Welcome BlogHer 2008 Attendees!

Here are speaker Lynn Truong's post-panel notes for the Monetizing Breakaway Session. She's written more detailed answers to your questions from the session.  If you have a question or comment about the session, drop her a note in our forums. If you want to see Lynn's advice in action, check out the blogs she has monetized for the Killer Aces blog network:

• Wise Bread
• Parenting Squad
• Healthcare Hacks (recently featured on iVillage homepage via BlogHer)

Panelists:

1. Dana Loesch (moderator) -- founded a local St. Louis ad network
2. Lynn Truong -- cofounder of Killer Aces Media.
3. Stephanie Agresta -- SEO and affiliate marketing consultant
4. Kristen Hammond -- ecommerce queen

Q&A:

1. What are some monetization options beyond advertising?

There are many things other than traditional banner advertisements that you can offer to advertisers.  One attendee had made a comment during the session that she was disappointed to hear that we were still talking about traditional ad units. Of course, that's the starting point and foundation for most online advertising campaigns.  But going beyond the banners and text links is something that anybody can do, and that everyone does differently. 

Look at your space creatively, think about what your audience wants, and match that with the goals of the advertiser.  With Wise Bread, we have an active community forum which we often use for promotions and giveaways.  We bring on experts to answer our reader questions, and hold contests to promote events.  These are things that are valuable to both our readers and sponsors.  We also offer sponsorships of particular sections of the site.  For example, we recently had an investment company sponsor our Green Living section because they were promoting their green mutual fund.  Any articles written with our Green Living tag would show their message.  They got a targeted audience and the readers got a targeted message that they were most likely actually interested in.

Look at each advertiser as a partner rather than a client.  How do you guys work together to provide the best value for your readers...and get a little money out of it too.

For example, when publishers want you to review a book, ask for extra copies of the book to run a giveaway to your readers.  Readers love free stuff and the publisher gets buzz for the book.

Another example is we'll ask sponsors to send an expert to answer questions in our forum for a week or so.  This is a win-win situation -- we provide readers with expertise, and sponsors get exposure as experts.

Of course, this is assuming that the product or service is a good fit for your readers.  Once you've decided that a sponsor is a good match for your site and readers, then you can feel confident that the campaign will be successful for all parties involved.

2. I have a local film blog, but Adsense sucks.  How do I target advertisers? How do I know what to charge? 

It's more valuable to advertisers to have targeted impressions rather than a blanket one that may or may not hit many of their target audience.  If you are local, definitely find local businesses.  Show your influence.  In addition to traffic numbers, advertisers want to know people care about and are influenced by what you have to say.  Point to your loyal following.  Having loyal readers is more valuable than fly-by-night ones.

If you have a new site that is not quite "proven" yet, you may want to approach businesses to offer free ads.  Once you get some advertisers on your site, other advertisers (maybe their competitors) will inquire about your rates.  And once those advertisers that you gave free ads to see that they actually get business from you, they'll return for a paid campaign.  Like any business, getting clients at the start will require some freebies and/or lower rates.  Remember, your rate is never set in stone.  You can raise it or lower it depending on demand.  So don't be afraid to make a mistake by asking for too little or too much.  Just adjust next time.

3. What is affiliate marketing?  How can I do it?

The basic concept of affiliate marketing is that you place an ad for their product or service.  If someone clicks on the link from your site and acts on it (for example, buys something), the advertiser will pay you a percentage or fixed rate.  This works really well for some sites.  But since you only make money if one of your readers actually performs a certain action, you must consider your audience and what they are looking for.  Throwing hundreds of buttons up on your sidebar isn't going to cut it.  Your readers aren't browsing your buttons to find something they might want to click on.  Show them something that's really useful and interesting to them.  There are tons of affiliate programs.  And if you can think of a business that you think your readers would really want but can't find their affiliate program, contact them directly.  An affiliate program is the best deal for advertisers.  They get the best return for their investment.  You put up their ad at no cost to them.  They only pay you if you bring them business, which they are happy to do.  Check out Amazon Associates, Commission Junction, and Chitika.  There are also lots of ad networks that only run CPA ads (cost-per-action). 

Make sure you continue to monitor the performance and keep trying out different companies and creatives.  Because you don't get paid just by showing ads (like you do if you ran CPM ads -- cost-per-thousand), you don't want to throw up the ads and forget about them.  If it doesn't work, try something else.

4. Where do you find advertisers?

What are you passionate about?  What do you write about?  Approach the businesses that you frequent and talk about.  Find out who is advertising on sites similar to yours.  Once you find them, tell them about your site, your readers, and what you had in mind.  Get coupons with custom codes.  Offer a special discount for being a new advertiser.  Ask if they have any upcoming products or promotions that you can talk about on your blog.

Make sure to bring demographic information on your readers.  If you approach an advertiser, they may not understand what a blog is, or how much traffic is good, or what you mean by the number of comments you frequently get.  But they understand the language of demographics, because they have a specific target audience. They know exactly the kind of person who wants their product or service.  So you can use a service like Quantcast that identifies the demographics for you, or run your own reader survey.  Running your own takes more time, but you can get more specific than just the general Male/Female, age, HHI type of information, which is valuable, but getting more behavior type stats is even better. 

For example, Wise Bread ran a reader survey, and now we have detailed information on who our readers are. 

5. I put up some affiliate ads, but they're going offline to buy stuff and I don't get credit for the sale.

Get a custom coupon code so even if they go into the actual store, the owners will know that the customer came from you.  Try to get a CPM (cost-per-thousand) deal or monthly fee by showing them the comments on your site and what you often write about.  If they know you have a big influence to your loyal readers, they will be more interested.

6. How do I know how much to charge?  What's a good CPM rate?

Depends on your niche and the advertiser's target.  We recently sold ads at $6 cpm for a 30 day campaign when a personal finance company wanted to reach our personal finance readers on Wise Bread.  If you are a part of the BlogHer Ad Network, you know that they've sold ads for up to $15 cpm.  Of course, BlogHer has a big sales team with lots of media contacts and experience.  But even asking for half of that really isn't unreasonable.

But deciding your ad rate is really a lot of trial and error.  You can start with a $5 CPM, and if they don't respond, maybe try $4 CPM next time a potential advertisers comes to you.  If they jump on it, maybe you need to raise your rates for the next advertiser.  Also, do a little research on the advertiser.  If they're a small business with a small budget, lower your rate.  If Microsoft is asking, charge more. 

Don't forget to look around at what other bloggers in your niche is doing.  How much are they charging?  Who is advertising on their site?  The more information you have, the better you will be able to close the ad deal.  A lot of it is a judgement call.  Don't be afraid to ask questions.  Don't be intimidated by advertisers.  They're just people

When I get a sales inquiry, I'll give them our rates but tell them that if they give me a budget, I can put together a package for them.  Most advertisers know that the rate card is negotiable.  Put together a custom proposal for them that will knock their socks off.

7. For Lynn -- you mentioned that you share 100% of the ad revenue with your bloggers.  How does your company make money?

100% of the advertising revenue on the bloggers' pages -- for example, their articles and blog home page -- goes to the blogger.  The company keeps the revenue from community pages like the forums, home page, category pages. 

We calculate their earnings based on page views.  For example, if a blogger's total pageviews for the month is 20%.  We pay that blogger 20% of the sitewide revenue.  We feel this accurately represents what the blogger earned.

We provide a full service admin team for our bloggers so they can focus on content and the community.  Many bloggers don't really want to run and maintain their own site all by themselves.  We take care of the business end of blogging -- sales, marketing, PR, and tech -- so the blogger doesn't sacrifice any content quality focusing on things they're not really interested or good at.

8. I'm ready to contact advertisers.  How do I add their ad on my page?  Adsense is so easy, but if you're not using Adsense, what do you do?

If you want to charge a flat monthly rate, then putting up an ad is just like what you did with setting up Adsense.  But if you want to be more flexible in what to offer advertisers, and/or be able to run several different ads through one ad unit, you'll need to use an ad server.

Google has an ad server (Google Ad Manager), which you might want to try out first since Google has a robust help center.  We use OpenX which is an open source adserver.  Pubmatic is another free, easy-to-use, Web based ad server.

Having an ad server is crucial if you have a large audience and plan on really pursuing a lot of advertising for your site.  You can sell a specific number of impressions, display multiple creatives, and run a backup code for any remnant (unsold) inventory.  At Wise Bread, we are constantly changing out creative and using the ad server to run multiple ad campaigns at the same time.   Not only does using an ad server provide you the ability to manage multiple campaigns at the same time, it also gives you very specific stats.  Giving your advertisers your Google Analytics or Feedburner stats after a campaign is not particularly helpful -- it doesn't give accurate information on how many impressions a certain ad served.  For example, many people have ad blockers, but Google Analytics and Feedburner will count those people as page views.  Page views do not equal impressions.  To provided accurate reports of impressions served and performance (click-through), you need an ad server.

9. Don't too many ads turn off readers?

Absolutely.  It's a balancing act.  But really, it's a design problem.  Some sites look ad heavy with just one or two ads, but some look fine with much more. 

10. I'm scared of advertising.  What are some getting started tips?  Ad networks you recommend?

There are so many ad networks out there, and different ones will work better for different people.  Ask fellow bloggers in your niche.  Try them out one by one if you have to.  Consider the user interface, the service, the types of advertisers they have.  But do a little research before you sign up and throw up their code.  Ask them who their publishers are and contact the publishers to see what their experience has been.  Ask who their advertisers are.  Picking an ad network can be frustrating and time consuming.  But they're not all created equal.  It may take some time before you settle on one. 

Final notes

Monetizing your blog is going to take a lot of time, and your monetizing strategy will depend on your priorities.  Direct sales will always get you more money.  Ad networks usually take at least 50%.  But ad networks do all the work for you, and they may do it better than you even if you were to spend all your time on it, which you can't, if you have to keep up your site as well, in addition to your offline life.  It's also a big learning exercise.  There's really no right or wrong way, so just go for it. I also have a work-in-progress comprehensive list of ad networks.  Drop notes in the comments to let me know which ones you've tried and like or hate!