was more than I needed at this point. It has lots of options for companies that have a team of people selling ads and just about any tool or report you can imagine. My opinion is that small bloggers are better off with a simplified solution since all the bells and whistles won’t even be used.
Got any experiences managing your ads...please share them with us. I'd like to hear from you.
