Creating a GOOD advertising page
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Guest Post by Lincoln Adams. Visit his blog at The Habitation of Justice.
Face it, most of the advertising pages you see on blogs today (if there even is one) sucks mighty moose balls.
I believe there are two crucial things advertisers want to know about your site: how much traffic you get, and what your reader demographics are. When I revamped my own advertising page, I took these two things into consideration and developed what I hope is now a much more informative (and attractive looking) landing page that will give advertisers everything they need to know about my site.
For the former, I realized in spite of their inaccuracies, it still pays to list your Alexa, PageRank, Compete and Technorati rankings. Rather than do it by hand though, I used MyRankings.Net to help me display my current rankings in real time, that way I don’t have to keep hand editing them whenever a ranking changes.
I then listed the actual organic traffic figures I get per month. Right now they are, *ahem*, shall we say… a bit modest, but then again my prices are dirt cheap as well, so it all balances out in the end. 
As to the latter, it’s especially hard to describe your reader demographics and what they’re interested in when you don’t have a definitive niche (like yours truly), and since advertisers want more than anything to market their goods and services to a targeted audience, this might present a problem.
However, there’s an effective way to way to determine the makeup and interests of your audience, partly by analyzing the search engine keywords that brought them to your site.
Personally, I found the easiest way to do this was via HitTail, a free service that analyzes your search engine related traffic and helps you find optimal keywords to improve your rankings and traffic numbers. They also provide an easy to scan list of all the keywords that have been used to direct visitors to your site since it began tracking, and I believe the data can also be exported into a spreadsheet format as well.
Using HitTail then, I went back almost a year and scanned all the keywords that led people to my site. I tried to understand what most of the visitors were looking for, and what their search efforts told me about them, and also what keywords drew the most traffic. If someone found my site via the search phrase “natural cures for shingles” for example, that told me they were interested in alternative and herbal medicine. If another one was looking for “privacy software,” that told me that they were interested in… uh… privacy software.
After I finished that, my next step was to analyze the interests of my repeat visitors. Some of them were friends, so I already knew what their passions were. For other visitors, more often than not they tended to have blogs of their own, so in those cases I would visit their sites to see what they liked to write about. Was it literature, politics, gadgets or romance? What fueled their passions the most? What was on their wish list, if they had one? And so on.
From all this I was able to develop and list several categories that I believe accurately reflected the interests of my audience. If an advertiser had a product to sell that easily fit the description of one or more of these categories, he or she would know right off the bat that their ads will likely draw healthy attention and attract a higher clickthrough rate, which of course would hopefully lead to a higher conversion rate as well.
Finally, in order to encourage advertisers to book a campaign on my site, I offered a significant discount guaranteeing a certain clickthrough rate for their ads, or they would receive a partial but generous refund. Am I a swell guy or what? 
Hopefully my experience will help some of you develop a more effective landing page for your advertisers. And if not, well then, feel free to send them my way. 
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Lincoln, your advertising page is definitely well organized and user friendly. Thanks for the tips and sharing your experience w/ ad. pages!
Cool, I got published!
@Andrew: You’re welcome, I should note part of what helped me organize the advertising page was by using the OIOPublisher plugin, the same one the Cow uses for his advertising.
I came up with this approach particularly because I don’t really have a narrowly defined niche, so it helped to know what kind of niches my audience was interested in instead.
Nice tip on that myrankings site. Thanks
Good links in this article, I’ll check them out.
Hi Lincoln .. you really have a nice advertising page on your own site, so I take great interest in this guest post! Is that a custom Purchase.php script or .. open source
*g*
Interesting post, I’ll keep this in mind.
-Mike
Very thorough review with the attachment of some useful tools and resources.
Revealing a blog’s stats is a known important issue and this is why a blog should be said as “not ready for monetization” if the stats are too bad to be shown (often when new).
Thanks for the myranking.net tip. Was looking around for something like that.
Very interesting and useful.
Good advice - a well presented advertising page could be very lucrative.
MouthyGirl.com is still too new to have any statistics, but great tips, I plan on using them in the future. Thanks
Thanks for the compliments all.
Regarding MyRankings, I noticed for some reason it wasn’t giving me the Technorati stats anymore, so I had to switch it for another service. If you find you’re having problems with it as well, try out http://www.showoffrankings.com/ instead.
http://popuri.us/ also offers a similar widget, but it’s still a little buggy.
@Hart: It’s the same OIOPublisher script, but I was able to customize the purchase page via the administrative options.
Lincoln (and John), thanks for sharing.
Maybe I should change my advertising blog page to get more visitors..
Thanks for inform us about MyRankings.Net and HitTail.com
Never heard before, thanks…
Thanks for these great tips. I’m not quite ready to start direct advertising yet, but hope to do so within the next month or two. This article will give me a great headstart when I put up my advertisers page.
Awsome post and good resources. MyRankings.net is really useful!
I checked out hitail but it isn’t a free service. They wanted 9.99 for it. How did you get it for free?
This is really helpful, I am in the process of puting together my advertising page. Thanks for the info.
fine and useful posts. Thank u
You’re welcome Debo and Stock!
Well you got great page and have lots skills to teach us. Thanks for he post
Making a new one for me now .. Gotta try to see if he is right.