How to Make an Awesome, Free Media Kit in Under Two Hours

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For site owners who have plans of selling ads directly to premium advertisers and weaning themselves off of ad networks such as Google AdSense, one of the first steps in the process is developing a media kit that offers a “snapshot” of your property and audience. This process can be intimidating if you’ve never done it before, so we’ve put together a guide and template. (By the way, MonetizePros members enjoy access to our Media Kit Generator tool, plus other monetization tools, insider reviews, and in-depth e-books: click here to sign up.)

Below is a step-by-step guide for creating a quality first draft of a media kit, including the resources used for various features of the document. You can view a PDF of our media kit, or open up a Google doc that can be edited to include your site’s information. (We don’t mind.) If you want some additional inspiration for an extended media kit, check out our feature article, Seven Media Kits That Make it Rain. 

We used the presentation option within Google Drive to create our PowerPoint-stye media kit. This is basically a cloud-based alternative to PowerPoint that can be used by anyone with a Gmail address. We selected one of the dozen or so pre-loaded slide themes (Paper Plane), though there are several sources of additional templates if you want to get even fancier.

Cost: Free, though you’ll need a Gmail account to create presentations (instructions here).

For capturing and editing pictures of your site, Awesome Screenshot is quick, easy, and free. We were able to take a picture of one of our more popular tools to include in the media kit, as a way to highlight the type of content that’s found on our site.

In addition to taking basic screenshots, this tool lets you crop, add text and shapes, and blur out any information you don’t want to share:

Cost: Free.

IconFinder has a huge library of icons that can be downloaded for free. There are some premium ones as well that sell for a few dollars apiece. We used this resource to find and download the icons used throughout our media kit to highlight various aspects of our audience.

Cost: Free for many of the icons, with some premium icons available for purchase (generally for $1 to $3).

Google Analytics is used by just about every major website to provide statistics about traffic. Once a line of code is installed on your site, you’ll get detailed information about how many visitors are coming to your site, what they’re doing while they’re there, and why they eventually exit.

There are dozens of metrics available from Google Analytics that can shed some light on the nature of your audience. Ideally, you’ll be able to identify a few that identify your audience as engaged, loyal, and fast-growing. Some to consider include:

Time on sitePageviews per visit% of Return VisitorsAverage Visits per MonthMonthly Unique Visitors / PageviewsGeographic Location

Cost: Free.

Quantcast can be used to get additional data about a site’s audience that Analytics can’t provide. The demographic information is pretty basic, but it’s enough to give a good snapshot of the audience coming to your site. Metrics available include:

AgeGenderEducation LevelHousehold Income

Quantcast can be up and running on your site in a matter of minutes, though you will need a bit of time to collect meaningful data about your audience’s demographics.

Here’s a sample screenshot of the Quantcast data for Goodreads.com:

Quantcast can provide additional detail into each of these categories, and also shows some of the other Web properties your audience likes, as well as trends over time.

Cost: Free.

In this media kit, we decided to include prices for each of the ad units available. Some publishers may not wish to have this information publicly available, preferring to share pricing info only when a serious request comes in. But if you do want to include, you may want to do some research on what reasonable rates for your niche are.

BySellAds, which functions as a marketplace for publishers looking to sell their premium inventory, is a good resource for researching appropriate CPMs.

Cost: Free (to browse at least).

Using only the free resources highlighted above, we were able to put together what we think is a pretty decent media kit that highlights our site and gives potential advertisers a good understanding of the value in promoting their products and services here. Feel free to flip through the presentation, or copy and edit the entire thing to showcase your own site.

 

How to Pick an Affiliate Marketing Offer

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For sites looking to monetize their existing traffic through affiliate marketing, a major determinant of success is picking the right offers to run. The difference in earnings from a bad offer and a good one can be enormous. Unfortunately, finding the “right” offer isn’t exactly easy; if you’re using an affiliate marketing network such as Commission Junction (now CJ Affiliate), SharesASale, or LinkShare, you will have literally thousands of affiliate offers available to you.

As with many aspects of Web monetization, the exact strategies will vary from site to site. There’s no universally superior affiliate marketing offer or merchant. There are, however, some general guidelines on factors to consider when evaluating potential affiliate marketing offers. We’ll dive into several of these below. We’re using screenshots from ShareASale throughout this article to illustrate the process, but the tasks and terms will be generally similar across the major affiliate marketing networks. (By the way, if you’re enjoying this article, you may want to subscribe to our free newsletter; we’ll send monetization tips straight to your inbox each day.)

The major affiliate networks will have thousands of offers available to you. The vast majority of them won’t be appropriate for your site, in the sense that the products or services advertised aren’t relevant to your audience.

One of the major factors that determines affiliate marketing success is the click rate on your site, or the percentage of your visitors who click on an affiliate marketing link. The more targeted and relevant the offers you present, the more likely your visitors are to click through to the merchant site.

Every network offers affiliates a way to filter through the numerous offers presented. Take the time to go through the various categories or search for specific merchants that you think would do well on your site. There’s no set of rules for filtering through the options; you’ll ultimately need to rely upon your familiarity with your audience and your gut feelings about what types of offers will perform.

If your site is more general in nature (e.g. a personal blog or general news site), you may have a bit more flexibility and a deeper pool of initial candidates.

The commission is generally the percentage of a sale that is paid to the affiliate for referring a customer. The commission percentage can range from the low single digits to more than 50%. (E-products generally have the highest commissions since the margins are close to 100%.)

Though commission rates are obviously important, this number definitely needs to be considered in connection with the type of offer. A merchant offer that pays 50% commission seems very attractive in a vacuum, but if the product offered isn’t relevant to your audience and the creative is no good the results will probably be uninspiring.

In other words, the equation for affiliate marketing revenue has several variables:

Revenue = Visitors x Click Rate x Conversion Rate x Average Sale Price x Commission

In many cases, offers with the highest commission may result in sub-optimal click or conversion rates. The commission percentage only comes into play if you actually generate sales.

Some offers will feature unique wrinkles in the commission structure:

Multi-Tiers: While most commissions are a flat fee, some offers will pay out different percentages depending on sales volume.

Bonuses: Some merchants will offer bonuses for reaching certain sales thresholds, creating another opportunity to generate revenue for major affiliates. For example, a company may offer a $500 bonus to affiliates that generate $25,000 in sales in any given month. While only a very small percentage of affiliates will ever hit this target, it can translate to a higher effective commission rate (the extra $500 on $25,000 in sales is effectively an additional 2% commission). Here’s an example of a bonus commission offer (in this case, $625 for hitting the $25,000 mark and $1,250 for generating $50,000 in monthly sales):

The presence of multi-tier pricing and bonuses can obviously increase the overall attractiveness of an offer.

The hardest aspect of an affiliate marketing offer to evaluate may also be the most important. Your ability to drive traffic to merchant sites via affiliate links is one of the primary revenue drivers, and it depends in large part on the tools you’re given. These tools are the advertisements merchants have available for affiliates to use on their site. The better the ads are, this more clicks they will get.

Networks will generally provide a preview of the creative files a merchant has before you sign up. There are a couple elements of ads to evaluate:

Technical aspects, such as sizeOverall quality

The first point is straightforward enough; affiliates need to identify offers that include ads that will fit easily into their site. For example, if your site has only 300×250 ad units you’ll want to stick only to offers that have a 300×250 ad.

Harder to evaluate is the quality of the ads.

Generally, larger and wealthier merchants will be able to spend the time and money to produce a wide variety of high quality ads.

Affiliates receive credit for a conversion by placing a cookie on the computer of visitors they send to a merchant site, allowing the network to attribute sales to specific partners. Many merchants will give credit for a sale to an affiliate even if the sale comes after the initial visit to the site. For example, assume:

Visitor clicks affiliate link on publisher site;Visitor browses merchant site, but doesn’t buy anything;Visitor returns to merchant site (by typing in URL) a week later and completes purchase.

Many merchants will still give credit for this sale to the affiliate, even though the visitor came directly to the site and not through an affiliate link when they completed their purchase. This is a fair solution in many cases, since many customers take time to make a decision and commit to a purchase. In the scenario above, the affiliate still provided a valuable service to the merchant–getting the customer to their site–and deserves to be compensated for that.

Here’s an example of a cookie that lasts for almost 6 months:

A 30-day cookie is the standard, but there can be quite a bit of variation here. Some cookies expire after just a week, while others run indefinitely. From an affiliate perspective, the longer the cookie length the better.

Many networks provide metrics on the earnings of other affiliates with certain offers. The standard metric is EPC, or earnings per click. This unit is generally presented as the total earnings for every 100 clicks received. An EPC of $97 means that for every 100 clicks on an affiliate link to that merchant, affiliates are generating $97 in revenue.

EPC can be converted to RPM, or revenue per thousand impressions, as follows:

RPM = (EPC  / 100) x (CTR x 1,000)

This assumes that you know (or can estimate) the click rate that an affiliate offer will get on your site.

This metric is a way of summarizing the conversion rate, average ticket price, and commission percentage. It does not take into account the click rate that an offer will receive. So while EPC is certainly a useful stat to consider when evaluating potential affiliate offers, it must be considered alongside the click rate an offer will receive. A great EPC combined with a bad click rate won’t translate to great earnings. (In other words, the highest EPC isn’t necessarily the best offer.)

Reversals refer to completed sales for which the commission is cancelled and returned. This can happen for a number of different reasons:

The order was cancelled by customer (and refunded by merchant);The transaction was a duplicate (i.e., customer card charged twice);The transaction was fraudulent;A violation of the merchant’s affiliate policy was committed.

Reversal rates are generally in the low single digits; it’s standard for about 1% of transactions to be reversed. If you see offers with extremely high reversal rates, that could be a red flag. It doesn’t mean you should necessarily stay away, but it’s worth understanding why so many transactions are returned. For example, there’s something strange going on with this merchant:

A lower reversal rate equates to higher revenues.

Affiliate marketing compensation arrangements generally fall into one of three categories:

Pay-per-sale (most common)Pay-per-lead (somewhat common)Pay-per-click (pretty rare)

The pay-per-sale and pay-per-click structures should be pretty obvious. Under a pay-per-lead arrangement, affiliates can get paid even if the merchant doesn’t generate any revenue. In most cases, this would involve earning a commission when a referral starts a free trial to a service. Even if they never pay for that service after the trial expires, the commission is earned.

You may eventually determine that certain types of pricing arrangements work better on your site and with your audience. Excluding pay-per-sale offers, however, will dramatically limit the pool of options at most affiliate networks.

Success in affiliate marketing ultimately comes down to finding the right offers for your audience, and effectively funneling your traffic to your merchant partners. Picking the relevant offers that feature attractive commissions is a tough process, but one that is worth spending a considerable amount of time on.

 

How to Use Autoresponders to Boost Revenue

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Though an email address may not seem like much–just one of hundreds of millions out there–it can be an extremely valuable asset. While many site owners spend a great deal of time trying to get new visitors to their sites, there generally isn’t much thought on how to get previous visitors to return to the site (and, ideally, engage at a deeper level). Today we’re going to dive into email autoresponders, a powerful tool for better monetizing your existing traffic base.

An autoresponder is a series of email messages that is delivered at pre-determined intervals. Generally, the clock starts when a visitor to your site signs up for a membership or newsletter; they’ll then start receiving a series of emails at times you determine.

For example, an autoresponder email sequence might look like this:

Immediately Upon Signup: Welcome email1 Day After Signup: Autoresponder email highlighting a free tool available on the site5 Days After Signup: Autoresponder email highlighting three pieces of great content10 Days After Signup: Autoresponder email highlighting another free tool14 Days After Signup: Autoresponder email pitching an upgrade to a paid membership

As we’ll discuss below, each of the bullet points above can potentially be broken down into its own autoresponder with a series of emails expanding upon the particular point.

(By the way, if you’re enjoying this article, you may want to subscribe to our free newsletter; we’ll send monetization tips straight to your inbox each day.)

In order to set up an autoresponder, you need only to have an email service provider. (We use MailChimp; instructions for creating an autoresponder are pretty straightforward.) You’ll have to make a few decisions as you go through this process:

What is the primary goal or the autoresponder?How many emails are included in the autoresponder?How frequently are autoresponder emails sent?What is the call-to-action (or desired recipient action) for each email?

In addition, you’ll obviously need to write subject lines and copy for each email in the series.

To show how you may be able to use an autoresponder to better monetize your traffic, think of the problem we’re trying to solve.

Problem: Most visitors spend only a few minutes on your site, and aren’t able to discover or fully appreciate all of the content you’ve created there. Even if they give you their email addresses, they’ll likely only ever see a small fraction of your site.

Many sites focus on stuffing visitors full of all of their content while on the site. That’s like trying to get them to drink from a fire hose.

 

Solution: Think of autoresponders as a more measured, gradual approach to selling a product or exposing your audience to your site’s content. Instead of trying to close the deal immediately on-site, you get a chance to make the pitch over the course of several detailed emails. You’re letting them drink from the fountain instead of the fire hose.

There are a number of different approaches to setting up an autoresponder. Your strategy should be built around one primary goal–an action you’d like to see the recipients of the autoresponder email take. For example, your primary goal may be for recipients to:

Upgrade to a paid membership (generating premium revenue)Click through and spend time on your site (generating ad revenue and increasing loyalty)Forward to a friend (growing audience)Share socially or link (growing audience)

For sites that sell a paid product, autoresponders can be a great way to gradually familiarize potential customers with the value your product offers. If your paid membership product has a number of different features (like this one), each triggered email can highlight the benefits of a singular feature. If your product has one primary feature (like this one), an autoresponder can be used to show different ways the tool can be used or to highlight success stories.

Our autoresponder includes an email highlighting our free Media Kit Generator tool. This is a tool that many new members might not see during their initial visit, but that many want to check out once they’re aware it exists on our site:

In other words, think of an autoresponder as way to walk potential customers through your landing page. Except instead of letting them read (part of) it in one sitting, you get to explain your product in a series of emails.

If someone signed up for your newsletter (or gave you their email address for another reason), they clearly liked something about your site. But odds are that most subscribers have not seen the best content and tools you have to offer on your site.

If you have one killer tool or article, it’s easy enough to funnel visitors there (for example, by linking to it in the nav bar, using a Hello Bar, or various other techniques). But for any property with several great resources (a term that can include articles, tools, e-books, etc.), it is always a challenge to get visitors to focus where you would like them to focus.

In other words, it’s difficult to highlight the best content you have to offer and steer visitors when they’re on-site. But autoresponders are a great way to do this effectively. By highlighting the best content on your site, you can increase quality indicators such as time on site. There are also some direct monetization benefits for sites that monetize via display advertising: more pageviews translates directly to more revenue.

For sites that already have a deep library, this approach allows publishers to leverage existing work. There’s no need to create new content; simply highlight the best parts of your site already in place.

We also have an email in our autoresponder sequence that simply highlights an article on our site. We’ve identified what we think is one of our most in-depth and useful guides, and crafted an email designed to get our subscribers to check it out. Success here is a simple social share or even a click-thru to the article:

Though we don’t focus much on linkbuilding or other aspects of SEO, it’s worth noting that there is a potentially significant (and positive) side effect. If you’re able to gradually highlight high quality pieces of content to the right people, you’ll probably be able to attribute some new inbound links to your autoresponder.

If you’re taking this approach, your autoresponder should include a series of emails highlighting what you think are the most “linkable” pieces of content you’ve produced.

For sites that monetize via affiliate marketing, an autoresponder can put several different affiliate offerings in front of subscribers over the course of a few weeks. There’s a fine line to walk in terms of being overly promotional here; if you’re shamelessly hawking products that you make a fee on, you’ll see some pretty high unsubscribe rates. But if done tastefully and in an informative way, an autoresponder can be a great way to showcase products and services that cut you in for a portion of the total sale.

Perhaps a better use of this technique would be to work an affiliate marketing-focused email into the autoresponder sequence. For example, after you’ve sent a few emails highlighting some of your best content you may send one that highlights some of your favorite tools and resources.

Most autoresponders (including a few of the examples below) borrow from a number of different strategies and thus seek to accomplish a number of different goals. For example, an autoresponder may focus primarily on highlighting or explaining free content and resources, with occasional plugs for paid membership upgrades or affiliate offers.

While we’re at it, here are some other ideas to include in an autoresponder:

Social: Invite subscribers to like you on Facebook, follow on Twitter, subscribe on YouTube, or connect on LinkedIn.Sister Sites: If you publish more than one site, let subscribers know about what the other properties have to offer.Coupons: If your site is set up to run sales where you offer paid products at a discount, an autoresponder can be a great way to encourage subscribers to take advantage.

When evaluating the success of an autoresponder, you’ll want to consider some of the obvious metrics such as open rates. In addition, there are some other stats that can give you a feel for how well you’re doing:

Completion Rate: Ideally, everyone who signs up for your subscription will receive the entire autoresponder chain. In reality, you’ll probably see some drop off along the way. If there is a big increase in unsubscribes at a certain point in the chain, you may need to tweak your strategy there.Click Rate: The goal of most autoresponder emails involves getting the reader to click through from their inbox back to your site. The percentage of opened emails that end up on the site is a good indicator of the success in this initiative.Conversion Rate: Ultimately, an autoresponder’s success is measured by the number of email recipients who convert to s specified goal. Detailed tracking can be set up here using Google Analytics so you’ll know exactly how efficient your email sequence is.

If you’re more of a visual learner, the image below might help to clarify the nuances of an autoresponder. This first one is from SmartPassiveIncome.com; it demonstrates a mix of free content with a regular “upsell” email designed to get subscribers to pay for a product:

Below is another example, this time of a more detailed autoresponder sequence used by Digital-Photography-School.com. This one also sprinkles in promotional emails with regular updates (i.e., free content):

If you want to learn more about autoresponder tactics, the best thing to do is to experience them firsthand. Start by signing up for these:

ProBloggerCopyBloggerKISSMetricsCrazy Egg

We’ve spent a considerable amount of time setting up an autoresponder for MonetizePros subscribers. We’ve created a great suite of tools to help with Web monetization, and we’re using our a series of triggered emails to explain to subscribers exactly what’s available to them. Our primary goal here is to get subscribers to come back to the site frequently and hopefully pass along our site to a friend or colleague. If you sign up for free MonetizePros membership, you can see exactly how the sequencing works and the emails are structured.

Autoresponders take quite a bit of thought and work to set up, but can be an effective way to accomplish a number of goals. Whether you’re looking to build links, grow your audience, generate additional display ads, or convert visitors and subscribers into paying customers, autoresponders can be an effective way to market your product.

 

How to Monetize a Forum: 50 Tips, Guides, and Resources

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They were the original form of online social media before anyone coined the term social media, and forums are still going strong. We know you’ve probably already read a lot about creating and managing forums; what you really want to know is how to make money from all your hard work. Here at MonetizePros, we’ve got you covered. (By the way, if you’re enjoying this article, you may want to subscribe to our free newsletter; we’ll send monetization tips straight to your inbox each day.)

TripAdvisor.com Forum

With so many active users and pages, you can make money directly off your forum. Use ad networks. Sign up to ad networks, such as Google Adsense, and let them do the leg work and find advertisers. It will cost you some of your revenue, but it’s an easy way to get started.Sell ad space directly to companies. Cut out the middleman, and agree on a CPM or CPC fee with advertisers directly. This requires more work, yet you get to hand-pick the ads, ensure they’re right your audience and keep all the money they generate. (Also see: Should You Sell Ads on Your Website Directly?)Mention products you affiliate-sell. Once you build trust with your audience, you can drop an affiliate link during a forum discussion if you know of a product that would be perfect for the person asking a question. Clarify that you’re an affiliate and explain why you think the product would be a great fit.Add a sub-forum that sells. Introduce a sub-forum that’s dedicated to nothing but advertisements. It could be a job board if your forum is for professionals in a given industry, or it can work as an e-store. Members who aren’t interested in advertisements will avoid this part of your forum, so this works best if you know your audience is on the lookout to make a purchase (or find a job).Add a sub-forum for product reviews. Encourage members to post product reviews and post some yourself. Add affiliate links to these posts when applicable.Turn links in user-generated content into affiliate links. Whether or not you create a sub-forum for this, members will post links on your forum. Switch those you can into affiliate links yourself or use software to automate the process.Invite industry leaders to live posting events and affiliate-sell their products. It’s a win-win situation: Members get their questions answered, industry leaders get exposure to possible new customers — and you get a happier community, a possible new connection and affiliate commissions.Sponsored sticky posts. Charge companies to stick a thread that advertises them at the top of your forum. It’ll be the first or second post on the page for a pre-determined period of time, no matter how many threads are started or updated.Barter advertising. Offer companies free advertising in exchange for them promoting you, too. Don’t limit yourself to the Web. Depending on what ad space on your site is worth, ask for advertising space in brochures or a booth at a conference.

Whether you read forum threads, create surveys — or, better yet, both — your forum is a rich resource of data, which you can leverage in several ways.

Learn what they want and create a mailing list opt-in they can’t resist. Forum members discuss what they like and don’t like about your industry, so it’ll be easy for you to figure out what they want so bad, they’d give their e-mail address for it. It’ll be much easier to sell through e-mail once they opt in to receive regular updates from you than it will through random ads on your forum.Learn what they want and create products and services to fill the gap they tell you exists. Or, better than the previous option, figure out what they want so bad, they’d be willing to pay for. Create what they want and sell it to them.Learn what they want and pitch a collaboration to leading brands or experts. You could develop products or services together, which could lead to earning money. It could also lead to promotional opportunities and establishing yourself as an industry leader, which could open up new monetization possibilities. Digital-Photography-School.com Forum

At times, you want to create a forum to support other ventures. In fact, a forum can be just the right addition to take your business to the next level.

Start a forum around your business. If you sell bicycles (online or offline), start a forum for bicycle enthusiasts. It will connect your brand name with your audience’s thoughts about bicycle and establish you as the go-to expert in the field. Plus, forums often come up in search engine searches because they’re updated often; so if you’re not getting enough search engine traffic, consider adding a forum to your company site.Run contests and games to create product awareness. Contests and games can generate more activity, which could be great for ad clicking and audience building. They could also help spread the word about your products, which would increase your client base and sales.Advertise your own company. Who says ads on your forum need to advertise other people’s businesses? Instead of relying on commissions, create ads that promote your own products and services and spread them around your forum.Offer exclusive offers or discounts to forum members. These offers could be available to anyone who happens to drop by the forum, to active members only, or to new signups (which would encourage registration).Use your forum to generate traffic to another site. You could do the selling there and leave the forum to member discussions. Unobtrusive ways to do this include creating a forum name that relates to your other site’s name, adding an RSS feed that links to your blog on the forum’s sidebar, and redirecting the forum to be a part of the main site’s URL (for example: forum.yoursite.com).Use your forum as a bonus offering when you sell other products or services. Offer to answer product buyers’ questions there. If joining your forum costs money, offer free access to anyone who buys a product from you. Once they have a positive experience in your forum, their loyalty to your business will grow. Set a time limit on the free access and, if they have a good experience, some customers will end up buying forum membership too.Enable easy opt-in to a mailing list during forum registration. Even if your forum is free, chances are it requires registration. Allow people to easily sign up to receive updates when they register. Then, use your e-mail list to sell directly to their inboxes.

 

Forums put you in a unique position, where you are constantly interacting with people who have an interest in your industry. Leverage this position to create larger profits.

Interview experts and broadcast it via a podcast or webinar platform. It will serve your community while giving you learning opportunities. If all goes well, you’ll be able to stay in touch with the expert and build a new business relationship.Hold an offline event or conference. Invite both community members and potential members to get to know each other and you offline, and network in person. This type of customer conference enables you to charge for event tickets, strengthen your community and brand awareness and/or sell your products live.Invite brands to your community’s offline conference. Sell brochure or booth spaces to companies and experts in your industry. You could also work with them on creating campaigns that combine the online and offline worlds. FreelanceWritersDen.com is a membership site with an active forum.

Any forum is a form of membership site, yet you can take it one step further and generate revenue through subscriptions.

Limit access to paying members only. If you have expertise in an industry, know industry leaders you could convince to regularly post on the forum or you’ve created extremely valuable content you could include there, consider closing your doors to non-paying forum members. You’ll start earning a reliable, recurring income.Go freemium. Include free sub-forums for people to try out your site and increase your traffic, and limit access to premium materials to paying members only. If you have a lot to offer, you can even have 3 layers: absolutely free with no premium access, partial access, and unlimited access.Make it cheap. Pricing decisions aren’t easy to make. Attract more members and lower your churn rate by making membership cheap to purchase. But blow buyers away, and make them feel like they’re cheating you out of a more deserving price by providing unbelievable value.Make it expensive. Decide on your business goals before deciding on a price. Consider building a brand of exclusivity and prestige (and back it up with unbelievable value). Fewer people will join, yet those that do might have money to spend on additional products. They could also have the money that entices brands with more expensive products and bigger advertising budgets.Limit number of participants. If you choose the latter approach, intentionally limit the number of participants, creating a waiting list that acts as an e-mail list and makes them want access even more — be it to your forum or to another product you offer meanwhile.

When you lead a community, and one that creates so much industry data, you pave the way to branding yourself as an expert. As a result, you’re creating a key to unlocking endless possibilities.

Soft-sell by leading the community. If you do nothing else to monetize your forum, ensure that people associate you with the forum. Keep your contribution consistent and valuable, and place a clear link to learn more on how you can help.Hold an offline conference solely for industry professionals in your niche. Showcase data you’ve generated from your forum about these professionals’ customers and prospects, presenting yourself as an expert and opening new possibilities for you in the industry.Run other companies’ forums. Use your experience of running a successful community on your own forum to pitch yourself as an expert and do it for pay for other businesses.

Yes, there are a lot of forums out there, yet not all of them do everything they can for their business or audience. Be the one that does, and you’ll see your income soar.

Provide an enjoyable mobile experience. The number of people using smartphones and tablets to access websites is constantly growing, but most forums fail to cater to their needs and end up losing members. Stand out in the crowd by having a forum that delivers an easy, enjoyable mobile experience.Add social proof. If you and/or your forum have been featured on top sites or media outlets, or won awards, add these places’ banners to your home page. This is an easy way to stand out in the forum crowd and create trust, which leads to members sticking around, clicking on ads and making purchases.Start threads around keywords you want to rank for. As time passes and more quality discussions take place on your forum around these topics, Google will present your threads to its visitors. Success here can be translated both into greater monetization on your own forum and into consulting opportunities for other companies.Start threads about hot topics. Set Google Alerts and follow Google Trends and Twitter Trends. Start threads about hot topics that relate to your industry. This will establish you as an up-to-date expert and be another step toward standing out in the Google crowd.Let your forum act as a focus group for brands. Hold contests to select forum members that will get to test new products. The members will then create testimonials — forum posts, blog posts, videos — so that there’s plenty of “regular people praise” on launch day. Charge brands for this access and ensure that all testimonials come with a mention, link or watermark that references your forum. You’ll get great PR and be able to present your forum as one that’s associated with brands and gives out perks, which could help you grow the number of forum participants and product buyers.Enable sharing of posts with special offers or contests on social media. Let forum members easily share forum posts that include perks on social media platforms to allow more people to buy from you.Enable signing up with social media. Signing up with e-mail takes several actions, and you risk losing new members. Let people sign up quickly with their social media accounts, especially when you know most of them are coming to take advantage of a special sales offer.

You don’t have to be a big brand to earn from someone else’s community. There are plenty of ways to monetize forums you don’t own.

Choose your user name carefully. While forums don’t often allow blatant self-promotion, some will let you get away with a user name like “Iceland Tour Guide”. If that’s the case, know that it’ll be easier to notice (and penalize you) when you promote yourself, yet if you add value to the community, people will start seeing you as an expert and might inquire about your services via private messages.Offer a discount code in your signature. Most forums allow a signature, which shows up below each one of your posts. Add information there about who you are and what you’re selling, and include a discount code “for my friends from the forum”.Promote occasionally. Once you’ve built trust, you could casually mention something you’re selling, or send a member a private message with a link to learn more. This is trickier to do on someone else’s forum, but once you’re a valued member of the community, most people won’t mind, as long as you don’t do it too often.Volunteer to be a guest expert and sell your product. Offer the forum owner that you’ll answer members’ questions in a live posting event. At the end of the event, offer members a chance to buy a product or a service you sell, or refer them to your own forum. Clarify in advance that it’s OK to make these offers in exchange for your time and effort.Give away something for free to the forum’s community. Promote your business or forum by offering something for free on another forum in exchange for some promotion. Make it a contest that gets your name out there to as many people as possible. FirepoleMarketing.com Forum

We know it’s easier to find information on blogs and social media than it is about forums, so we’ve done our research and dug up the best of the Web for you. 3 Easy and Effective Forum Monetization Tips. MonetizePros: Our own Michael Johnston breaks down 3 great, usually overlooked tips that can help you stop struggling to monetize your forum.How to Make Money with Membership Websites. Carol Zombo: This 58-page SlideShare presentation is for those who intend to charge a forum entry fee. Among others, get inspired by offline membership programs, gain ideas for types of content to include, and choose from membership models.Tap User Psychology to Build an Indestructible Community. ProBlogger: In a guest post, Richard Millington of FeverBee, and author of Buzzing Communities: How to Build Bigger, Better and More Active Online Communities, tells you how to create emotionally-connected, enduring communities that will follow you anywhere. His post might focus on blogs, but his points can be more easily applied in forums.ForumCon. An annual conference for forum professionals, where companies like Google, CNet and Adobe present. ForumCon also has useful blog and YouTube channel.How to Find a Profitable Membership Niche. Jeremy Gislason: This 26-page SlideShare presentation gives you a quick guide to setting yourself to success by choosing a profitable niche, finding products that are already selling well — and those that advertise them and might be willing to buy advertising space from you, too.How to Improve the Success of a Membership Program. Entrepreneur: Dave Lavinsky encourages membership program owners to measure the number of subscribers, cancellations and average subscription lengths, among other metrics. Whether you charge for membership or not, measuring how many members remain active on the site and for how long can help you create a better management strategy that will support greater monetization.How to Monetize Your Online Community. Ning: Ning, a company that helps other companies create their own online communities, hosts Patrick O’Keefe, author of “Managing Online Forums” and “Monetizing Online Forums”. In this 1 hour video presentation, Patrick talks about forum ads, affiliate links, in-text monetization, product-related discussions, audience segmentation, working with brands, membership programs, and more.Getting Value out of Forums. Firepole Marketing: Sean D’Souza founded 5000bc, a forum for small business owners to come together and thrive. In this podcast, he tells Danny Iny what it takes to keep a community going strong and profitable for more than a decade, even when he takes his annual three-month vacation.

Forums might seem like one of the most challenging online platforms to monetize, but their targeted, passionate audiences can open a wealth of opportunities for you. Mix different options together, consider your audience’s benefit first, and you’ll soon discover that the sky is the limit.

 

10 Free Tools to Help You Sell More Ads

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If you run a website that has a large and valuable audience, there is the potential to unlock significant value (i.e., cash flow) by weaning yourself off of ad networks and selling your valuable inventory directly to premium advertisers. Unfortunately, making this switch is much easier said than done; selling your ads is a long process that requires a great deal of time and effort.

While there’s no substitute for time and hard work, having access to some handy resources can help you work more efficiently. Below are 10 tools we’ve identified that can help publishers market their site, get in touch with the right people, and ultimately close a deal.

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If you want to sell ads at any sort of scale, you’ll eventually need a media kit that highlights your audience and helps advertisers figure out exactly what services you offer. Below are some tools that can be useful when building your first media kit. (Also see: Seven Media Kits that Make It Rain.)

Free Media Kit Tools. This list at Hubspot has a number of great tools for putting together a media kit. Particularly useful are Skitch (for creating screenshots), IconFinder (for getting free images), and FontSquirrel (for finding creative and free for commercial use fonts).

We also have a free Media Kit Generator that can get you a basic version of your media kit in no time.

Finding appropriate advertisers for your site can be a time consuming process. An ideal advertiser is one who would both be a good fit on your site (i.e., has products and services that appeal to your audience) and who is willing and able to spend money on marketing.

Here are a few of the tools we like for lining up advertisers and tracking down the appropriate contacts:

SellerCrowd. This online community of media buyers is a great resource for finding out almost anything you need to know about an advertiser, a campaign, or an agency. All you need to sign up and sign in is a LinkedIn account; then you’ll have access to thousands of threads with detailed information about the appropriate contacts, relevant email addresses, and preferred strategies.

In most cases, there will already be answers on the site to most questions you come up with. But in the event it hasn’t been asked before, it’s pretty easy to throw it out to the community and get a response back.

AgencyCompile. This research tool is simple but incredibly useful. Users can enter in a brand (e.g., General Mills) and see all the agencies who work on that brand’s marketing campaigns. The database can also be searched by agency, showing all accounts that are held at a particular agency. (This can be useful if you have a good contact at a certain agency, and want to know if there are any accounts that may be relevant to your site.)

There are also advanced search options that can be extremely useful in targeting certain locations or certain types of advertisers. AgencyCompile is completely free, which makes it one of the most useful tools on this list. (A few of the ones highlighted below offer limited free functionality.)

WhatRunsWhere. As the name suggests, this tool shows you where advertisers are running. Publishers can use this tool to see who is advertising on similar sites in their niche, generating leads of relevant companies who are known to be spending to run online campaigns.

This tool isn’t free–in fact, it’s quite expensive (starting at $150 / month). But it is possible to get a three-day trial for just $1.00; that’s enough time to let you gather quite a bit of information for almost nothing.

RedBooks. This online directory has information on more than 15,000 advertisers and 10,000 agencies. If you have identified a company but aren’t sure who the correct contact is, this site can be a great way to get your hands on a name and email address.

RedBooks isn’t free, but they do offer a 48-hour free trial (or 10 profile views). If used wisely, that can get you quite a bit of valuable information. Starting a free trial there appears to be a manual process; it takes a while to actually get started.

Moat. This site provides a similar service, but is 100% free. It’s pretty easy to use: enter in a brand, and you’ll see all the advertisements being run by that brand currently (including a list of sites where they’ve appeared).

This can be useful if you’ve identified a company you think would be a good fit for your property, but aren’t sure how active they are with digital advertising campaigns.

LinkedIn. This might seem like an obvious inclusion, but it’s worth highlighting. LinkedIn is a great resource for tracking down names within the marketing department of a company or within a certain division of a media buying agency. The free version of LinkedIn gives you most of what you should need here, as long as you don’t mind stalking potential leads.

Tracking down the appropriate contacts for an advertiser is often very challenging. But the really tough part comes once you have names and email addresses; then you’ll need to get them to respond and eventually strike up a conversation.

Staying organized and disciplined is a big part of the ad sales process; you’ll need to be persistent in your outreach. Here are a few good free resources to help keep your prospects straight:

Zoho CRM. This free CRM is part of the Zoho suite of business products. While Zoho doesn’t have all the features of solutions such as SalesForce, the price (free) is much better.

If used correctly (i.e., in a disciplined, organized way), Zoho can be a great tool for keeping your leads organized and gradually chipping away at your “wish list” of advertisers.

Insightly. This online CRM lets you manage contacts, existing deals, and potential new advertisers. Insightly is cloud-based (which means you can access it from anywhere) and can scale to accommodate a larger sales force down the road. Insightly is integrated with Google Apps, Gmail, and Outlook.

Boomerang. This free extension offers up some awesome emailing capabilities, making it easier to see who has read your emails and reminding you when it’s time to get in touch with potential advertisers again. You’ll have the option to return messages to your Gmail inbox if no one replies within a set amount of time, which can be very useful when trying to juggle a number of different advertiser leads.

Boomerang has a basic subscription level that is completely free. If you start using certain functionality regularly, however, you may have to upgrade; although a $4.99 monthly membership gets you just about everything you need.

In addition to the tools above, we’ve created a number of guides and tutorials to help through the ad sales process. Check out the links below for some of the resources we have here at MonetizePros.com:

 

Here’s How You Get 5 Ads Above the Fold (Without Cluttering Your Site)

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When it comes to maximizing display ad revenue, there is often a temptation to move ads higher up on the page to boost visibility and clicks. In general, the higher up on a page ads appear, the higher the percentage of visitors who will see and interact with them. But maximizing both short-term and long-term revenue isn’t as simple just throwing a bunch of ads at the top of a page. Doing that brings a couple of risks into play: for starters, you risk your site getting penalized by search engine algorithms that are on the lookout for ad-heavy layouts.

But more importantly, moving a bunch of ads above the fold can lead to a big decrease in performance. If the above-the-fold section of your site is heavy on ads and light on content, visitors are likely to either hit the back button or scroll down to find the content (which moves the ads off screen). In other words, the ideal solution is to have ads both: 1) above the fold, and 2) next to your page’s content. That’s obviously tough to do, since there is a limited amount of real estate available.

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Below is an example of a site that does a pretty good job accomplishing both of these goals. There are five ads above the fold, but also a substantial amount of content:

In addition to several well-placed ads, there is a ton of content above the fold. That means that this site is likely at zero risk of any penalty, and that visitors will spend time consuming the content in close proximity to ad units.

Included in our count of five ad units are a custom search engine box (labeled as #1 above) as well as a 160×90 link unit box (labeled as #3). Both of these generate revenue by leading visitors to landing pages where ads are presented, and both have the potential to generate attractive, incremental RPMs.

There’s also a smaller 160×130 rectangle, which helps to get the ad count up while keeping the space requirement down.

It pays to be creative with your site layout and ad implementation. Featuring both quality content and quality ads above the fold is a tough task, but clearly not impossible. As you browse the Web during the course of your daily work and pleasure, keep an eye out for implementations that effectively position both quality content and relevant ads in places where visitors can easily consume them both.

 

How to Establish a Direct Affiliate Marketing Relationship

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The two primary players in any affiliate marketing arrangement are the content-creating affiliate and the product-selling merchant. But as affiliate marketers know, networks such as Commission Junction and LinkShare are key components of the “ecosystem” as well. Just as many sites that monetize via display advertising attempt to establish direct relationships with advertisers and cut out ad networks, successful affiliate marketers may wonder about eliminating networks and working directly with their merchants.

In this article, we’ll explore the options for affiliate marketers looking to cut out networks entirely and establish affiliate relationships directly with merchants who will compensate them for any sales generated.

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To understand the potential value in establishing direct relationships with merchants, a quick refresher course on the economics of affiliate marketing may be useful. We like this visual as a way to summarize:

What the chart above doesn’t show is the role of the affiliate marketing network (e.g., Commission Junction or LinkShare). From the publisher’s point of view, the affiliate network is involved very early on in the process, generally supplying the ad creative and affiliate links used to refer traffic. They’re also involved at the last (and most important) step in the process: a portion of the commission earned by the affiliate goes to the network who matches them up with merchants and handles the various administrative functions.

Whenever there’s a network in the middle, the payout to the publisher will be diminished by the “cut” that player takes. So there is an opportunity to make more money in affiliate marketing by cutting out the middleman network and keeping the entire commission intact for the affiliate (publisher).

But establishing direct affiliate marketing relationships is extremely challenging for a number of reasons, which we’ll get into below. While there are certain instances when a direct relationship makes sense, most affiliates will be better off accepting that networks are part of the equation and focusing on finding the right merchants and maximizing referrals.

If you’re attempting to establish direct affiliate marketing relationships, it’s important to fully appreciate the value that networks provide. To over-simplify, the network exists to:

Match up merchants and affiliates;Handle the administrative aspects of an affiliate-merchant relationship;Protect affiliates.

The “matchmaking” service–offering access to a pool of merchants–is the role of a network that likely comes to mind first. But the administrative workload handled by networks can’t be overlooked; they handle all the tracking, reporting, and payment processing that arises during the steps shown above. While that might not seem like much, it can add up to a significant amount of time each week.

Affiliate networks also offer a certain degree of “protection” in the sense that they ensure revenue you earn is properly attributed and paid out. When you start establishing direct relationships, you put yourself (to some degree) at the mercy of the merchants you’re able to land as partners.

There is a reason why many major merchants prefer to utilize affiliate marketing networks instead of setting up their own infrastructure. Just as the administrative burden can become overwhelming for publishers with multiple relationships in place, it can be too time consuming for merchants as well. Maintaining direct affiliate relationships involves building out an infrastructure to track referrals, calculate commissions, and process payments. While that may sound like a relatively straightforward process, it can become a major investment with plenty of potential complications and liability issues.

Even eHarmony, one of the Internet’s largest affiliate merchants, uses Commission Junction to power its affiliate relationships:

Many other major brands that use affiliate marketing take a similar approach and let one of the big networks do the heavy lifting for them: see DirecTV (CJ), Best Buy (LinkShare), and Overstock (LinkShare).

Many major merchants use multiple affiliate networks in order to maximize their reach. HootSuite is one such example; they’ll work with affiliates through either Commission Junction or ShareASale:

Of course, there are some companies out there who run their own affiliate programs without the help of a network. Below is a list of just a few of them:

(We have a forum thread going with a list of direct affiliate programs; if you know of another, please add it there!)

If you want to uncover more merchants who partner directly with affiliates, just keep your eyes open. When you see affiliate links, do a quick search to see if the related merchant runs their own program. (We came up with the list above by reviewing a few of the bigger affiliate marketing blogs and investigating the most prominent affiliate links on those sites.)

Direct relationships between merchants and affiliates will generally develop in two (very different) scenarios:

An affiliate generates a huge volume of monthly sales and commissions; orA merchant has a small operation and a very limited number of affiliates.

Let’s start with the first scenario above. Suppose an affiliate is generating $100,000 in monthly revenue for a merchant, and getting $25,000 in monthly commissions. In this case, the network between the two may be taking $10,000 a month for its part in the process. In this case, the merchant may attempt to go around the network and set up a direct relationship with the affiliate–perhaps with a 30% commission.

Note that merchants reaching out to establish direct relationships with affiliates will only focus on the “whales” who generate the most revenue. While it’s possible to run a few affiliate marketing relationships directly, opening up this benefit to everyone quickly becomes overwhelming.

At the other end of the spectrum is the small merchant who is only willing or able to work with a handful of affiliates. In this case, the merchant and affiliate may come to an agreement and utilize a “low tech” solution to determine commissions earned (e.g., a custom referral path and an earnings statement powered by Google Analytics). This type of affiliate relationship will typically develop when there is a logical affiliate relationship between two parties, but the merchant isn’t interested in opening up the affiliate program to a wide range of partners via an affiliate network.

The vast majority of affiliate relationships are run either through networks or through custom platforms established by merchants. There’s a reason for that; these types of arrangements are the easiest to manage, and allow scale for both merchants and affiliates.

But there will be instances where an ideal merchant isn’t active on an affiliate marketing network and doesn’t have their own platform in action. There may be instances where a potential merchant partner doesn’t even know what affiliate marketing is.

If you have identified merchants for whom you think you could generate substantial revenue through an affiliate marketing relationship, there’s no reason not to attempt to set up a direct relationship. There’s also not much magic to pursuing this type of arrangement; if there isn’t a pre-existing relationship, start by reaching out to your potential partner and telling them a bit about your site.

From there, it’s some good old-fashioned business development. A few tips / pieces of advice:

Gather as much information as possible about their current marketing plans. How are they generating sales / leads now? Do they have any affiliates? Are they open to more?If you’d be the first affiliate, make it as technologically simple for your partner as possible.Be prepared to explain exactly what affiliate marketing is, and how it can benefit them.

In some ways, trying to establish a direct affiliate marketing relationship with a merchant is a lot like trying to get an advertiser to run a campaign on your site. But there is a major difference here that you should consider when reaching out to establish direct relationships: the biggest hurdle to overcome from the perspective of the merchant isn’t a cash payment (as it is with advertising) but rather an administrative burden.

In general, affiliate marketing relationships will fall into one of three categories:

Facilitated through a network such as ShareASale, Commission Junction, ClickBank, or LinkShareRun on the merchant’s in-house affiliate platformCustom deal set up directly between two parties

The vast majority of affiliate marketing relationships will be established either through a network or through the generic, impersonal interfaces of the companies who have established their own platforms. While the opportunity to generate additional revenue exists if networks are cut out of the picture, the substantial benefits they offer, including administrative responsibilities, makes them a pretty vital part of the affiliate marketing ecosystem.

When opportunities to establish direct relationships and negotiate customized commission deals exist, there is likely already a relationship between the two parties. The biggest hurdle to overcome here is generally the administrative and technological burden, since there are no payment required unless revenue is generated.

 

What’s the Best Advertising Network for Your Website?

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This is a question that’s been asked by millions of website owners and online entrepreneurs over the years. While there are a number of different monetization methods available–such as affiliate marketing and e-commerce–most online properties generate a substantial portion of their earnings from display ads served through networks.

There are a number of factors that impact display ad revenue, and the choice of network is definitely one of those. So this is a very important question to ask–and it’s also a tough one to answer. We’ll do our best to highlight some of the best display ad networks out there, and make a recommendation for specific steps. (You can also skip straight to our Bottom Line, which includes a detailed 10-point plan for picking an ad network.)

Before diving in to the specific networks, we should explain the primary factors we consider when evaluating the attractiveness of an ad network. There are five primary points of evaluation for any ad network:

This is obviously the big one; the more an ad network pays out for every impression you serve, the more attractive it is.For many publishers, ad quality is equally as important as the bottom line earnings figures. Most publisher would prefer to serve clean, quality ads from premiere brands instead of the sleazy “one weird trick ” ads that seem to be everywhere now.Some networks make it much easier than others to get up and running. The amount of time and assistance from signing up to serving your first ad can vary dramatically across networks. For publishers who don’t have extensive technical skills, this factor can be particularly important.Some ad networks give their partners the ability to customize almost everything about their ads, from the size and shape to the types of ads allowed to run. Others offer almost no customization opportunities; you can either run their ads or not.This feature is more important for publishers planning to spend a meaningful amount of time optimizing their ad implementations; better reporting makes it easier to see what’s working (and what isn’t) and spot opportunities for improvements.

Before we dive in to some specific recommendations, we should give a brief overview of the ad network landscape. There are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of ad networks operating currently. Most of them are generally worthless, offering very limited earnings capabilities with clunky user interfaces and limited transparency.

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We’ll focus below only on the higher quality ad networks that, in our opinion, are actually worth using. These opinions are based on our personal experiences with each of these networks, and provided objectively. There will of course be publishers who have had different experiences, or who may have had some success with networks we don’t even cover here. If so, we’d love to hear about it; leave a note in the comments, or put up a post in our display ad forum.

To make a broad generalization, there are two ad networks that are head-and-shoulders above the rest: Google AdSense and Media.net. These two networks maintain the deepest pools of advertisers and seem to have the best technology, resulting in relevant ads served and high payouts to publishers.

AdSense is the largest ad network in the world; they paid out more than $9 billion to over 2 million publishers last year. With an average payout of less than $5,000 per publisher partner, AdSense clearly works with publishers of all sizes. AdSense is great for small publishers because there is no minimum number of pageviews required. If you have a Google account and a site that meets their quality standards (i.e., isn’t in a restricted niche), you can be up and running in a matter of minutes.

Below we outline why AdSense is the best ad network in our opinion:

Earnings: AdSense generally offers the best CPMs of any ad network. This is attributable to a number of factors, including: 1) generous revenue split (68% to publishers); 2) deep pool of several million advertisers; and 3) superior technology that serves relevant and targeted ads. While CPMs vary by site and niche, AdSense will generally beat all other options.Ad Quality: Google has fairly high quality control thresholds, meaning that the ads running on AdSense are generally not spammy or low brow. There’s also a dashboard that allows publishers to block specific advertisers or entire niches (e.g., personal fitness products).Ease of Setup: While you’re unlikely to get any assistance from a human, the process for getting approved and completing the initial setup is easy enough. There’s a massive amount of documentation around the ad setup process, though some degree of technical knowledge is required.Customization Options: One of the major advantages of AdSense is the extensive control publishers have over ads. Tweaking the type, color, and size of ads is a pretty straightforward process.Reporting Detail: There is also extreme customization available within the reporting interface, allowing publishers to get data on just about anything they would want.

For both large and small publishers, it is very hard to beat what AdSense has to offer. In our opinion, no other ad networks do; AdSense is the most popular for a reason.

Biggest Advantages: Competitive earnings, extreme customization options. Deep pool of advertisers + superior technology = relevant ads, higher earnings.Biggest Disadvantages: If you do have any questions about your AdSense account, getting in touch with someone to help you through them is next to impossible, though there is an impressive amount of documentation and a number of active forums.Read our in-depth review of Google AdSense.

Medit.net is a collaboration between Yahoo! and Bing, Google’s two largest competitors in the search engine space. Though this network is beginning to serve more “traditional” banner ads, the business has historically focused on Keyword Blocks that send visitors to a landing page full of relevant ads.

To the right is an example of one of these blocks, and below is a sample landing page where visitors are directed after clicking on one of the “ad topics”. (Read more on how link units work.)

Earnings: Media.net isn’t always mentioned in the same breath as AdSense, but the earnings capability here is just as good. This network will earn many publishers equivalent or even better RPMs relative to the Google display ad network.Ad Quality: The implementation of the keyword blocks shown above may be a bit of a turn-off to publishers who would prefer to see image-only ads. While Media.net has a deep pool of premium advertisers, the appearance of the ads isn’t necessarily great.Ease of Setup: Getting approved for Media.net is a straightforward process, and getting ads up and running is very straightforward as well.Customization Options: Media.net gives publishers a fair amount of control over how their ads look on the site, presenting options for selecting style and color. There is no control, however, over the specific advertisers and niches that appear within your site.Reporting Detail: The reporting for Media.net is a bit delayed, which can be frustrating. But otherwise, the granularity is pretty good (though not as detailed as AdSense).Read our in-depth review of Media.net.

Media.net does do some things better than AdSense. Publisher support is a great example; even small publishers have no trouble getting in tough with a human being to help troubleshoot issues, something that is next to impossible with AdSense. If you don’t have the time or interest in attempting to maximize your network earnings, Media.net may be worth trying out as a primary partner. If you have an audience of a decent size, you should be able to get optimization suggestions from an account rep. Those suggestions, which can translate into meaningful increases in earnings if implemented properly, aren’t going to be made available to the vast majority of AdSense publishers.

Beyond AdSense and Media.net, the remainder of the ad networks out there generally won’t come close to matching up. Earnings will be significantly lower, the quality of ads will drop off, and the details and timeliness of reporting will decline as well. We’ll mention some quick thoughts on these below:

When discussing display advertising, many publishers still think of traditional banner ads (e.g., 300×250 rectangles and 728×90 leaderboards). In reality, however, the “display advertising” umbrella now covers a significantly wider range of monetization techniques and strategies. And there are a number of ad networks that offer niche display advertising packages:

For premium brands–high quality sites with a large audience–it may be worth expanding beyond the usual ad network suspects. There are a couple of major ad “marketplaces” that allow publishers to showcase their ad inventory to media buyers and advertisers interested in establishing a presence there:

BuySellAds: We’ve mentioned this site before as a great resource for intelligence on CPM rates. Publishers can list their inventory here, and interested advertisers can find it by searching through different niches and topics. Judging by the number of “Sold Out” placements on this site, publishers seem to have decent success in getting hooked up directly with

Advertisers have the option to spend anywhere from $100 to $100,000 per month on this site, so there’s a chance to get in front of both big and small clients.

iSocket: This platform is similar to BuySellAds, functioning as a marketplace where media buyers can browse higher quality publishers and purchase ads on a specific site. Publishers are able to set rates for certain ads and packages on their site, and will then receive a message when interested advertisers want to book that position.

If you’re able to get approved for both, the best approach for monetizing your site via display ads from networks will be to use a combination of Google AdSense and Media.net ads. For a site with two to four standard ad units, we’d suggest the following 10-point approach to setting up an ad network. These are presented in order of difficulty / time commitment and importance. In other words, everyone should do the first step, but most won’t make it to step ten (and that’s perfectly fine):

Open an AdSense account, create your ad units, and get them running on your site.Experiment with the settings (color, style, etc.) of these AdSense units until you find a combination that generates the highest RPM. (This feature can help.)Open a Media.net account. Start serving Media.net ads in one or two of the units that was previously running AdSense.Experiment with the settings (color, style, etc.) of these Media.net units until you find a combination that generates the highest RPM.Split test ad units between the different networks, filling 50% of the impressions with AdSense and 50% with Media.net. If there is a clear winner, shift 100% of impressions to that network if possible. (Note that you’re not permitted to have more than three AdSense units per page.)Create AdSense link units and add them to your site.Add a Custom Search Engine to your site.Create a profile with an ad marketplace (BuySellAds or iSocket), and list your inventory there.Experiment with other ad networks (Chitika, Kontera, etc.). We doubt any will beat the baseline you’ve established with AdSense / Media.net, but ongoing experimentation is always a good idea, particularly if you’re looking to supplement (rather than replace) AdSense and Media.net revenue.Read our guide on 101 Ways to Make More Money With AdSense, and optimize where appropriate.

If you have specific questions about a strategy for your site, post a thread on our forum. (You’ll need a free membership; signup takes about 30 seconds.) Someone from our community will chime in with guidance.

 

How to Monetize YouTube Videos

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Video continues to become an important part of a well-rounded online strategy. As advertiser demand skyrockets and the means of consuming online content continues to evolve, more and more sites are starting to regularly produce video. While video monetization is still a relatively novel concept, the amount being spent is growing rapidly and there are a number of success stories already.

To put the video advertising industry in perspective, here are a few stats:

(By the way, MonetizePros recently launched a YouTube channel where we’ll be publishing video tutorials; subscribe for free to get all the latest.)

Monetizing YouTube videos is actually very straightforward, primarily because the options for doing so are very limited (for now at least). YouTube content creators really have no choice but to monetize through the YouTube Partner Program, which is essentially Google AdSense for video content.

For now, YouTube content creators channels don’t have the option to sell their own video ads on their videos. As we’ll discuss more below, there is really only one decision to make: whether or not you want to allow specific types of ads to appear in your videos. From there, the strategy for increasing revenue becomes pretty simple: get more views of your videos.

In order to have ads appear within your YouTube videos and start generating revenue, you’ll need to join the YouTube Partner Program. In addition to allowing for monetization via ads, this will unlock some useful tools as well (such as annotations within your videos). If you reach the point where your videos have logged 15,000 watch hours over a three-month period, you will get access to technical and strategic YouTube resources such as the YouTube Space program. (For a 60-second video, this translates into about 5,000 views a month.)

In order to most efficiently monetize your YouTube videos, you’ll want to have a YouTube Channel set up to keep everything you’re producing organized in one place. Once that channel is up and running, kicking off monetization is pretty easy. From the YouTube Partners page, click on the relevant link under the “Monetize your videos” section:

From there, you’ll have to agree to some terms of service and then will be given the option to select which type of ad formats will appear within your videos:

There are a couple points worth highlighting here:

Publishers have the option to choose what types of ads will appear on their videos. If you’re interested in maximizing complete views and giving the best possible user experience, you may want to de-select the TrueView in-stream ads (these are the full screen video ads that let you skip through after a few seconds).Ads with product placements in them aren’t allowed under the terms of service. In other words, you can’t run YouTube videos that have ads already built into them.

Once you’ve gone through this process, you should see ads appearing on your videos almost immediately. The last step to get paid is to connect your YouTube account to an AdSense account (or set one up if you don’t already have one).

On a YouTube video page, ads can appear in two different forms (videos or standard banners) in three different places. Video ads (similar to TV commercials) will appear as “pre-roll” before the video starts playing:

Traditional banner ads also appear on many video pages. These generally come in the form of a 480×70 ad within the video player (#2 below) or a standard 300×250 rectangle in the top right of the page (#3 below):

 

The YouTube dashboard features an Analytics section that will summarize your earnings. Again, monetized YouTube accounts must be associated with an AdSense account in order to receive payment. All earnings are remitted through Google AdSense.

There are really only two factors that impact earnings from YouTube videos: the number of views your videos get and the cost per click associated with the ads shown.

Unfortunately, YouTube monetization is unique in that there are very few choices publishers can make and no real room for optimization. This differs quite a bit from AdSense (or other ad networks) where publishers can customize every aspect of the ad experience by choosing ad sizes, styles, and positioning within a page. (There are so many options for AdSense customization that we recently published 101 Ways to Make More Money with AdSense.)

With YouTube, there are no real opportunities to monetize more efficiently. Users can opt to allow TrueView in-stream ads (as shown in the screenshot above), but beyond that the monetization aspect is largely out of your hands.

In theory, you can figure out which niches offer the most attractive payouts using the AdWords tool’s CPC estimate as a proxy for earnings potential. For example, we see that the search term “New York hotels”:

Has a much higher suggested bid than does the term “Notre Dame football”:

In other words, a YouTube channel covering New York hotels would probably generate more revenue per click than a channel about Notre Dame football. Advertisers are willing to pay more for traffic interested in the former topic, since these visitors can translate into meaningful revenue.

There are some obvious problems with simply chasing CPCs. Many of the topics associated with the highest CPCs are extremely competitive, meaning that you’ll have a tough time getting your video seen. Moreover, it’s tough to create high quality, engaging videos on topics that you don’t know much about.

Making a few dollars of revenue on YouTube is easy; you can be up and running as a partner, pump out a few videos, and have your first ads appearing withing a day. The tough part is making enough money to support yourself full time. In a way, YouTube is a lot like professional baseball: a few stars make it big and get rich, but most toil in obscurity and retire without ever coming close to the big leagues.

Let’s put some more concrete figures around YouTube earnings potential:

Most publishers earn between $0.30 and $2.50 CPMs from YouTube. (I.e., they make between $0.30 and $2.50 for every video 1,000 views; this tool can help you figure out revenue potential.)Some publishers are definitely getting rich from YouTube; the average of the top 1,000 channels is $23,000 of monthly revenue.According to Google, “thousands of channels are making six figures a year”.30% of the YouTube videos account for 99% of total views.

It’s very difficult to track down updated information about the average YouTube video, but the reality is that most videos posted on the site get fewer than 1,000 views. Here are a few older studies showing the disproportionate allocation of YouTube views:

In other words, it takes a lot of video views to make a meaningful amount of money on YouTube and the vast majority of videos published receive a significant number of views. Using the YouTube earnings calculator, a video with one million views might only make the creator $300 in total revenue:

That may be a harsh reality check for content creators who have big dreams of opening up a new revenue stream. But the fact of the matter is that only a very small portion of YouTube partners make more than a few hundred dollars in revenue from the program before giving up and focusing elsewhere.

Of course, there are other ancillary benefits to maintaining an active YouTube channel. Specifically, a YouTube channel can be a way to get your content in front of additional subscribers, boost your position in search results, and increase the time visitors spend on your site. In other words, the real money to be made with YouTube is indirect: it comes in the form of more visitors and a more engaged audience. We set up a MonetizePros YouTube channel not to get rich off of video ads, but to carve out a new platform to share our content.

For the time being, YouTube monetization is a very simple equation. Making enough money to support yourself from YouTube videos, quite simply, requires a huge number of video views. The first few dollars of revenue generally come quite easily; set up is minimal, and there are only a few steps required to get up and running. But cashing a big paycheck from YouTube requires considerable time, effort, talent, and a bit of luck.

 

14 Creative Ad Units To Include In Your Next Ad Proposal

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While most display advertising revenue is generated through traditional banner ads, revenue from less traditional advertising implementations is growing significantly. Many publishers who sell directly to advertisers would like to expand beyond the IAB standard ad units in their proposals, but struggle to come up with ideas that excite advertisers without being too overwhelming from a technical perspective.

There are multiple benefits to including non-traditional placements on an advertising proposal. First, these placements help your proposal to stand out; most advertisers are always on the look-out for new ideas, and are anxious to try new, creative ideas. Second, because many of these implementations create additional ad “inventory,” they can increase your overall earnings even if the number of visitors to your site remains steady. In other words, they can help you make more money from your existing traffic base. (By the way, if you’re enjoying this article, you may want to subscribe to our free newsletter; we’ll send monetization tips straight to your inbox each day.)

You’ve probably come across ads that pop up over a website for a few seconds. While many visitors may view these as obnoxious, they are very effective. Below is the ad that shows up over Entrepreneur.com for a few seconds when visitors navigate to that site:



Many advertisers love these types of ads because they’re hard to ignore (meaning that they know their messaging will at least be seen). These should be used somewhat sparingly in order to maintain a good user experience, but can definitely generate some incremental revenue.

More and more sites (including this one) are now using Hello Bars to drive visitors to important parts of their site. While this implementation is most commonly used to highlight internal features (such as a membership or newsletter subscription), it can easily accommodate an advertiser’s messaging as well.



Below is another slightly different implementation of a similar idea. This may be easier to implement for many advertisers since it utilizes a standard size of creative (in this case, a 728×90 leaderboard):



A number of sites use “pop-ins” in the corners of their pages to present visitors with ways to click through to other popular pages on the site. This implementation can also be used as part of a package for a third party advertiser.

Here’s an example of this in use on Wired.com. This ad is small enough as to not be too obnoxious or obtrusive, but is effective because it naturally draws the eye of visitors.



For sites that have their own video, inserting pre-roll ads (i.e., as that run before the video plays) can be a very attractive offering to advertisers. Inserting video ads is pretty straightforward with services such as Viddler.

ESPN.com sells quite a bit of pre-roll video; they have video players integrated into most of the site, and generally run an ad before a clip from one of their shows:



For some advertisers, it may make sense to target only visitors in certain areas of the country. Most ad serving platforms, including DFP, allow publishers to go all the way down to the city level.

If you have a potential advertiser who is promoting a product or service that will have regional appeal, offer to target specific regions of the country for their campaign. Here’s a shot of the control panel in DFP that allows you to target only specific ads with your campaign:



For more ways to boost performance, also see our feature on How to Improve Advertiser Performance.

Allowing advertisers to sponsor articles or groups of articles is a great way to get them additional exposure without creating too much new content. There are a number of different ways that this can be packaged and presented; below is an example from Entrepreneur.com, with three different advertisers sponsoring articles:



A “welcome page” ad implementation effectively creates a brand new page whose primary content is an advertisement. Forbes.com uses a welcome screen to show an ad whenever visitors navigate to their site:



After a few seconds, visitors are automatically forwarded on to the page within Forbes.com that they were attempting to visit. This high impact placement may lead to some user frustration, but is a great way to prominently position an advertisement. If you run this type of ad, be sure to charge a significant premium for it.

For sites that send out an email newsletters, there’s an opportunity to include advertiser banners within the body. This high visibility placement is a great way to monetize email, and something we do with out mailings:



If you’ve developed a mobile app on any platform, you have a great line item to add to any proposal. Offering an advertiser the ability to “own” your mobile app is a very attractive line item. This is generally done through banner ads (the 320×50 is the standard for mobile devices, while a 728×90 works for iPads).

Below is an example of a sponsored app in action; Dunkin’ Donuts sponsored the “Beat the Streak” app created by Major League Baseball:



If you have a large list of email subscribers, you may be able to “rent” out this list to advertisers. If a potential advertiser is active in email marketing, offer to include sponsored emails on their next campaign. This essentially involves you (the publisher) sending an email to your subscribers on their behalf. The example below is from WhichTestWon, a site to which we subscribe. They occasionally send sponsored emails on behalf of third party advertisers:



For more on how to sell and send these, see our Ultimate Guide to Sponsored Emails.

If you have a large social media following, you may be able to monetize it by making posts that mention an advertiser. Here’s an example of a sponsored tweet from Perez Hilton, who was compensated to ask his followers to engage with the official Twitter handle for an upcoming theatrical release:



We’ve covered this topic in great detail in our feature article 101 Ways to Make Money with Twitter.

Running online conferences or webinars can be a great way to generate some additional revenue. If you can present on an interesting topic and get a decent number of visitors to attend, offer up a sponsorship role to an advertiser.

Clickz.com runs webinars regularly, and signs up premium advertisers (such as IBM and Bing) to sponsor these events:



If you have a paid product on your site, you can offer an advertiser the opportunity to “sponsor” a free trial for all visitors. This basically involves making the premium features of your product free for a set length of time, and acknowledging the advertiser as the one responsible for delivering this benefit:



Many sites now offer advertisers a way to take over the white space around their normal site with hard-to-ignore ads. This practice is known as “skinning” the site, and it results in a high impact ad around the borders of the normal site dimensions. Here’s an example of a custom skin on IMDb.com to promote a TV show:



This takes a bit more work from a technical perspective, but can be easily replicated once you’ve figured out the initial specifications.

The opportunities for creative ad placements continue to multiply; there are dozens of unique ideas that publishers can use to improve the advertiser experience as well as their own bottom line. If you’re interested in expanding your offerings beyond banner ads, the best advice we can give is to keep your eyes open when browsing. There are creative implementations all around you; take note of those that you think are well done and easily added to your site.

Have another idea for a unique line item to include on a digital ad campaign? Let us know about it in the comments!