In the increasingly crowded online ad market, the ability to stand out from the competition has never been more important. David Donnan, managing director, Igentics, offers some tips for publishers to get advertisers flocking to their site.
1 – Know your readers
The first and most important thing to consider when you’re looking to generate advertising revenue from your website is that you must have a core visitor group – preferable a large one – before any advertisers will be interested in significant investment.
Of course the bigger your audience, the more money you can generally make from advertising. However, it’s not always about numbers. Many brands will be more interested in exactly who your audience is – for example, a brand looking to target the under-25s are likely to buy space on key celebrity / entertainment blogs, in addition to the more standard online sites they know have huge visitor numbers.
Therefore, before approaching any advertisers, you should analyse the people using your site and get an understanding as to which brands would gain from advertising on that site. This will let you narrow down your list of advertising targets – meaning you only approach the brands that you know would benefit from being seen by your audience.
2 – Prove yourself
The next step is proving that your site will be an ongoing success in itself. Many websites, from blogs to e-commerce sites, are launched everyday and the majority fail to really take off.
With so much competition, it’s tough to differentiate but this is the only way to build up a loyal following and ensure that your visitor numbers grow. A website won’t survive for long if it relies on new visitors. It needs to hook its visitors in to make sure they come back and thus the site is able to build and prove to potential advertisers that they will get ckick-throughs.
To impress site visitors, it’s vital that your website looks good and is designed to make browsing as easy as possible. The homepage should be un-cluttered and easy to navigate. The first thing an advertiser will do when considering purchasing space on your site is visit the homepage, so it needs to be appealing.
3 – Keep things fresh
Another step to attracting advertisers is to ensure your website content is updated regularly so that people visiting your site are not seeing the same information as they did the previous week or month.
If the content is engaging enough, visitors will keep coming back for more and you’ll have a stronger offering to approach advertisers with. Advertising can be highly lucrative and the best way to attract the right brands is to make sure your site is attractive and they’ll therefore want to be linked to it.
Once this is in place, you should go to them with a clear understanding of who your audience is and therefore what you offer the advertiser. Get that right and you will have a foot in the door.
By David Donnan
Managing Director
Igentics
www.igentics.com
