Why Advertisers Aren’t Investing in You
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
The simple truth of advertising is that you need to prove to the advertiser (before they ever hand you money) that your website can provide the eyeballs and the conversion rates that justify their return on investment. If you get that then you can probably go read another article. This one is redundant.
If you don’t get that, you may have a website with large blocks of colour and text which reads Advertise Here. You may even have a fancy page of terms and conditions where you sound officiously experienced in the Internet Marketing industry. You may even try to make demands and set conditions that further dissuade people.
Don’t bullshit yourself – because business is not about bullshitting anybody – there is no lack of screen real-estate on the World Wide Web that makes advertisers desperate for the attention of your little blog, one of billions of URLs hocking its arse on the information highway.
OK that sounds negative. But there is an upside to knowing your own limitations and those of your business resources and capabilities. The upside is you can stop wasting time chasing the wrong business model and discover the right one.
You can visualise your blog as the wall of your living room – how many people see that living room? That’s your entire profit pool in regards to the advertiser’s market. Out of those eyeballs that see your living room wall, how many would convert to purchasing customers and repeat customers? That’s your actual value to advertisers.
It sounds ominous. What it’s telling you is that unless you have a HUGE number of eyeballs and unless you can quantify who they are, what they REALLY buy, and how they REALISTICALLY convert to sales, then you are pushing shit uphill (an Australian term) to convince a profit-oriented business to invest in your screen real estate.
So what do you do? The first step is to pull down the signs of desperation from your sidebar – yep those Advertise Here GIFs that tell the world you’re a virgin.
The second step is you need to quantify your readership – your eyeballs. If you don’t have enough eyeballs then appreciate your weakness. If you really do have 100,000 people every day spending half an hour reading your content then you might be in business.
The third and most difficult step is to rethink your value proposition in the eyes of the website visitor. Are there 10 places they can get similar content or 10,000 or 10,000,000… it makes a huge difference. If you want to pursue the advertising business model you need a reason for those eyeballs to come to your living room.
It might just be that you need another business model. Advertising isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of revenue streams.
