Online Advertising With BuySellAds (BSA): An Advertiser's View

This is a guest post by Helen Bailey.

Bloggersentral.com is offering a huge selection of blogging tips as well as tips on how to monetize your blog. And we hope today’s article will help both people who want to promote their blogs with ads, and people who want to earn money by placing ads on their blogs. To make a long story short, here you’ll find an advertiser’s point of view on BuySellAds (BSA), a reputable service allowing people to buy and sell online ads. Advertisers choose BuySellAds because it saves them time on finding places for their ads, while publishers love BuySellAds because it helps them make extra money without extra efforts. Actually, BSA is a place where advertisers meet publishers and vice versa.

This article is based on TemplateMonster’s experience of using BuySellAds. However, the article will be interesting not only to advertisers looking for the best places for their ads, but also publishers because it will help them to see what kind of websites attract advertisers most.

But let’s stick to the point. For example, you’d like to advertise your product or service, or you’d like to get more visitors to your blog. What should you know about BSA? Buysellads.com allows you to choose from more than 2000 websites in different niches. Simply look through the websites that share your niche and decide which of them will be most valuable for you.

How to find the best websites for your ads?

Our answer is, potentially effective websites have the following criteria:

• Page Rank 5 and above
• Alexa Rank not more than 30,000
• Domain Authority not less than 50,000
• Price
• Placement of the banner (it’s better to keep your banner above the fold, i.e. at the top of the sidebar, below post title, etc)
• And of course, you’d better ignore those websites that have not been updated for months or even years

Things to remember 

No one can guarantee which site will give you the best results. So you should test the websites that meet the criteria we’ve mentioned and see which of them will be effective for your business.

We used Google Analytics and the statistics available in our BuySellAds account to monitor our ad campaigns. Although the numbers were not always the same, they helped us understand if we wanted to continue with this or that ad. By the way, one and the same website can be effective for one advertising campaign and totally useless for another one. In other words, you will never know before you try, but any venture should start with a case study and we’ve just shown you the main characteristics of a promising ad space.

After you’ve found the best place for your ads, it’s time to design an awesome banner. You’d better take this task seriously as your banner will have just a few seconds to attract visitors or … be ignored.

Finally, don’t forget to monitor your ad campaigns. How to know that your banner works well for you?

• You don’t pay more than 30 cents per click (to calculate the number you should divide price by the number of clicks)
• CTR (Click-through rate) is higher than 0.45%
• Please note: it’s up to you if you trust the statistics shown in your BSA account or the data you get from Google Analytics. We would recommend both options.

A few more things to keep in mind

• The most expensive banner does not mean the most effective banner.
• The minimum advertising period is one month. In other words, you can not remove the ad from the site even if the first 10 days show it is not as good as you supposed it to be. The only thing you can do is to not renew it. So be sure to click "Do Not Renew" before the next bill date if you do not want to renew the ad.
• If you buy an ad on a good website, it’ll get a lot of clicks even if it is placed below the fold.
• Do not always follow your competitors, meaning you should not always place your banner next to your competitor’s banner, because the website that works well for them will not necessarily work well for you. So again, test the website, monitor the results and keep your ads only on those websites which give you the best results.
• We strongly recommend that you check your banners at least once in a few days to make sure they’re being displayed properly.

So if you want our opinion on BSA, we would say you can get good results with BuySellAds if you use the service wisely, and we hope today’s article will help you with this.

About the author
Helen Bailey is a part of the Template Monster team. Template Monster is a web design company offering WordPress themes and other types of website templates.