Advertising seems like a way to make some easy money with your website, but it is not easy as you may think it is. Still want to try? Pajama Mommy is here to help! Here are nine things I think you need to have on your advertising page to make your website attractive to advertisers.
1. A description of your site. Why do you need this? You want potential advertisers to know what you aim to do with your website. You don't want people to just look at your site, think it's popular, and buy advertising.
2. The approximate number of readers and their primary interests. Advertisers want to know who is visiting your site and what they like to read. You may have a parenting site for moms, but if your audience is made up of childless single women, why would someone want to advertise parenting goods on your site? Run a few polls, visit the websites of your commenters, track which posts get the most comments, and figure out who your audience is.
3. Find out your Page rank, Alexa rank, and Technorati rank. A little knowledge in the wrong hands doesn’t help anyone. People seem to think that certain things mean more than others. If you are connected to ranking sites, make sure your advertisers know it, and update it regularly.
4. Ways someone can sponsor your site. Advertisers may want their product mentioned on your site but think they have to pay to get it on there. That isn’t always true. Let advertisers know if you accept product reviews, contests, sponsored posts, text-link ads, banner advertisements, etc. If you do require payment, give them options -- and always make it cheaper than your competition.
5. A contact form. Having an easily accessible contact form has increased my number of inquiries. Once they have read all of your information, make it easy for them to get any additional information they need. Beware of spam catchers; I have found that some spam-catching programs don’t work and people have issues with them. I don’t use them on my site because it deters people from trying to reach me if they’ve been tagged as spam multiple times.
6. The number of outgoing links on your site. Why? A lot of people check the number outbound links, but not the links themselves. This means your actual links can be either lower or higher than the number. If you have an explanation of the number of actual outgoing links vs. the internal links to subcontent on your site, you will save advertisers a lot of hassle!
7. Your website statistics. It doesn't have to be a picture of your actual stats. Giving an advertiser some idea of how many people are coming and going throughout your website lets them know what to expect and deters advertisers who are looking for things you can't deliver.
