Monetize Your Site or Blog by Connecting to Advertisers

With so many social networking websites like StumbleUpon, Digg & Reddit and other microblogging services like Twitter, Tumblr & FriendFeed and of course not to forget the traffic exchange sites like BlogExplosion and EntreCard, there are lots of ways to bring traffic to a blog or site these days.

But as any expert, or even a newbie blogger may know, the real question is: is that traffic getting converted into earnings? If you're thinking 'no', this article is meant to help you change that to a 'yes'.
The problem: Although you're getting thousands or maybe millions of page views and visitors every month, nobody knows exactly how much traffic you're getting. Thus no advertiser contacts you despite those clusters of 125x125 "Advertise Here" banners already placed on your blog.

Reason behind it: People know the value of blogs/websites which receive huge traffic every month. However, they seldom care to download the entire list of the top 100K websites from Alexa for example and check which ones allow for advertising, nevermind contacting them to check their 'real' traffic statistics and finally placing their ads. It's the natural tendency of all humans to get things done the easy way. Instead they usually try to look for simpler methods of filtering these websites according to their requirements.

Finally the Solution: As hinted in the reason above, we need a solution which brings your blog/site to the attention of advertisers in an 'easy' manner. The solution is actually a list of websites, which are the meeting places for publishers (bloggers/webmasters) and advertisers. Here goes:

BuySellAds.com (recommended)
TechnoratiMedia.com
AdEngage.com
DigitalPoint Forums

Sites like these have always been around, so what's so special about the above?

For advertisers: It simplifies the the selection process by categorizing all member blogs/sites according to different criteria like Impressions/month, CTR (click through rate), CPM, Alexa ranking, etc. So advertisers can easily select where to advertise their products.

For publishers: As a publisher (specially true to BuySellAds.com) you are given total control to set specs such as the advertising dimensions, number of banners on your blog/website, etc. You can also set different prices for different ad zones (remember that a 25% commission is charged by BSA and around 40% by Technorati Media & AdEngage, so you may want to make your prices slightly higher than usual)

Moreover these ads will be banners and NOT text-link-ads so there's no risk of getting penalized by Google. Also the banners appearing on your site/blog are all controlled by JavaScript which further avoids any SEO issues.

With AdEngage and TechnoratiMedia (relatively new), the choice of ad sizes are quite limited, but of course the most famous 125x125 ad size is present. TechnoratiMedia, being new, doesn't have many advertiser accounts right now, and the response time taken by AdEngage is much more than that of BuySellAds.
In the DigitalPoint forums , as other forums you can only place your ad as a thread which may/may not come in to the notice of advertisers. If your thread doesn't get frequent replies it will easily get lost in the ever-coming stream of new threads. Digital Point is being referred in this post as it is one of the most famous forums among webmasters.

NOTE: As of now there are no 'exclusive' restrictions from any of these sites. Hence you are free to use several advertising networks on your site/blog at the same time and diversify yourself between these advertising programs.

V.Divya Sai is a Scientist and Biotechnologist with a keen interest in Blogging. He has founded the blogs Bikers Blog and Blogger Templates & Widgets with the main aim of helping other bloggers to uplift and optimize their blogs. BloggerStop.Net is mainly beneficial for people who blog on Google’s Blogger platform. A list of important tutorials can be seen here: Blogger Help.