The other side of the coin in online marketing is ‘online marketing real estate’. Online marketing companies are constantly looking to find high traffic websites on which they can market their clients’ products and services. Further, if you have a large database of clients/users that have opted in to receive further information, all the better.

So what’s important to take into consideration when looking for advertisers?

Niche

Is the topic/theme of your website conducive to advertising? Do you have a sufficient sized community that regularly visits the website? It’s important to note that if you’ve chosen a popular niche that your website is clearly a cut above the rest in terms of relevance and being up to date. Search engines will award your with traffic if they realise that you’re providing your users with relevant content and that in turns bring traffic which brings me to my next point.

Traffic

Targeted traffic is very important. If you can show potential advertisers that you’re receiving a big load of relevant traffic each month in a specific niche, you have feet to stand on.

Know your users

You’re flying blind if you don’t know who’s using your website. First and foremost ensure that you have proper stats installed (try Google Analytics to start with). Secondly, try and capture some of your market via user registrations and newsletter subscriptions, as that will enable you to better profile your website users. Profile your users according to their preferences as well as age, gender, location and more. Try and find a balance between being overbearing and something your users will feel comfortable in sharing. If you can present a breakdown of your profiles and number of users within those profiles it will help agencies match potential advertisers with your website.

Ensure you can handle ads

Ensure that your website layout has dedicated areas for advertising. Don’t overdo it of course as clutter will cause your users to go blind to your ads. Do you have ad serving software in place? There are small and large scale solutions for serving ads. The simplest is Adsense of course, but if you really want to manage it properly a proper ad serving platform is required. Something like DoubleClick can be of great use and advertisers look out for credible ad serving solutions as part of their decision making processes. These ad serving platforms also provide you with great analytics which you can provide to potential advertisers.

Channels

Your website is not your only media channel, if you have a large subscriber database you can open up revenue opportunities by selling ad space in your newsletters as well. Further you can segment the different sections on your website as high target niches for advertising to better serve advertisers. Develop your channels over time and monetise accordingly!

Talk to potential advertisers

Once you have everything sorted on your website, start targeting potential advertisers. Advertising Agencies are generally a good bet, but online marketing agencies even better as they generally handle online media buying for their clients. Also prepare to pay commissions to agencies that handle their client accounts. Generally they would negotiate a cost per click or per 1000 impressions for placing ads on your website.

It’s not always easy to build up such a successful platform, but it can surely be lucrative once you get to that stage.

Talk to PERONii Solutions if you’re interested in a consulting session on monetising your website or if you’re in need of online marketing specialists to look at promoting your products and services

If you’re an company looking to do some affiliate marketing, check out TrafficSynergy.Com. Their Adrands program is going to give Adsense a go since it’s almost fully customisable (the ads that get displayed on affiliate sites). Obviously affiliates looking to make some extra moolah can sign up and start serving ads in minutes.

I was intrigued, not only by the actual DVD, but by the way this DVD was marketed, almost solely by word of mouth. I had at least 5-10 people ask me whether I’ve seen ‘the Secret’. If you haven’t seen it, go and watch it. Interesting stuff. Now there is some follow up material with an affiliate program, so check out some new lessons from the teachers of the Secret…

I’ve come accross an interesting case study of someone doing a test to see if they can create ‘something of nothing’ on the internet. Jennifer Laycock, editor of Search Engine Guide tried it out and it makes for interesting reading. Especially for small business owners wanting to do things on a shoe string budget. Get the full article here.

As a regular listener to Cape Talk I was pleasantly surprised to hear Tom London chatting to Netucation about Blogging and how to make money on one’s blog. It’s not as simple as just placing adsense, but of course there are some cool ways of making additional income. It takes alot of hard work if you really want to make money, but the fact that you’re earning dollars obviously helps us South Africans.

If you’re just a little tech savvy you can easily set up a blog and add Adsense (link in the right hand column). You can also join affiliate programs like Commission Junction to increase ad revenue, but it’s something more hands on.

Thanx for helping us educate the market Tom!