Quick Tip of the Day: Direct Advertisers

Whether you are a domain owner or a web developer, the best advertising deals are usually direct deals with advertisers. In many cases affiliate relationships pay more, but for the sake of this post, I will focus on direct advertising deals since that is guaranteed revenue.

The first thing you need to do is obviously build a website on your great domain name. Once you have your site with unique content, add some Adsense blocks on your site. I generally recommend waiting until you are receiving search engine traffic before doing this to make certain that Google and Bing will see that you don’t have a “spammy” site with the sole objective of monetizing the traffic. I don’t have quantifiable evidence, but I’ve been told they may rank these sites lower.

Once your Adsense blocks are showing relevant advertising, you should make note of all of the advertisers whose ads are showing on your site. Make sure you have both text and graphic banners, as some advertisers might choose one over the other. You should also contact friends and colleagues in different areas of the country and ask them to email you those advertisers as well, in the event that there is some geo targeted advertising.

I would then do some research on the advertisers, and contact the companies who most likely have the smaller marketing department, allowing you to get directly in touch with the decision maker. Let them know they are currently advertising on your site via Google, and you would be willing to give them great space on your site. You might even offer exclusivity if you can make it worth your while financially.

Do some research to estimate what they are paying (using Adwords) and offer them a compelling deal. You might also want to keep at least one Adsense text block so you can keep an eye on new advertisers.

If you can make a good argument about why an advertiser should be advertising on your website, you just might score a great deal.

As an FYI, you don’t necessarily need to install Adsense on your site, as you can do the same thing simply by searching Google, although you won’t see banner advertisers.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

11 COMMENTS

  1. Great point I have always looked at google search but never at the adsense on my own site

    I have found that another way to find advertisers is to look at sites like yours and see who is paying for ads on others sites and send them an email or call

  2. You have to be careful with selling display advertising too soon with a new launch. In advertising sales…you can always lower your price, but it is difficult to raise your prices unless you can show some solid CTR or solid growth in traffic to your site as a whole.

    I always like the idea of using a directory to build a base of revenue while your site and traffic are getting to the point where you can have more clout to get higher rates on your display ads.

    There is also a good argument for not monetizing until you get to a solid level of traffic.

  3. I’m currently getting over 2000 visits a day to my fairly new site (1 month old) I’m now thinking of ways to monetize the traffic. Do you have a specific way of approaching the potential advertisers – E-mail, Phone, and what sort of details do you give them? Thanks for any advice

  4. It is always smart business to “cut out the pimp” or middleman at every chance you get.

    Very few middlemen add enough value to make their fees/costs worth it.

    One of the numerous benefits of the internet is that it has really phased out the need for middlemen in many areas.

  5. Don’t be so fast to cut out the middleman when it comes to selling advertising directly. BIG MISTAKE!

    I deal with lots of domainers every day and very few have the selling skills you need to pitch and close corporate advertisers.

    It’s well worth the money to either hire your own ad sales reps or contract with an ad sales firm to do the pitching and closing.

    First off prospecting is time consuming as all hell and secondly a good ad sales rep or firm will already have existing relationships with set ad budgets ready to go so the trust is there.

    @GhettoCaveMan – cut out the “PIMPS” and you cut out the guys who got the connects with the big money Johns. If it was so easy to sell sex there wouldn’t be any “PIMPS” in the first place.

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