How do you monetize your website? To do so, most blogs are selling ads spaces, or at least, they try. Last week, I visited lots of blogs and studied how they directly sell ad spots, using an “Advertise” page. A good “Advertise” page, with the proper info can make your blog gain new partners quicker than you may think.

Here is 10 tips and tricks to create a killer advertising page for your blog and attract new advertisers.

Make it visible

[tweet]This may sound as a basic tip, but regarding the amount of blogs who hide their advertise page and simply display a link on their about page, it has to be said.

Advertisers don’t have time to lose by searching how they can advertise on your blog. There’s billions of blogs, so if they can’t access your advertising infos and price, they’ll simply advertise on another blog.
To make sure that everyone can easily access your advertising page, add a link to your navigation menu or below your main ad space.

Be clear about your prices

Believe it or not, I saw many blogs were the author ask potential advertisers to email him for giving out the price of an ad spot.
Seriously, excepted if your run a very popular blog, I doubt that many people will agree to waste their time by sending you an email to ask for the price of an ad space.
Even better, if you sells ads spots at a very competitive price, what about displaying the price below your blog’s main ad spot?

Selling differents ads spaces? Describe each individually

If you’re selling different advertising spaces (125*125px banner, text links, 60*250 footer ad…) you definitely should consider describing each of your space individually, and show pros and cons of each space. You should also let potential advertisers know if banners are rotating or not, if if you allow animated gifs/flash banners.

Honestly is obviously a good way to start creating good relations with your advertisers.

Create a clean table for your prices

More than one year ago, I came across a WordPress theme called Wp-Maganews. This theme doesn’t exist anymore, but I remember how stunning the “Advertise” page template was, mostly due to the table displaying both ad positions and price for 1, 3 or 6 months.

Add a site plan to your ads page

Another great idea is to display a huge screenshot of your blog showing where ads are being displayed. Ads position is a very important factor for an advertiser, so the most precise your are, the better it will be.

A good example of an advertising plan can be found here.

Don’t waste time. Add paypal links.

I already said it twice before, but advertisers haven’t any time to lose and there’s many other blogs that sells ad spots and links, so the competition is pretty high.

If you want to stand out of the crowd, you should definitely provide a quick “Buy it now” Paypal link, directly on your advertising page. This can also gets benefits from compulsive buying.

Though, you must think about being clear in the kind of ads you find appropriate for your blog. If you don’t say a word about that, you can for sure expect requests for porn and viagra ads!

Don’t be afraid to show your popularity

Remember that you’re are selling ads. So, you must convince your potential client that buying an ad spot on your blog will be good for him.

Always take screenshots when you hit digg frontpage, or when you’re are linked by a popular blog, and make sure to provide links so the advertiser will be sure that there’s no fake. This is a real proof of your blog success.

My blog Cats Who Code have a pretty good example of it.

Show off your stats

The popularity of a blog can be estimated using several parameters as such as GooGle Pagerank, number of RSS feed subscribers, Alexa rank, and a lot more.
To attract advertisers, you should definitely display this info publicly on your “Advertise” page. If you’re using WordPress, a plugin called Blog Stats allow you to easily display all the informations a potential advertiser need on your blog.

This include: post count, comments count, average comments per post, registered users count, Pagerank, technorati rank, alexa rank, feedburner subscribers, google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, and more.

A very great thing with this plugin is that it will automatically update the data once per day. A definitive must have if you’re running a WordPress blog.

Using WordPress? Take advantage of page templates

If you’re using WordPress, you should definitely use a page template to give a special style to your advertise page. Creating a page template is easy: You just have to start with a blank .php file and add the following:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Advertise Page
*/
?>

This will create a page template named Advertise Page. Now, you have to use your creativity to populate this page with useful info – for example those you’ve learnt while reading this article

But, where’s the 10th tip? Well, the 10th tip is YOUR tip. If you have any trick to enhance your advertise page or attract new advertisers, let me know in a comment!