How much to charge for your advertising space

This is a part of the “Getting Started with Blog Advertising” blog series.

You will want to price your advertising spaces strategically when you first start advertising, I recommend waiting until you have 250 unique visitors a day, but how do you decide on how much to charge?

There are a few things to remember:

• There is no “average” formula.
• There are a many different opinions on this – this is my opinion, but feel free to do a bit of research.
• Its highly likely that you will get the pricing wrong at first. Don’t be disheartened, and most importantly don’t give up!
• As I mentioned before you will have to do your research and have some strategy in place.
• Be patient, as there is no guarantee that you will sell your ad spaces immediately,

Here are 14 significant factors that you’ll want to consider when you first start thinking about the “price”:

1. Traffic (Unique Visits, Page Views, Potential Impressions, etc.)
2. Page Rank (How strong is your Page Rank?)
3. Age of Domain (How long have you owned and operated with this domain and URL?)
4. Subscribers and Following (RSS, Email, Newsletter, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
5. Inbound Links (How many sites are linking to you?)
6. Brand (How strong is your brand?)
7. Quality of Focus (How focused in your content?)
8. Niche and Competition (Is the content market that you’re in “crowded” or “untapped”? Who is your direct competition? Who is your indirect competition?)
9. Location (Where on your blog the advertisement placed?)
10. Quantity (How many advertisements are you offering in total?)
11. Size (What sizes of these advertisements?)
12. Type of Sponsorship (CPM, CPC, CPA, Flat-Rate, Percentage, Shared, etc.)
13. Perceived Value (This is a wildcard factor, to some degree, but powerful!)
14. Metrics and Reporting Sites (Your own metrics and the qualitative data that is provided on your advertising page, as well as outside reporting sites like Alexa, etc.)

A Simple Formula to Try:

There is a general formula to help bloggers start their pricing strategically while feeling confident that they’ll be able to get someone to purchase quickly.

As you know, traffic to your blog is going to be your first consideration you can typically start there and then adjust the price according to what your research shows about your niche, your competition.

This formula applies to a 125 x 125 px banner advertisement in your sidebar, as I’ve recommended that you start with here.

(MPVs / 1,000) x $1.50) / NoAS = BSP

What???? Ok, here is the formula in simple steps:

• Monthly number of Page Views divided by 1,000 (CPM model - cost per mille)
• Then multiply this by £1.50 divided by the Number of Available Spaces

This gives you your Base Start Price

Remember that this is just a starting point, you can add or reduce the value when you take the other considerations as listed above.

So what do you think, are you ready to try? Let me know how you get on!

This is a part of the “Getting Started with Blog Advertising” blog series.

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