How to Sell Ads in Your WordPress Blog with BuySellAds

Banner advertisement is by far the most common form of advertisement through out the web (including blogs). There are numerous ways to sell ads in your WordPress blog, but in this particular article, we will share with you a particular company, BuySellAds, that we have been using since WPBeginner was started. Due to BuySellAds, we never had to worry about getting advertisers, filling up our inventory (we have been sold out for over twelve months now), or dealing with the hassle of collecting money. That’s a nice problem to have right Before we go further in this article, we want to clarify that we are NOT being paid in any way or form to write this post. We just wanted to let every new blogger know that without BuySellAds, we would not be where we are.

What is BuySellAds?

BuySellAds is an online marketplace that connects website publishers and advertisers. No Fancy algorithm, no complex methods, it is very simple. The advertiser searches for a niche that they are targeting, bunch of site pops up (you might be in that niche) – Advertisers look at your site’s stats, and buy the ad. BuySellAds handles the transaction, provide advertisers with analytics, and deposit the funds in your account every month. Pretty straight forward stuff. You are still in control because you get the final say in which advertisers you want to approve, and which advertisers to deny.

Why use BuySellAds?

There is no better way to explain this aside from sharing our story and experience. We started using BuySellAds in September 2009 (WPBeginner was founded in July 2009). By this time, we have built-up a fairly decent amount of readers to the site, however the site was still very new. The only way for us to get advertisers would be to create a list of companies that might be interested then send out an email asking for them to advertise (Yes, that comes of pretty SPAMMY). So this could potentially hurt our reputation, but it would have also been very time consuming. Finding advertisers (sending and replying to all those emails), keeping the current advertisers happy (offering them analytics), collecting payments (reminding those who haven’t paid), etc. By no means, we are suggesting that there are not plugins which cannot do that. OIO Publisher Plugin that we use on this site, does that job very well. However, BuySellAds provided us with something that no WordPress plugin can provide: good base of advertisers who are looking to spend money on advertisements.

Aside from that, it saved us all the time which really helped us increase our growth rate significantly because we were focusing our energy on the right area: writing quality articles and building our user base (exactly what every blogger should focus on). All we had to do was go in, create our profile page for the site, create ad zones (areas where we want to sell ads on), select the prices and quantity of ads we want to sell, and then place their script within our design. They took care of pulling in our site’s screenshots, providing advertisers with social proof (statistics for your site). Check out the example of our Property page:

For all this, they took a 25% cut of the ad price which covered transaction processing fees, support for you and advertisers, and all the services that BuySellAds provide for you. You might think that is a lot of money, but we paid it happily. Because if you dedicate a person to do this for you, or spend time out of your day to do this, you will end up spending more. Because not every email you send out will convert into buyers. Often, you will exchange emails and the deal will end up falling. So it was really well worth it for us to use BuySellAds as a service and focus our efforts on what we do best.

It is not just us by the way that feels this way. Tuts+ Network, The Next Web, Search Engine Journal, Dynamic Drive, and many other big name sites use BuySellAds to sell their ads. They have some very well-known advertisers as well. See what others are saying about BuySellAds.

Through out our years of using BuySellAds, we made numerous suggestions on things that we saw need improvement. We suggested new features a lot of them were implemented. We even had the honor of creating the blog design for BuySellAds built on the best WordPress Theme Framework: Genesis. Basically what we are trying to get across is that they CARE about their users. They will help you pick the right price, right ad zones etc.

Enough of our story on why we use BuySellAds, lets get into how you can start selling ads in your WordPress Blog with BuySellAds.

Note: It is important to establish the point that you have to be using self-hosted WordPress blogs to sell ads.

How to use BuySellAds with WordPress?

First, you would need to register for a BuySellAds account (it’s FREE), and then add your site (create a property). You get to add numerous ad zones for that web property of yours. Ad formats include (Image Only, Image + Text, Text + Description, Sponsored Tweets, RSS Feed Ads, and more will probably come in the future).

You get to select your own price, you can select per month or impression based. You can select to rotate ads if you want, select ad sizes and much more. Once you are done creating your ad zones, all you have to do is simply drop the codes into your template. Or alternatively, you can use the official BuySellAds WordPress plugin.

You are probably wondering, why we are not providing a step by step guide of doing this? Because it is very easy to follow once you are on BuySellAds. They have created a very neat User-interface that will guide you step by step.

Is banner advertisement the only way to make money? Certainly not. There are tons of other ways to make money from your blog. Check out Syed Balkhi’s presentation on Monetizing your Blog from WordCamp Miami.

Are you already using BuySellAds? Just signed up, or have used it in the past? Please share your comments, experiences, and questions in the comments below. We would love to hear more.