How to charge for advertising space on your blog or website

Virtually every top website, blog, social media sites, search engines, YouTube and others with a tangible number of visitors sell advertising space on their sites and is a proven money generator. You have the chance to make money and attract advertisers if you have an audience that advertisers want to reach. If advertisers see your visitors as their potential buyers, they will definitely buy your add space. Selling ads space has been the main source of online revenue for some bloggers and web masters. Some start from making as little as $50 a month to thousands of dollars a month from direct ad sales. When properly harness, it can be your most consistent source of online income.

The following conditions will determine how much you can charge for advertising space on your blog
 
1. The position of the ad
The position where you put the ad on your site can greatly influence how much you can charge. The position will determine whether to charge high or low. You have to know either by experiment or other means which area of your site are the most appropriate and valuable for placing ad. You might charge high for some area of your blog e.g $300 a month for a banner in your right sidebar. This is just an example, am not saying that your right sidebar has more value than the left sidebar but it means the value of positions on our site differ and you can charge according to the position where you put the ad.

2.Your niche
The niche that your site belong also make a difference in terms of how you can charge for selling your ad space. It is very hard for some niche to sell ads while some niche sell ads easily with minimal effort from the site owner. So, avoid niches that do not sell ads even with high traffic. You can avoid such niche by doing some research on profitable niche before starting out your blog or website. What advantage can someone derive from a site with an average of over 1000 traffic per day but which does not sell ads while a site with as low as 150 visitor per day sell ads without stress.
Also visitor to some niche are more valuable to visitors to other niches. For instance, a visitor looking to book an hotel room or an aircraft ticket is more valuable to the hotel management or an airline company than the value of a visitor that want to buy a $5 worth of software to the software sellers. What am trying to say in essence is that the hotel management or the aircraft company will be willing to pay for ad space and can even pay high because they know they can make huge money from only one booking.

3.Conversion rate
The conversion rate of the lead from your site will also determine how much you can charge for your ad space. My ' Akinola ' theory for charging ad space is: the higher the lead value the higher the charge and the lower the lead value the lower the cost of the ad space. For instance, if you are charging $150 per month and your sponsor is making $15000 per month, by the time your sponsor income grow to an average of $20000 per month, there is nothing bad if you increase your charge to $2000 per month. To optimize your conversion rate you have to get a very targeted ad on your site and you can do this by finding the right sponsor. Please try to know and always check whether your sponsors are genuine business people to avoid exposing your lead to fraud. Do what you can to maintain trust from your visitors and build a good online reputation as this will have a long term effect on how much you can make from your blog.

4.Traffic
The number of traffic to your blog is the most important determinant of what you can charge for
Adverts on your blog. Some people even use it to calculate their charges. One formula you can use is : number of daily visitor divided by 10. It means if you are getting 1000 visitors per day, you can charge $100 per month. Mind you the formula is not a recommendation but a guide.
Following all the above suggestions will guide you on how you can charge the adverts on your site and how you can make the best out of it.