It can become quite a challenging task to try and sell your advertising units through the market leader in banner advertising: BuySellAds. The problem is mainly that most people that are trying to sell adverts are publishers and to sell adverts, you need to temporarily adopt the skills of an advertiser. Well, fear not my friend. Below are the main ways you can help sell your advertising units in BuySellAds so you can start to make money.
The first step is to make sure you have filled everything and I mean everything out. An uncompleted market listing on BuySellAds will turn advertisers straight off. This means you need to fill out:
- Website name
- Website description
- Channel
- Logo
- Advertising units
- Website screenshot
- RSS, Facebook and Twitter fans
The list goes on but if you are unsure about what to fill out, just take a look at my market listing on BuySellAds. With each of the above bullet points, I will now go into detail about how you can optimise it to encourage advertisers to buy your units.
Website Name
Your website name should be the same, if not, similarly to that used organically. However, there is a character limit on BuySellAds which means you might have to shorten your website name to concur with the regulations.
Website Description
The description to your market place listing has huge significance when it comes to selling your units. You can look at [How to] Create a Good BuySellAds Description for an in depth look but, basically, you need to:
- Tell the advertiser what your website is in one sentence.
- Then go into detail about what subcategories there are in your website.
- Try to make your website sound amazing through including statistics that favours your website. For example, I mention in my market listing that Ask Will Online gains 88% organic traffic which means lots of new visitors will see the BuySellAds units.
- Above all, you need to make clear you are giving the advertiser priority if they buy your unit. You want them to feel like that have a premium experience when buying adverts on your website so you gain repetitive sales.
Channel
The channel is the category you choose your website to be in of BuySellAds’s marketplace listing. Choose your channel wisely because it will affect what advertisers will look at your listing. If you are unsure what channel your website should be listed under, make a spider diagram of all the topics your website is about, group them into larger categories and see which one has the most underneath it.
Logo
The logo is required to be 48×48 pixels large and is placed to the left of the website’s name on the marketplace. Your logo should be the same as the favicon used on your website.
Advertising Units
The choice of units you give to advertisers is a key area which most people do not understand. It is always better to have more units than less because you are never going to sell all of them but you might end up selling a few at all times. For this reason, I would try to include the following sizes:
- 468×60 or 728×90
- 300×250 or 336×280
- 120×600 or 160×600
- Always 125×125 (this is the most common on BuySellAds)
Having more unit sizes gives the advertiser more flexibility over what he wants. The next step is pricing them each. I tend to always keep the 125×125 the cheapest and then gradually increase the price as the area of the advert increases. However, you will need to bare in mind just where your advert is located on your website. Above the fold should have much higher prices than below the fold.
If you find yourself not selling any adverts at all, it is a good idea to slash the prices of all your units by $5-$10 to attract advertisers. Remember that it is better to sell an unit cheap than to not sell it at all.
It is also important to add a small description next to each advertising unit. The reason for this is so that a little promotion can be placed next to each advert when the advertiser hovers their mouse over the unit box. I use descriptions such as:
- “The largest unit on AskWillOnline with, by far, the most visibility too, this advert is above the content which is a prime location for a high CTR. In fact, the highest CTR out of all the units.”
- “Gaining the most exposure on AskWillOnline for loading first on every page, this unit gains a high CTR.”
- “Located below every article on AskWillOnline, this advert unit inherits lots of clicks.”
- “Highest Opt-ins and Advertiser Satisfaction”
All they need to do is reassure the advertiser of the performance the advertising unit can obtain.
Website Screenshot
The website screenshot should be an up to date image of your website with clear boxes of where each advert is. Take my website screenshot for example where I have added the areas where the adverts will be on my website. This helps advertisers choose exactly what advert they want and also reassures them what the advert will look like and where it is located on the website.
RSS, Facebook and Twitter Fans
Advertisers hate websites that hide their statistics. Therefore, even if the social media presence for your website is not that high, still show it. It makes clear to the advertiser that you are not hiding anything from them.
Ultimately, your marketplace listing should give the advertiser as much confidence as possible that you are trying not to steal their money but actually provide them traffic. If you can do this through including the above points, you will make money with BuySellAds.
