Advertising services can seem like licenses to print money; after all you can virtually sell a never-ending supply of ads for an almost arbitrary amount of money.
However, there is a catch: they are notoriously hard to get going. Advertisers will generally only advertise if there is a large number of users using the service, and users will only use the service if there is a large number of advertisers in the service. So it's a bit of a catch-22 situation.
Once you build up a reputation with both advertisers and users, then these can be fantastic earners. For example, a job board that is famous in a particular niche as the place to find jobs, can attract anywhere from USD 50 to USD 300 per job listing with dozens of listings a month. Some strategies for getting a service going are to:
Since you have a blog with an audience that these advertisers want to reach, you can offer weekly or monthly posts that feature advertisers from the service.
Example post headlines are "This week on the job board" or "Best services from the directory." If done well they can help get the ad service going while still producing a post that users will, if not find useful, at least not find too annoying.
Getting advertisers when you are charging for listings is difficult, but finding them when the service is free is pretty easy. Consider running the service for free for the first six months until it gets a reputation and then switch over to the paid model.
You'll have some chafing from advertisers, but hopefully if you made it clear that the free period would not last forever, then it shouldn't be too bad.
Like any product you are selling, ad services can benefit from a bit of promotion. Create some adverts to appeal to job posters, companies that would list in the directory, or people who'd list in the classifieds, and pay to advertise in places those people might visit. It might not be cheap, but it can buy some momentum for your service.
Affiliate programs tend to work best if the service is already working well, so these might not get much momentum early on, but they might be worth investigating, especially if the ad service software you are using offers an affiliate module that you can switch on easily.
Ultimately your task in launching an ad service is to seed the service to make it useful. Discount listings, special offers, promotion on the blog, networking with advertisers, and anything else you can do to get some content on there is worth pursuing.
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02172011
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