VinceZ | The advertisers

The advertisers

Preparing An Online Media Kit

WHAT IS A MEDIA KIT?

A media kit is a sales tool for selling advertising in your ezine or on your website. It should include everything a potential advertiser might need to know to decide two things:

1. Whether to advertise in your ezine, and

2. How to place an order for advertising in your ezine.

Use your media kit to get potential advertisers excited about advertising in your publication.

WHAT DOES A MEDIA KIT LOOK LIKE?

Your media kit can be as simple as a rate card or an extension of a printed press kit. I recommend developing a full-blown online media kit. Prepare a media kit in HTML to display on your website and another one in text format that can be accessible via email through an autoresponder.

WHY SHOULD I DEVELOP AN ONLINE MEDIA KIT?

1. To provide immediate access to advertising rates and demographic information for your potential advertisers.

2. To provide you with an effective filter for prospective advertisers guaranteeing that only seriously interested prospects contact you.

How to Find Advertisers for Your Website

What You Need to Have in Place

A popular website: Before landing direct advertising deals you will need to have a good amount of traffic on your site. There is no “magical” number here, but a good rule of thumb would be 1000 daily unique visitors. If you are below that mark you should focus on building traffic instead of looking for advertisers. Other factors like Google Pagerank, RSS subscribers and Alexa rank might also help. (Notice that small websites might also be able to sell direct advertising, but usually the time spent on that will not justify the results)
A clear focus: You might have the most popular site on the Internet (well, not as extreme as that, but you get the point), but unless your site also has a very clear niche and a defined audience, advertisers will not find it very attractive. This means that you should avoid rambling about 100 different topics on the website. Advertisers want to deliver a message to specific people, and the more specific the better.

A professional looking design: If you are planning to monetize your website through sponsors, you probably should invest some money into a professional looking design. Advertisers will be associating their product or service with your website, and not too many of them would be willing to get mixed with an ugly, MySpace looking site.
Give visibility to the sponsors: This point is connected to the previous one. Not all templates and themes will be suitable for selling direct advertising. Preferably you want to have an idea of what kind of advertising you will sell (e.g., 468×60 banners, 125×125 banners, text links) and design your website according to those objectives. Advertisers want visibility, so reserve a good spot for them.