November 20th, 2009 
admin
I love sending advertisers traffic -- for pennies.
7 Clicks….. $.07 !
Thank the Lord that Adsense isn’t our primary source of income. It has great features such as: ease of use and — well, that’s about it.
The ability to put up ads (I didn’t say TARGETED) in an instant and never have to lift a finger to find an advertiser.
PPC is the only advertising that is directly measurable by the advertiser.
To steal a line from friend Bruce Marler: “Think about that.”
(You do say that a lot, Bruce) 
An advertiser can never measure the exact response rate of a TV ad, Radio spot or Print campaign. Why do you think you are asked ”where did you hear about us” on so many email contact forms? Advertisers want to know what campaigns work and which dont.
PPC shows an advertiser the exact response rate, and breaks down a cost per visitor for them. It’s easy for them too. It’s effective. An advertiser knows they paid $450 today for 900 targeted visitors to their website. Pretty cool.
Another big advantage to PPC is that users are already online… able to purchase. Many TV and Print ads hope to entice customers to: Go to their computer, sign on the internet, type in our URL… find the page with the item you want…. etc.
With PPC, a user (ready to buy) is directed to a sales page. That’s it. It’s that simple. Set up a good conversion page and they are making sales instantly.
So, PPC is here for a reason.
HOWEVER, us publishers are a bit frustrated with some of these payouts.
Today, (and I’m laughing)… one ad placement on a small site of ours
sent 7 prospective customers to a site, and we received 7 cents in compensation. ONE PENNY per visitor. What’s the point if we’re getting pennies? I’ve lost a user, maybe for life, and I was paid a PENNY for that person? For a living, breathing human… eager to browse and buy… ONE PENNY?
Yesterday, we received 4 cents per click on a domain name with very minimal adsense, which we’ve received up to $15 for a single click in the past. I guess we’re going to accept this and say, oh well… maybe tomorrow.
Granted, there are variables that effect the payout, but come on. $15 one day. 4 cents the next. That’s cute.
The only real solution is to go direct… to contact companies directly and offer the same ad spots. You have to offer a DEAL, though, to these advertisers. Don’t get greedy and try to sell a spot for $1500 that’s produced fifteen bucks in adsense clicks.
Since we can’t guarantee any CTR (Click through rate) on our direct ad spots… you might have to price according to CPM (cost per 1000 impressions). CPM rates for advertisers range from $5 to $20 and more depending on the topic. Have a site with 2000 page views per month? One ad spot might range from $15 to $40 per month. The good news is, you can sell more than one, and the payment is guaranteed. No more checking stats to be disappointed, and no more scratching your head wondering if YOU are doing something wrong.
Publishers are ALWAYS open to replacing adsense with direct ad spots.
Our adsense is up mainly to show us a near-real-time page view count.
We don’t expect it to convert well at all.
Most of the time, our ads on sites like TrafficEstimate.com (Alexa 24,500) aren’t even targeted to domain or traffic.
TrafficEstimate.com has an Alexa Rank of 24,500
Adsense does a poor job sometimes.
Direct ads are the way out of the trap.
Control your site and your income.More to come later… time to go eat
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Posted in
In the beginning I honestly thought PPC meant Pennies Per Click.
Why would anyone buy directly from you unless you can offer them a rate lower than 4 cents a click , as per your example. Along with stats, scale, reporting ect.
Duh
I think the popularity of Wordpress and a growing number of affiliate plugins that are contextual, much like Adsense, give owners of descriptive product domains an immediate alternative.
I’d still lean toward direct ad sales as you’ve suggested in your post.
@Jeff: Because the advertisers aren’t PAYING 4 cents a click… Duh
Good post. Advertisers actually are very receptive to direct advertising…they like solid content and authority sites. Deliver that and they will want to hear what you have to offer them.
@Anthony: Agreed. If I were an advertiser, I’d rather deal with one highly targeted site, as opposed to doing PPC on every random site that Google places you on. Plus, click fraud is a big issue, and this takes the hassle out of that.
The approach makes perfect sense, and I agree with you on this. However, domain owners with quality portfolios have initiated this effort throughout the years and failed misserably. There were a variety of factors that contributed to the failure of signing advertisers directly.
I believe the main factors are trust, education, and site content. Let me explain these in 2 scenarios.
Senario 1:
I am a business owner who is new to the internet and want to deliver targeted traffic to my website. Everywhere I read on the subject, Google.com and Yahoo.com seem to be the companies that can deliver this traffic I am in search of to make me successful on the internet, so long as I bid for keywords that define my business. The process is easy, informative, and provides performance results for my advertising dollars. Additionally, I trust these established companies to deliver on the services they provide because of their business stature. I have no clue how advertising on targeted domain names can be of value to me.
How hard do you think it would be to convert this business owner to advertise on your domain name directly? CPM, what is that?
Senario 2:
I am an established business owner on the internet who has been using google.com or yahoo.com for years after trying a variety of CPM models. I get all the detailed reports that show my performing keywords and can see how many of these convert to sales on my end, etc. Much more detailed data than I received in the past with CPM. Everything has been going great with the advertising budget we established, with the exception of keyword bids fluctuating. I am aware of targeted visitors that developed domain names deliver, but I would have to go back to a CPM model which did not perform in the past.
How would you convince this seasoned business owner/advertiser to sign with you?
The converstation would go something like this:(Much different if a top notch salesperson though)
Salesperson: Hi my name is Billy Bob and I am with Domains Inc. We understand that you are in the realestate business in denver. We own DenverHomes.com that receives 20k visitors a month and can deliver targeted traffic to your site through our CPM model.
Advertiser: Domains Inc? Who are your other clients? I have visited the site denverhomes.com and do not see any purdinent content on the site. Additionally, all I see are links and banners. How could this possibly be more effective than google.com or yahoo.com? It looks like a spam site.
Salesperson: Tapdancing his way to answer this question honestly.
Anyway,
In both of these scenarios, you would need an outstanding salesperson to sign these type of advertisers directly for those with undeveloped domain portfolios IMO. It is easier said than done. Hell, established websites with tons of content have a hard time siging advertisers.
Frank Schilling is taking this on directly with the upgrade of his platform. Is he having an abundance of sucess? I have no clue. I am sure, it is not as easy as just placing a link on a parked page saying advertise with us.
Sorry for the long post. Just my opinion on executing this hard task, that is the right answer for domain portfolio owners, but hard to conquer.
Thanks,
Steve
Right. It is up to the domain owner to impress upon the advertising partner that the traffic from his or her site is actually much more targeted (and ready to buy) than what they will get through the SEs. In my experience, some get that when you discuss it in detail and some will take time.
Steve, great points. True, this isn’t easy… which is why parking and PPC is so popular with domain owners.
In my opinion the pitch gets easier the more targeted your site is, and the lower your price becomes
Any ideas and thoughts are welcomed.
Great post Steve.
PPC is the wrong model for any Website or Domain Investor.
All are out to get advertisers and the direct selling model is the best.
When I started out my developement plan, I gave away advertisement and leads for free.
I had a business model and a working site and what was it costing me? Nothing!
All these companies where making a killing off my “Business Network” and they LOVED me for it. Ofcourse ! I mean, in there eyes I was the stupid good guy filling there contract books.
They where all pretty happy until the day the tab was cut.
No more free advertisement, no more contracts rolling in from free leads!
Shock, anger, disapointment arised. Questions asked ” Is it over” , ” What happend”, ” How can we still work with you”?
From then on there was no need in finding companies to buy leads or book advertisement.
If a kid has never had candy it will never miss it, but once it has had that sweet taste it will want more of it!
My service Network now runs in 4 countries.
Good post
direct advertising ain’t easy. I have send thousands upon thousands of emails. but none are interested.
perhaps the alternative is commission such as CJ, clickbank and etc
Everybody forgets it’s all about providing genuine value to the actual site visitor. It’s NOT about the domain owner. It’s NOT about the advertiser. It’s NOT about the host company. It’s NOT about the registrar. It’s ALL about the site visitor.
When will you guys get it?
For God’s sake, what do you think SEO is all about? Instead of taking care of the site visitor, “experts” have determined what the search engine algorithm needs (based on constantly changing “rules” to ensure the site visitor is being taken care of) and then attempts to distill this down to an easy to follow set of programming features. The only trouble is, now it’s about meeting the needs of the search engine – not the site visitor.
All Google wants is for the site visitor to find exactly what he or she is looking for. That’s it. That’s enough.
There are thousands and thousands of sites with top 10 SERP that don’t focus on SEO at all. They focus on actual site visitors. What a concept.
The lazy domainer’s way to riches mentality has mesmerized one too many domain owner. News flash: That train has left the station. The days of taking gold out of the bank vault and being kindly escorted back to your waiting vehicle are gone. Yeah, all you guys at the very top of the DN food chain had the vision thing going-on, and for that you have been amply rewarded. Good for you; now move on.
As for the rest of us, wake-up and go to work.