In my last post I wrote about Contextual Advertising basics. This post is about Buying and Selling ads on any Website or Blog.

If you are advertise or Website publisher then selling or buying ad space is another way of advertising. As a Website publisher you can sell ad space on your Website. Advertisers buys ad space on publisher Website and pays a fix amount for that ad space. Price depends on for how long ad space is available it can be like for a week or month.

When you buy or sell ad space advertiser put a banner or text link ad on publisher site. When you buy or sell ad space it does not count costing or earning on CPM or click cost. Advertiser pays fix amount to publisher and publishers earning not affects how many clicks that ad is getting. Advertiser also do not need to pay any extra money if their ad is getting good response.

Benefit of Buying Ad Space

As advertiser there are many ways of advertisement but question is why to use Ad space for advertisement. Advertisers normally use contextual advertisement, CPM ads or Affiliate Marketing so why buying Ad Space?

When you use any other form of advertisement you may not save that much money compares to direct buying ad space. When you buy ad space on any Website you put banner on that Website you may get lot of clicks on your banner which can lows down your cost per click compare to Pay Per Click program. If you use affiliate marketing then you pay some commission to your affiliate but when you get visitors from direct ad space and they buy product you do not need to pay any commission. Thus you can save lot of money on your promotion.

Benefit of Selling Ad Space

As Website publisher you make money by Pay Per Click ads CPM Ads or affiliate marketing. If you are not expert in any of them you may not make good money.When you sell ad space on your Website you get a

fixed amount for you ad space. You do not need to take care of clicks or conversions you are free to just focus on your Website growth.

How to Buy or Sell Ads on a Website

There are two ways of buying or selling ad space. As publisher you can sell ad space directly by your own or use any direct ad selling advertisement company.

Many Website owner directly sell ad space on there Website. As an advertiser if you are interested in advertising on a Website you can contact Website owner by using their advertisement or contact page. Direct buying or selling ads save your money as you are not going through mediator company which charges some fee for serving or selling ad space.

Same rule applies for publishers they can sell there Website ad space directly or use any ad network who helps selling your Website ad space.

Ad Space Buys Selling Networks

There are many ad network who help you sell your Website ads. These network share revenue with publishers. You can search around and you will find some good advertisement network some of good ad networks are:

BuySellAds.com
AdvertiseSpace.com
BlogAds.com
LinkWorth

Adsense is the highest paying ad-network in the online world. If you want to earn more using your adsense account, you need to place your ads wisely. Because a good ad placement may lead to lots of dollars in your bank balance.

So here is a guide which helps you in optimizing your ads for your blog. Place your advertisements in these positions and it is sure to see a considerable increase in your adsense revenue.

Blog – Homepage

We will find below two types of optimization depending on your Homepage’s layout and structure.

Homepage 1

• Place 728×90 banner image ads above the fold for placement targeting, to receive with high brand value and clickthrough rate (CTR).
• Place 160×600 skyscraper ads below the navigation bar. Set them to display text and image ads.
• Depending on your page length, you can place a 728×90 ad unit in the middle or at the end of the page.

Homepage 2

• Place 728×90 banner image ads above the fold for placement targeting, with high brand value and clickthrough rate (CTR).
• Place 300×250 ads below the right navigation bar to attract the user’s eye. Set them to display text and image ads.
• Depending on your page length, you can place a 728×90 ad unit in the middle or at the end of the page.

Blog – Article Page

We will find below two types of optimization depending on your Article Page’s layout and structure.

Article Page 1

• Place 336×280 rectangle ads (text + image) on the upper left of the content, embedded in the text.
• Place 336×280 text ads below the content.
• Place 160×600 skyscraper ads below the left navigation bar, set to display text and image ads.

Article Page 2

• Place 336×280 rectangle ads (Text+Image) on the upper right of the content, embedded within the text.
• Place 336×280 text ads below the content.
• Place 300×250 rectangle ads below the right navigation bar. Set them to display text and image ads.

Third Party comment systems are getting adopted as a concept these days. These comment systems provide better user experience and more options for commenting and managing comments on both end. Third party comment systems provide easy and better integration of authentication services. These systems are collection of useful tools and features that you may wish to get in comment section.

To integrate these comment systems on your blog you need to open an account on these sites, and install a plugin or copy and paste some code on your blog to work for you. These systems need an API to work.

What features include third party comment systems?
As a wordpress user you can see it if you go to add feature in comment section you will install wordpress plugins. But how many plugins will you install to get all the features you see on other blogs.

If you see ‘like’ on a blog, you will install a plugin for wordpress, if you want to add a vote system for comment you will install a plugin, if you want to add rating system you will install a plugin. If you want to integrate Facebook and Twitter login, you will have to install two separate plugins. If you want to let your users publish their comments or opinions on Facebook and Twitter you will have to install two more plugins.

There are so many other features and you will not find a plugin to add them as comment flagging, comment collapsing, replying etc.

Third party comment system may include these features.

These comment systems are specially designed for comment section so new features also we can see being added.

Comment Systems that you can use:

(1) Disqus
Disqus is clear leader in comment systems. You can see it on top blogs. Most of the features I have discussed above you will find in Disqus. You can edit your comments any time you have left on other blogs. And more features as inline media embedding, mobile commenting, notification and reply system, real time notification system and many more features.

(2) Intensedebate
Intensedebate is developed by Automattic the company behind wp.com, it is similar to Disqus in many ways. Features are also similar but Disqus is more popular. Reputation and comment voting system is popular in Intensedebate.

(3) Echo
Echo is also a feature rich comment system and being used on many of enterprise blogs. But this is not free. You will find many feature that I have discussed above.

(4) Livefyre
Livefyre is a new comment system that is in beta yet so you can use it for free as a beta tester. But it future it will be chargeable for large scale bloggers. But it can be free for small bloggers. As you can use Disqus is free but it provides premium features. Livefyre has some of next level features as check-in and some of other new features.

Have you ever wanted to draw more attention to your most recent blog post on your WordPress website? Or, maybe you designed a blog with a more prominent post at the top, but found it impossible to pull it out of “the loop”? Well, “Latest Post” is a WordPress plugin that does just that!

Customize your first post with full control over image size, read more tag, and the amount of words displayed as an excerpt. Also, the plugin features custom CSS classes which can be controlled right through the options page!

To see a working example of this plugin, look no further – “Latest Post” was originally written for Blue Fountain Media’s own Blog and Business Learning Center!

Check out “Latest Post” on WordPress.org’s Plugin Directory: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/latest-post/

For some marketers, especially B2B companies, the holidays may be a time of year when things slow down, which can be the perfect opportunity to thoroughly cleanse your PPC account and get it to deliver more bang for your buck. On the heels of my blog post on landing page optimization, here are 10 ways to make your PPC campaign more profitable.

Give feedback either by commenting or by replying to my Twitter status.

1. Make changes that matter.


Don’t just look for what is not performing well in your campaign, look for areas that would have a big impact on your ROI if it were working better. See what campaigns and ad groups within each campaign represent the greatest share of your overall paid search budget.

Once you’ve identified the most critical areas of your campaign to optimize, start by taking a look at your Quality Score. Improving it will help you reduce your cost-per-click in relation to the position of your ads. This involves looking at each keyword’s CTR, associated ads and taking some of the following steps:

2. Create better targeted ad groups.


Look through your ad groups to find keywords with low Quality Score or low CTR and see what ads are showing up for them. Consider placing these keywords in another ad group with ads that are more relevant. In the case of broad match keywords, use the “See Search Terms” report to find some common queries you are getting clicks for. If some of the keywords that often get clicks are relevant to you, consider using them as a phrase or exact match in the same or new ad group.

Besides using the “See Search Terms” report to better target relevant keywords, use it also add to list of keywords that you do not want to target.

3. Curate your negative keyword lists.


Add negative keywords to your list so that your ads show for more relevant searches. You can find these in the “See Search Terms” report.

4. Use broad match modifiers.

If you have not done so already, add the new broad match modifier to your ad groups. This type of matching is more flexible than phrase and exact match while doing a better job of targeting than broad match. Bid on this match type higher than you would on broad match, and lower than phrase and exact match.

Your CTR does not only rely on your keywords, so it’s important that your ads get users to click.

5. Test your ads.


Look for ways to make your ads stand-out against your competition and test different ideas. Let ads compete against each other and gather sufficient data before eliminating one or more ads. When you come across a test result in one ad group, consider applying what you learned to other ad groups.

Everything I’ve listed so far is primarily meant to increase your CTR. But what about making sure that each click is the best click you can get?

6. Filter out unwanted clicks.


Provide information in your ad copy that will deter your most common unwanted customers. For example, if your services start at $5,000, consider using that in your ad copy. This may go against our strategy of increasing our CTR, but its benefits may outweigh the loss by increasing the value of each click.

7. Use match types to control bids.

Look at broad match keywords that are consuming a lot of your budget, without delivering the goods in the form of conversions. Consider reducing your bids on some of those broader keywords and increase bids on phrase and exact match keywords that are delivering good results.

8. Show ads at the right time.


After doing some preliminary testing by showing ads throughout the day and days of the week, configure your bidding schedule to get your ads more attention when it counts.

I’ve covered most things leading up to the click. Now let’s look at what to do about what visitors see after they click on your ad.

9. Improve device targeting.

Make sure that if you are targeting mobile devices that you are sending traffic to a mobile-friendly page and that this mobile traffic is in a separate campaign from your desktop computer targeting.

10. Conduct landing page optimization.

Work on continually improving the conversion rate of your landing pages. At the end of the day, no matter how cheaply you can generate traffic to your website by improving Quality Score or how well you can filter out unwanted clicks, if your pages are not focused on turning each visitor into a client, then you will always be spinning your tires in the mud. If you need a few tips to get you started, check out 84 Tips For A Killer Landing Page Design.

Below is a demonstration of the effects of conversion optimization on ROI: