Someone Wants to Advertise on My Blog - What Should I Do?

Hi Don,

I'd be wary of these emails, especially if they don't address your name and look like they could be sent in bulk to many websites.

Find out if it is a real person with real interest before getting too excited. Write them back a question asking what they would like to advertise if it looks legit. If it doesn't just ignore the email.

I ignore a few of those emails every week and they just keep on coming. Pretty much spam and you can always tell the legitimate people.

Don

Yaro has a great point above, but I'd consider that the second step.

The first question is : Do you want advertising / text links on your blog?
You're building up your traffic through articles etc; I'm assuming you have a monetization plan. If the plan is to earn through advertising, then you can evaluate this offer. On the other hand, if you plan to monetize through affiliate marketing or your own product, why on earth would you want to send your traffic elsewhere?

The next step (if you're ok with advertising) is as Yaro mentions; check out the offer. Is it genuine? Is the product / site that they want you to link to something you're comfortable with? What happens if they change the content later to porn or some such?

If all of the above look ok, then figure out what you want to get. Here's a tip - don't undervalue yourself. A year of blogging / article writing could easily mean anywhere from 100 to 300 hours of time spent; if he got someone else to create this for him, he'd have to pay anywhere from $10 to $50 per hour depending on the provider's skill.

Make sure you are getting a decent deal; it's better to charge higher and keep the advertising exclusive, rather than mess up your entire page with a bunch of lowball text links.

Hope this helps.

Hey Don,

I agree with Yaro, if you don't have a lot of traffic coming to your blog yet, or even if you do, be wary of those emails. If it looks legit, email them like he said and see if they respond. If they do, try to get a dialog going with them to see if they are serious or if they are just hitting up as many blog owners as they can with spam techniques. Find out what they are promoting and what kind of ad they wish to place on your blog.

If it is legit, you can charge pretty much whatever you think it is worth. I know people that typically charge about $50 or so per month on blogs with decent traffic but it really depends a lot on your blog, your traffic, and your business model. If you are shy about it, you can charge less then raise your rates once you get more traffic coming.

As far as how to do it, there are a few ways. You can just put the ad in your blog theme somewhere for a certain amount of time or if you really want to do it high tech, you can use an ad server such as PHPAdsNew, now called OpenX, it is available for free at sourceforge.net. Then you can charge them for a certain number of impressions or have a time limit as these ad servers will track that stuff for you and pull the ad automatically once the limit has been reached. You just have to put the ad server code in your blog theme.

If you do go through with it, keep an eye on their destination url to make sure they don't change it on you, after it is set up, to something spammy, or worse.

I hope that helps, let me know!