There are different ways to monetise your website and the most common one is to display advertisements. These could be via affiliate programs or other online ad networks like Adsense or CJ. When a visitor to your site performs an action using the ad links on your site, you receive a commission from the company who provided the links. Obviously, you receive the commission minus the affiliate network cut. Some networks take a fixed cut while others charge a percentage that could go up to 50% or even more.

Conditions permitting, you could consider interacting with the advertiser yourself and remove the middleman from the transaction. The advertiser and the publisher (that is you) would benefit from the saved middleman costs.

In such scenarios, you would sell the advertising inventory on your site directly to the advertiser and get paid for it directly to your account.

Obviously, there are some extra tasks that you will need to do in this case. First you will need an advertising kit. This should provide information that an prospective advertiser would need before they take a decision to use your services (yes, this is a service). The advertising kit should have information on the following:

Type of site
Site popularity
Number of visitors
Demographic of visitors
Location of advertising inventory on site
Type of advertising (CPC, CPA, CPM, per sale etc)
Inventory availability
Whether you will do design of advertising campaign
Information on tracking tools
Payment modes accepted
Any discounts available
Rates (optional, as you may want to discuss with prospective clients before giving custom quotations)

For direct sales to work satisfactorily, you must have decent traffic to your site. Also ensure that all visitors are tracked properly to get maximum information of their behavior on your site like where they came from, which pages they viewed, how long they stayed, which country they belong to etc. All these information can be easily arrived at from any good counter script.

Also you will need an ad management script. Again a number of free open source ad management scripts are available which you can use. If you are only looking to sell a few text links on your site, you may not need any complex software but you will still need to know the effectiveness of the ad campaign. Without this, it will be difficult to convince the advertiser to continue the campaign on your site.

You will need a payment gateway for accepting payments. Since you will receive payment from each advertiser individually, the amounts could be smaller as compared to the consolidated payments that will be sent out by the affiliate networks. So check payment may not be a preferred payment option in many situations. Ensure that you are eligible to accept payment via the major online payment gateways, like PayPal, Moneybookers etc and also through credit cards. You do not want to lose prospective advertisers just because you do not accept their preferred mode of payment.

You may also want to set a minimum advertising campaign budget for each advertiser. This would be needed as you will need to ensure that transactions costs do not exceed the income from inventory sold.

The question you must be asking now is how to find the advertisers. The answers are many and you will need to identify the right answers based on your requirements. If you have site targets your local area, you may need to advertise your services in the local paper while in other cases you may need to spread the word through forums or in some cases through email.

The final tip that we must give and which could tip the balance is ‘Be accessible to the advertiser’. Give an email address which you check often and reply ASAP to all advertiser queries. If required, add the advertiser contact to some chat to clear his queries. Add the human touch to the transactions. It will go a long way in getting you a long-term client.

Or if all these look too much trouble, you may well use a third party to sell your advertising inventory for a percentage commission.