How to determine the price of ads on your website?

When I started any of my past websites, I always had trouble in the beginning for setting the price of ads on my website. I wanted to try things out, so I had the price set ridiculously high for a new blog. I know my top banner’s price was $55/month, sidebar banner’s price was $35 / month, and my sidebar scraper’s price was $45/month. Whereas my review price stayed at flat $50. For the first couple weeks, I had no sale but I didn’t mind because Balkhis was very new. Then after a while my first sale was a review.

I then started thinking. Why don’t I buy links on other new sites? Because the prices are inflated, and I am doing the exact same thing. Suddenly I cut down the prices, to what they are right now. $15 /month for header banner. $15/month for the sidebar scraper. $10/month for a sidebar banner, and $5/month for textlinks. Whereas I left my reviews to be $50. It was still very hard to get advertisers, so I thought of going to places like TLA. Sadly got rejected from there according to them, The site was new and need more backlinks. Now I have over 43k backlinks, and I didn’t even bother applying back to TLA. I did signup for Adtoll, but they require their banner everywhere if the ads aren’t sold which is just as good as empty slots banners. Ruin the look of the entire site. So I removed their code.

Then I got OIO Publisher. Which gave my users an easy signup method. What do you know that I got enough subscriptions that I was making $150+ just from subscriptions. Rest aside the google adsense and other PPC and affiliates.

With my Short anecdote, did you learn anything? If you still haven’t then let me point out the important points for you.

Well If you notice, one of the main points are don’t keep your price inflated. I understand that your competitor’s prices are high and they are making more profit than you, but in the beginning you have to keep the price low enough to survive, and just keep your business going.

Next thing you want to do is Don’t use any price calculator’s online. Half of them are based on PR, so most will say your link price is $0. If any of you are interested in selling links for that price feel free to use my contact form. I will be gladly to buy a couple at that price.

Now you should start considering the market rate, and how can you offer your advertisers a good bargain. To evaluate the market rate, Visit some of your competitor’s site. Preferably, those who have the same rankings, same stats as yours. Whatever they are offering the link price for, try to match that, or less.

Always take in account your hard work. Say if you are a blogger and you are writing a review. There is no need for you to cut your prices down because you are not doing any less work. I kept my review prices the same, and I did those for a reason because It takes me quiet sometime to write a detailed review of a product.

Next thing you want to consider is your traffic. While Alexa is a very unstable measure of traffic, I still use it to determine where the site ranks. From your own traffic, you need to start determining what is a decent price compared to your competitors.

My last advice on this subject is fellas, Start somewhere! One thing I can let you all know if you are running a blog. You will make more than adsense if you sell direct ad sales, so Start some where. Don’t let those banners take the look of your sidebars. If you notice I have removed the text ads from the header. There are only image ads now. So no more bidvertisers and others. Direct adsales, or adsense image ads. Many other webmasters and gurus will advice you the same thing to start somewhere. You can always work your way up once your site takes off.