Should You Sell Ads on Your Website?

You know, back in the early days of blogging, the quickest and most popular way to make money was to offer ad space on your blog.

Everyone was doing it and eventually, the blog ad marketplace became overwhelmed.

So the real question is, should you sell ads on your website in 2018?

Hopefully, I can answer that today.

Let me start this off by talking about some friends of mine who run blogs that get hundreds of thousands or millions of visits a month. Some of these friends do sell ads on their sites.

But the catch is, the advertisers they’re attracting are paying a couple pennies per click or a couple dollars per one thousand impressions. You get the idea.

The issue with that model is that the advertisers are making far more money than the owner of the website running the ads. If your website isn’t pulling in hundreds of thousands of clicks each month, you’re not going to be raking in much dough. So in a lot of cases, running ads is a lower for of website monetization and you’ll need to supplement your monetization strategies with affiliate marketing or – even better – selling products or services of your own.

That said, it’s still a form of revenue that doesn’t cost you a dime to implement. So if you run a site that is already monetized by selling products or services and aren’t afraid of sending visitors off-site by clicking on other people’s ads – it might be worth your while to sell ads on your site.

The smartest way to go about selling ads on your site is to test visitor behavior out.

For example, if someone is a continual repeat visitor and they never opt in to a lead or buy a single product form your site, you should show segment that person and show them ads from relevant companies.

Many sites will do this with traffic coming in from impoverished countries. Their testing shows that site visitors from these areas simply don’t purchase products. But show them an ad to another site they might click on and BOOM – you’ve at least made a little profit off that otherwise dead-end lead.

The gist of this entire post is that selling ads on your site is a decent way to supplement your revenue, but by no means should it be your primary source of site monetization.

Furthermore, you should never START with selling ads on your site as your main monetization model unless you’re looking to see what kind of companies would be interested in selling ads on your site so that you can, in turn, sell similar ads to other sites.

It’s sneaky but effective! You can then copy your competitors’ advertising model and make it better.

Hopefully, you found this article helpful and informative. If you need help selling ads on your site, feel free to reach out below!