Monetizing Your Blog for Dummies – Ad Servers

As many of you might know, private ad sales is my desired method of monetization to make money with my blog. I have only just begun to offer them so it will be interesting to see if my stats are up to par enough for someone to buy an ad spot on my site.

Are you thinking about private ad sales for your own site but don’t want to deal with the hassle of selling them, uploading code, collecting payments etc?

Do you want to sell or run ads on your blog but just not sure how? I came across a great tool that might be the answer to all of our problems. I am implementing it on my blog on a trial basis. If it helps me make money with my blog, it stays but if not then out it goes.

Before we get started, an ad server is simply a program or bit of code that will serve ads to an ad zone that you specify on your site. A number of different ad servers exist out there in the world and in some cases they can be complicated require that you install a script on your server etc. A daunting task for beginners but certainly not impossible.

An ad server that many of you are familiar with is AdSense. Unlike adsense the server we are talking about will show the ads that you choose for it to show and you aren’t held to the mercy of the contextual engine trying to figure out what your readers want. Bet you didn’t think it would be that easy did you? It is…at least it can be, depending on the service you use.

Until now I have been using static affiliate links for my ads on my blog. A few of them have converted reasonably well for my traffic level but still not consistently like private ad sales are capable of doing. If you can build your brand and traffic to the point that your ads are in demand then they can provide a very steady and lucrative revenue source for your make money blog.

As I stated earlier, I am going to experiment with and If you would, take a look at that Hostgator banner that I have at the top of the blog. If you look carefully you will see a small bit of text under it that says “Show Your Ad Here”. If one were interested in placing their ad there, they could simply click that little bit of text and be transported to a sales page where they can make the purchase, upload their ad and it will begin showing almost immediately.

This means that you can sell ad space on your site without ever touching the code. At least you can after you get your zones set up the first time. Once you are setup it’s autopilot from there. Really pretty cool if you ask me, but what’s the catch?

Well of course nothing comes for free and neither does this service. The advertiser will keep 25% of the revenue for the service so you will have to decide for yourself if it is worth it. I am willing to give it a shot and I LOVE no maintenance.

The deal gets better and better and you can read more about it at Show Your Ad Here but one thing that I really liked is that you can keep your own affiliate banner in place until someone buys the ad zone. Once they buy the zone then your ad will be replaced with the purchased ad. After the purchased ad expires, then your original ad banner will return to it’s spot.

No hassle and you ALWAYS have some kind of potential revenue maker on your site. No more need for those cheesy “Your Ad Here” banners you see everywhere.

Setup is a breeze and I was able to register and setup my 468 ad zone in about 15 minutes tops. If you really want to see how it works then purchase my 468 banner above for a GREAT deal. I set the price low simply because I want to make it as appealing as possible so I can see how how it works.

If it works as well as I think it does then I will change all of my ad zones over to this program.

Stay tuned for a future post and an honest, fact based review of the program. This isn’t a paid review or any kind of affiliate program so you’ll get my straight up opinion.

All in all I think it seems pretty sweet and the author of this program (Mark at 45n5.com) is working on a host of new features to come in the future. I would be happy to answer any questions in the comments section and if you have feedback, share away.

Remember…you can buy that 468 ad banner for a screaming deal. I will even throw in a site review with a permanent backlink from a soon to be PR5 blog.