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: