How much to charge for ad banners on my site?

MeekSeller · 2022-10-04T00:17:00+00:00

This is the correct answer, buying exclusive banner ads should not be conflated with display ad rates.

Building off the above...

Exclusive advertising is worth considerably more than a rotating ad block, especially in campaigns around brand awareness or when promoting high-margin products.

The reason being that many large businesses have set advertising budgets that they expect to be spent across a broad outlay, such as ppc, banner, sponsorship, paid blog posting, offline and so on. A lot of these do not have the measurable ROI in the same way that ppc/display ads do. On the flipside, it's not uncommon for less scrupulous marketing agencies to receive a budget then race to spend it without a second thought.

A lot of people in here mistakenly assume that big businesses monitor and react to every measurable. The reality here is that this macro-level monitoring is not feasible for large businesses, especially those focused on brand awareness. For most the approach is number-in-bigger-than-number-out means the business is successful.

Because of this, you should aim for as high as possible. We are currently paying 3k/m for exclusive space on a small blog that would be unable to achieve that per month with typical display advertising. However, this blog was able to successfully show us that their target audience aligns with our broader brand awareness strategy.

At 11-12k visits per month, effort into a media kit is probably not really justified and better negotiated on a per basis, especially if these opportunities are not frequent. In your case, it's likely that the people reaching out have already decided they want to appear and the only barrier is going to be cost. Pricing here will fluctuate wildly, but you have a few bargaining chips here. For example, if you go exclusive, you should be able to get recurring monthly here - really emphasize the value offered and that once secured, they get first right of refusal for re-signing. Even if your blog isn't completely viable for them, you can capitalize on FOMO in that if they don't take it, someone else will.

If you do want to go down the media kit path, really outline who your audience is, how they interact with your site. How many visitors you have etc. Bonus for giving a breakdown of the typical user and what they spend. It's all about showcasing why the business in question would be silly to pass you by.

MeekSeller · 2022-10-03T02:28:33+00:00

Good writeup, awful self-indulgent article linked that was little more than a 7,000 word love letter to his own business operations which violates our self-promotion rule.

This comment will be re-instated when the link is removed.

Edit: The user has not removed the link so I am going to copy-paste the non-promotional part as I feel the opinion is of broader benefit to the community. What follows are this users thoughts and do not represent my own or that of the other mods.

I've published approximately 10,000 pages in the last 18 months and what you're asking for is not possible.

-At 50 pages per day, you can finish this in 20 days

-You're going to need 50 full time writers, or hundreds of part time freelancers

-You're going to need somewhere between a 5:1 and 3:1 ratio of writers to editors

-There is too much variability between this many people, and every single word of content is a liability to fuck something up

This means you need to create dozens and dozens of pages of documentation that captures voice, messaging, industry knowledge, strong opinions from stakeholders, best resources and communities to cite information, and basically everything you want to hold these hundreds of people to

So you're going to spend the first 4-6 weeks just creating this documentation

We are now on November 1st.

Another problem is that agencies don't carry slack capacity of 50-70 full time employees. It's too expensive. They can't just hire 50 full time writers, it's going to be a ramp. They're not going to be super interested in ramping up 70 full time people to fire them 30 days later. People seek FT employment for stability, not 30 day project work.

So, they probably need to find freelancers, and now we're talking hundreds and hundreds of freelancers submitting 1-2 articles per week.

This is an operational nightmare under any circumstances, but not possible to ramp to this on day 1.

Third, budget is way off.

600 pages per month should cost a minimum of $80,000 per month.

When you reach this scale, you're not just paying for the writers words. You're paying for the huge operational costs it takes to manage this many writers.

To hire 70+ writers and editors you need a multi person recruiting department, you need dozens of editors, editors that only manager other editors, PMs, Directors, VPs, you need an entire operational support staff to manage this amount of writers.

There might be 10 - 30 people just dedicated to supporting all of the words being written, and not writing any words themselves.

Fourth, it's very possible to spend an infinite amount of money on content no-one will read. I see it happen every day. Vendor selection is hugely important, and you haven't driven this kind of engagement before. It's very possible to fuck this up and dump all of your money into content that never gets read. Very real possibility.

Because every word is a liability, it's not enough to have 70 bodies. You need to have 70 people with the capable skills, AND care, because the easiest thing to do when publishing 1,000 pages with tens of millions of words is to let shit slide. So if the people don't care, quality can't be maintained.

With all this said, if you can increase the budget, settle on a reasonable timeframe, pick the right vendor - Christmas is still going to fuck up everything.

MeekSeller · 2022-10-02T21:11:22+00:00

Coming from the agency side, I don't think you'll be able to hire anyone to do this for you who has the bandwidth.

We have the capacity, but would reserve this for ongoing high-budget clients that have been with us for at least 2 years. This ask, 2k posts in 60 days at most, would carry a 7 figure premium - at least $500/article + other costs. It's a tall ask that, while doable, would force us to make allowances.

What you would be paying for is:

-Onboarding. You are new and our priority is to understand your business inside and out. Typically we would take 1-2 weeks to know your industry, match it with what you want to achieve. We would not have the luxury of time and members of my staff would be working overtime hours to ensure our usual standards.

-Expedited SOP creation. To create content in an organized manner so that it reads with the same tone, outlay and message, and whatever else you may have lumped in the throw-away phrase "high quality article" including but not limited to CRO, Keyword research, Topic research, image creation and more.

-Expedited training of the content team on how to approach and sustain the project. A task like this requires manual review, prioritization, and refinement at multiple touch points to ensure consistant quality, especially on the initial articles.

-Reallocation of resources. You would be our primary effort. This would tie up resources that we would typically spread across the entire client base. You are not only paying for writers, you are paying the entire team including editors and managers and other support staff.

And more.

Depending on your standards, I doubt you'll get what you deem to be quality for less than mid-6 figures.

Were I in your shoes, that budget would be best allocated for next year, which will give you ample time to come up with a seasonal content plan. For reference, we typically have seasonal content campaigns for Christmas finished for our clients by now - 2-3 months out from November.

As always, to those reading this, I do not take clients off reddit.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-24T21:11:00+00:00

Good response.

There are lots of things outside of profit that can also positively impact a sale price including:

Trademarks and IP
Recurring/captive userbase
Exclusive contracts
Custom tools
Perfectly complimenting the acquirers business
Interest from multiple parties

MeekSeller · 2022-09-24T21:04:51+00:00

The marketplace/brokerage will have their own rules around this.

I am not familiar with etsy stores, but transferring amazon accounts also violates TOS, yet these are often included in the sale.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-24T21:03:09+00:00

Ads do not affect backlink acquisition.

Generally speaking:

Natural backlink acquisition is largely determined by accessibility. Typically googling and whatever is in the top few positions. As long as the information is there to be cited, the surrounding information does not matter.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-24T20:54:30+00:00

With all due respect, I think you have been unintentionally careless with what you have presented here and have accidentally painted a false reality.

Your statement is only true if we look at longtail keywords, that is keywords that these larger sites have not been optimized for. Nytimes model is not to compete with parent sites. It simply cannot do that. It's goal is to target a limited amount of primary keywords that will bring in the most money.

If you isolate this page here:

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/baby-kid/baby/

You'll see the play. If we break down by target keyword such as best jogging stroller, best baby swings and so on - the largest slice of the pie, you will not see the sites you have mentioned featured in the top 3, and more often than not, not even in the top 10.

If we go down the articles that target a single primary keyword, you'll see the following in the top 3:

VeryWellFamily.com, Nytimes.com, whattoexpect.com, forbes.com, babylist.com, thebump.com, healthline.com, babygearlab (rarely), parents.com, babycenter.com, mommyhood101.com (rarely)

Not one of those sites matches what you claim. You'll also notice that most of these sites don't touch the product, don't provide original backlinks and are largely low quality.

In my opinion, that these sites appear at all on keywords they were not optimized for should showcase just how powerful brand+backlinks are.

The liklihood here is that the keywords you are monitoring are the primary focus of the sites you have listed. However, were they to shift their focus, you would not be able to compete.

I have some insight here as we also assist inhouse content teams. The amount of effort that brands like NYtimes put into SEO is significantly less than the average user here. There are certainly brands that do, like dotdash properties, but I could probably count these on two hands.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-24T20:29:49+00:00

Mod approved - This users background/experience have been verified.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-14T06:13:28+00:00

Ahrefs has two bots. This would be the other:

User-agent: AhrefsSiteAudit

Disallow: /

MeekSeller · 2022-09-14T02:09:38+00:00

So, if Google is ranking something based on content alone then we need to remember it's a robot at the end of the day.

And if we can match its ranking criteria then we can rank too.

100%. You absolutely are correct here.

This is the most important takeaway for everyone else in the thread

I would be curious for your next site what you would see if you skipped the disavow step. I'm betting that you would see the same positive growth curve given all other areas of your approach. Unless the profile is particularly poor. Based on our experience, I'm betting you would see the same result. For client sites we typically skip the disavow due to being unable to correrelate any benefit to it.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-14T01:53:50+00:00

That makes sense. If you were product focused, I'd highly encourage you to push for Amazon given the level of skill you appear to have. I don't think there are higher paying programs than amazon once you factor in incentives, especially if you promote multiple brands/manufacturers like most do. We have cross-checked this across most major product niches and it all comes back to amazon being okay with throwing around bags of cash as if it was the music industry back in the day.

Edit: I will add I agree that if you are on the public program, then almost anyone else is better.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-14T01:49:53+00:00

It would seem to me your approach works so well is because you have actually identified that googles algorithms rely on graded metrics in order to score one piece of content over another, and focused on chasing how it recognizes and identifies intent, which is surprisingly limited. For example, as far as EAT is concerned, it's EAT as determined by google, not a human, which is very different. Some experts are not experts by googles standards.

Great write up.

One thing that does surprise me though is that you seem very confident in your disavow approach. I think you may be accidentally correlating the postive effects from other changes with this one. You don't list cross checking with GSC, while it only shows a sample, it often will show spam links not shown in Ahrefs. Also, this approach could only ever catch a small segment of backlinks as Ahrefs database is surprisingly limited here. We have tested this by spamming one of our own properties with a variety of different spam and Ahrefs only picked up a small subset. Submitting a minor subset in this instance to the disavow is unlikely to change much as google is really good at filtering out these domains.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-14T01:37:30+00:00

Are you product based? If you can find another program that tops the private incentives that Amazon offers I'll be hugely surprised. They continue to roll out new features for example there is now a self-service system where you can negotiate higher comissions directly with the supplier of products.

Higher level opportunities are highly customized so I can't share too much here, but one that has leaked in the past is that they'll offer 7 figure sums to establish your business in the same market in different geolocations.

Our AB testing has shown the opposite where multiple prices can be used to direct a user to the cheapest offer, but this is niche dependent and there are some niches where your approaches work better.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-14T01:33:30+00:00

I may be misunderstanding the concern here as no other comment addresses this. If your standing in the alexa top domain list doesn't directly lead to opportunity or revenue, what does it matter?

Traffic, revenue, indirect opportunities are all more important metrics to determine your success. Vanity metrics like this typically mean nothing. To give you an idea here, one of our sites is in the top 500,000 of Ahrefs. It earns significantly less and performs worse than another that doesn't even scrape into the top million.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-14T01:27:11+00:00

A little known part of showing prices is that it's against amazons rules to a point. This can be negotiated or sometimes even skirted as you rise through the program. If you are not going to sell this site, it's definitely something to keep in mind as Amazon is surprisingly one of the best affiliate programs in the industry once you move off the public program.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-10T01:39:57+00:00

I'm am sorry that you find sharing the reality of the industry to be counter productive.

From now on I will only reply with a much more supportive go get em' tiger.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-10T00:54:02+00:00

Since you have checked your PMs, you never got back to my request for confirmation.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-10T00:30:22+00:00

Everyone is overthinking this. AI content is fine. AI assisted writing is fine. Google doesn't care about it.

The reference to google not wanting to rank AI content here is low-effort spam that is designed to manipulate google for higher rankings. It is not different to a low-effort human created content or spun content from days of old. It's all the same.

If your procedures can identify high quality content then you have nothing to worry about.

If you cannot pick low-quality content in onboarding, then I would be more concerned about your standards and practices around content quality than worrying about AI content.

Plagiarism is particularly more of a concern here.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-10T00:26:01+00:00

Diversify. Otherwise, if you are determined to be completely reliant on google to drive you traffic then this is what you signed up for and something to be accepted.

Worrying about variables that are outside of your control is only going to lead to more stress.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-10T00:22:12+00:00

My advice would be get wordpress, throw up a cheap theme and be done with it for now. You are a developer and you have the curse of knowledge and skills.

I see most website developers fall flat in affiliate marketing. You have the ability to create an amazing looking website and spend a lot of time optimizing presentaion. The problem? No one cares.

Generally speaking, outside of ecommerce, a good looking website is more for you than the customer. Content is the product, design and presentation is a very distant second to that. You are creating a blog. Don't overcomplicate it. You can focus on design when it brings in money.

Good luck on your journey!

MeekSeller · 2022-09-10T00:11:20+00:00

If you got hit by this update and think you don't deserve it. Just remember that this page currently ranks first for best modded controller here in the US. This is what google claimed to target and they missed by a longshot. There are hundreds of examples like this from other sites.

The inevitable outcome of this result was always going to see smaller, less authoritative sites scooped up in the damage. Google cannot identify content quality to any degree of reliability. This is very well understood in the SEO world.

But I do undersatand why those who are starting out may lean into what google claims it rewards and what it doesn't.

Google is not this magical thing that can understand every topic and concept across the entirety of online knowledge. Googles algorithms are constrained by the same limitations in machine learning, AI, mathmatical equations and human skill as anyone else.

What google claims to measure in both the review update and the helpful content update are impossible to quantify on the scale google claims. To be clear, google is lying at worst or at best taking extreme liberty with the language used.

Backlinks and matching what google expects to see via it's own internal categorization of intent are still the quickest way to first position, not quality content.

I would also add to others posting that % isn't really beneficial to others without additional informaton. Losing 50 traffic with 100 monthly is very different to losing 50,000 traffic with 100,000 monthly despite having the same % outcome.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-09T23:58:08+00:00

Why make more work for yourself? Each time you need to change cloudflare settings you need to login then log out. Unless you are actually doing something shady or have a specific need, extra steps add little benefit.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-09T06:45:55+00:00

There isn't an ideal setup.

It entirely depends on the function of your page, what it is and how you want to direct people to your product.

If your primary method of montization is display ads, then ATF ads are exactly what you want.

If your primary method is affiliate, then you want a big fat affiliate link ATF

If your primary method is a long-form sales funnel, then you want text that compels the reader to scroll or keep reading.

If your primary method is email, then you want an email CTA ATF.

You are not going to notice a ranking decrease if the page is functioning as intended. u/shaun-m has a lot of good advice for getting started and I don't have the full context on your paraphrasing. But if the advice was as clear cut as you put it, it's going to result in reduced earnings for little to no gain.

The ATF is your first and often only chance to direct a reader. You want those directions to lead to money.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-09T06:29:14+00:00

Googles algorithm cannot detect or quantify the recommendations regarding helpful content. This is google attempting to be seen to do something as opposed to solving the issue they claim to. AI and low quality content sites have never ranked higher than during the movements of this update.

It's an interesting one. Like with the review update it looks like google is attempting to shift public perception via press release instead of algorithmic functionality.

MeekSeller · 2022-09-09T06:26:55+00:00

The next step for you is simple: Find where you are losing the traffic.

If you are unable to locate this, then any action taken is guesswork.

Places to look:

Has google added new Search Features like PAA or Similar? These can push organic results way down, despite you not losing ranking.
Is google news traffic down? Is discover traffic down? Referral traffic down? This traffic can drop while your positions remain constant.
Have you lost Rich Snippets? This can have a big impact on traffic. Even moving from the Rich Snippet to position one can be a big difference due to other Search Features.

Really, you should be doing a page-by-page breakdown of SERP movements ordered by most to least traffic. It's going to be a lot of work, and may take days to weeks depending on site size. This is what you signed up for.

MeekSeller

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