BuySellAds, if you couldn’t tell from the name, is a marketplace where advertisers and publishers meet up and hook up. Publishers can present their site statistics, their ad slots and their desired prices. Advertisers can bid on those ad slots. Through it all, BuySellAds takes a commission, allowing them to operate as an otherwise free service.

BSA is a great site to use when you want to monetize your site, but it can be hard to break in and get your money rolling. Once you have a critical mass, you’re good to go, but you can always work to increase your profits. Here are five tricks you can use to make more money, both in getting started and in moving forward.

1. Stick to Image Ads

BSA offers several types of ads. These are:

• Text ads
• Text and image ads
• RSS feed ads
• Tweet ads

In general, you want to stick with image ads. This is because the graphical ad is both easier to integrate with your site, and are easier to differentiate from your content. Your site has a style; ads run counter to that style, which makes them visible. More visibility means more revenue.

You can, of course, test each type of ad to see which work the best. For your site, text ads might be perfect. Another site might have a hard time getting RSS ads when they have no subscribers. BSA also sells mobile ads, so if you have a substantial number of mobile visitors, that can be equally if not more lucrative than desktop ads.

2. Assign Prime Zones to BSA Ads

When you’re assigning ad zones to BSA, you have a few choices to make. Here are some general guidelines:

• Less is more. One or two ads at a higher rate will perform better and pull in more money than six ads scattered throughout your page. The idea here is to stay on Google’s good side; Google doesn’t like pages with too many ads.
• Decide if you can get enough of a payment for a prime ad that it’s worth sacrificing the space. See, you could also use that space to advertise your own products, selling them directly. If you can make more money this way, relegate the BSA ads to less prime positions.
• Make sure your ads are well integrated with your blog design. You don’t want something that sticks out over your text, something that clashes with your design or something that looks like spam.

Even though the ads you get through BSA aren’t AdSense, you can still learn a lot through researching what AdSense ad positions perform the best.

3. Increase your Traffic

You knew it had to be on here somewhere. Increasing your traffic has a few beneficial effects with the BSA marketplace. For one thing, when your site is rated for positioning on the marketplace, traffic is one of the factors they consider. Advertisers look for sites with a high volume of traffic, so increasing your traffic volume makes your site a more desirable target.

At certain levels of traffic, you become sought-after. This allows you to start increasing the price of your ad slots, forcing advertisers to compete. You can gradually increase this price, by as much as 10% per sold slot, until you’re making what you consider satisfactory. Just don’t try to raise your price too much too quickly, or you’ll drive advertisers away.

Just make sure your traffic is real traffic. You don’t want to buy your traffic from bots over at Fiverr; you want real traffic from a reputable seller, if you’re buying traffic at all. Honestly, buying traffic can be a great idea; spend a few months with purchased traffic getting your income up, and then invest those profits in better organic marketing to increase organic traffic as well.

4. Use Unreserved

The BuySellAds Unreserved program is an interesting feature that’s new as of the end of the last year. What it does is, at the end of the month, it looks at how many of your ad slots are left available. If you have slots that have not been filled by marketplace ads, it looks for ads that are suitable and fills the spaces.

What this does is ensures that you always have ads to fill your spaces, even if you haven’t found the perfect fits for every slot for every month. It saves you a lot of time and energy, just like the BSA platform itself.

5. Reject Tertiary Ads

This is a skill you’re going to need to pick up over time. See, when an advertiser bids on one of your ad spaces, you get to see the ad they want to run. You also have the option of rejecting their ad. Chances are, you should be liberal with using that rejection button.

“But rejecting ads means I’m not getting paid for those slots!” This is true, but it’s better to have no ad than to have a spammy-looking ad. The problem is, as always, with Google. Google doesn’t want to log on to your tech blog and see advertisements for malware-ridden smiley packs. Your users don’t either.

For one thing, this decreases your Google rank and reputation. Google looks poorly upon bad ads, and running them can be harmful. What you make in immediate profits, you lose in long-term growth.

For another thing, users don’t like being confronted with the spammier side of web advertising. Some of them will recognize the bad ads for what they are and will reject them. Others might click through, find themselves lost in a maze of poor quality sites, and will fail to return to your site.

When in doubt, make sure the ads you accept are as closely related to your topic as possible. Even a well-made ad for a service completely unrelated to your own will come across as spam.

Join the Discussion

1. 

   Heike Grennell

   says:

   December 23, 2014 at 6:08 am

   Thanks for this, Kenny! I loved your tip on using BSA’s unreserved program; I’ll be giving it a try and changing some things up a bit to see how it affects revenue. Cheers

   Reply

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