If you earned any amount of money online through advertisement companies, then you obviously know that your earnings are not 100% of the money you made. Did you ever think how much more money you would’ve made if no commission was taken out from your earnings? This question got me to think more and more of how much money I would’ve made if I just dumped the middleman.

I hate giving cuts to people who didn’t help me market or write posts. So I devised a plan to go direct to the advertisers instead of letting the middleman take cuts from the money I earned.

Steps to Go Direct

Establish a high-quality site. Whether your blog is with WordPress, MovableType, or even Joomla, you can make a high-quality site out of it. Use the platform’s ability to make the best out of your site. Install key modules or plug-ins to give your users the best user experience with an easy loading interface. Write content to the best of your ability, the more time you put into it, the better.

Market effectively. I know that anyone can market, but it actually takes an effort to market to a target audience. A target audience is more beneficial to your advertisers and to your site than a random audience. I would rather have 1000 target audience visitors than to have 10,000 random audience visitors. The reason is that there is a greater chance those 1000 visitors will return, instead of the other 10,000 visitors.

Establish a loyal community. With a target audience, do your best to establish a good, loyal community. With a loyal community in your hand, create great content to attract them to come back to your site over and over again.

Get credibility. With a loyal community, work on establishing your credibility. The credibility works side by side with your market niche. Even if you think you know everything about your topic, research more; by researching more you’re not risking anything, you’re only gaining more knowledge. The more you know about your topic, the more credibility you’ll get when you put your knowledge in your textual content. One of the best places to research any topic is EzineArticles.

Get a good rank. To some this can be challenging, but if your site gets a good number of hits then it will only increase as you create more and more content. Do your best to get a good web ranking in PageRank, in Alexa, and in Technorati. To gain a good ranking on the web, establish a site with high-quality content. For example, look at this blog, it has a PR4, a Technorati rank of ~20,000, and a ~154,000 ranking on Alexa; these numbers will only get better with time. Before, this blog didn’t have a PageRank, and it was in the 1,000,000 on Technorati, and it was in the 900,000 in rankings on Alexa; so, it’s not hard to get a good rank, it just takes time.

Use the middleman. Join a publisher program of a well-established contextual advertiser: AdSense, AdBrite, or even AzoogleAds. Display their ads on your site for a significant amount of time such as for a week to a month.

Analyze. Analyze which contextual advertisements are displayed on your site the most. Keep a record of how many times repetitive advertisements are continuously displayed on your site.

Go direct. Go directly to these sites, which have their ads displayed on your site through the contextual advertising company, and contact the owners. Tell the owners of your analysis and offer them a flat fee to have their sites advertised on your site. Offer the advertisers various ways to advertise such as with banner ads and text link ads. The higher your credibility, as in the higher your web ranking, the better the chance you’ll have of the advertisers taking your offer seriously. Offer the advertisers a cheaper price than the price they already pay with the advertisement companies.

I put this plan to work on another site I own. However, instead of me going to the advertisers, the advertisers came to me and we reached a mutual agreement of the payment and where their ads would be displayed. And it worked; the only commission I had to pay was the 1.9%+$0.30 to PayPal, since I have a business account with them and all my payments were received through PayPal. One of my readers, Vijay, gave me a link on a podcast to Jeremy Schomaker’s direct advertisements, and so it reminded me that I did this a long time ago.

So tell me, what do you think of this plan?

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