Attracting Advertisers to Your Site

Attracting and retaining paid advertisements was never an easy business except for a couple of dreamy years from about 1997-2000 when over funded startups were propping up other startups by blowing money on ineffective advertising. When the NASDAQ tanked, so did the online advertising market. Add that to the seasonal slowdown typical after Christmas and you have a tough situation on your hands. All too many sites that relied heavily on advertising either had to either close down or trim staff just to survive.

But relying on advertising as a revenue stream isn't an impossible task - it's just a bit harder than it used to be. If you're looking to sell online ads yourself, we have some advice from you from Bill Furlong, CEO of business advertising strategists B2BWorks.

You've Got to Have Traction and Brand

"It's important to realize that if you're going to add any value to a marketer's presence in your world, you better have a fairly significant brand entrenched in that market," Furlong says.

Advertisers don't want to pay big bucks to some no-name site. You must have a name for yourself. If you're not a household name, you should at least be well known in your niche. That's an area where many web companies fall short.

Drive That Traffic

If you're going to derive major cash from your advertising, you must have substantial traffic, a figure Furlong estimates to be at least half a million site visits a month. "If you only have 50,000 visits to your site and you translate that to the revenue metrics that many sites are used to, that's not a whole lot of money. So you've got to have a half a million visits per month to your site to really look at this as a possible revenue stream," Furlong says. Furlong advises those wishing to increase traffic to use e-mail campaigns, which are both cheap and effective. He advises businesses to send promotional e-mails, special offers and other goodies to customers who sign up at your site. "That way you can ultimately link them back to your website to engage in whatever new purchasing or procurement they may want to do," he says.

And build traffic at the same time.

Deliver Impressive Content

All the e-mail tricks in the world won't work without brilliant content. If you're going to impress advertisers, you've got to deliver content that brings customers back again and again. "No one's going to come back to your site unless you give them a very good reason to do that. That of course means you better have some unique content, not just a variety of links to other sites," Furlong says. He adds that there are two kinds of content: content the site builds itself, or content bought from a third party. Small business owners tend to stick to the first kind.

"So if a small business owner is very adept and well known in a particular niche, all the intelligence they gather in that space is worth sharing with their future buyers," he says. The other kind of content tends to come from research and think tank firms, but could also work for a smaller business wishing to become expert in some specialized niche. "You're commenting and collecting data, trends, and opinions from that vertical market or that particular niche," he says. Pick one of the two kinds - and deliver the very best content you can.

Build the Community

The last step in building a site that will attract advertisers is building a community. Not only should you have a unique site that attracts visitors, but it should also be one that engages its audience and learns from it.

"Today the word community means you are learning from the visitors to your site through research, through focus groups, through just the way they visit the site. We have the ability, as do others, to track how people visit sites, so that we have a better understanding of what their needs are on a day to day basis. As more and more sites engage the supply chain, the suppliers and different marketplaces, there's going to be a conversation that's going to be held, hopefully within that particular website's platform," he says. Selling advertising as a revenue stream is a strategy that's worked for publications for hundreds of years. And it is possible to duplicate that strategy online - with some important modifications. But don't make it your only revenue source.

"No site should ever depend on advertising revenue exclusively as the overall revenue strategy of their business. It is a very important component and in many cases it can be the dominant portion of your revenue, but clearly it must not stand alone," Furlong says. But as part of a healthy, well-rounded business model, ad revenue can be a truly useful source of income for any business owner with the right stuff to sell.