Recently I was flown out to Los Angeles by AKMG and was selected to give a presentation at Meetup202 LA.  The topic I chose was how to get started with buying banner inventory on websites.  If you read my recap you’ll know the story about how I was really nervous about it.  Smaxor being present didn’t help my nerves because I knew if I had any slipups, he would know.  But after it was all said and done, I handled it pretty well.  A lot of people came up to me after wards and gave me great information and let me know they gained some good information, which is was my objective in the first place.  So I considered it a success.

The purpose of this post is to let everybody know that my Guide to Buying Banner Inventory is now public information.  There’s a link in the menubar above, so you might have seen it before.  I just had it set to password protected to tease everybody for awhile.  I had a number of people contact me on AIM asking for the password so they could check it out.

I did let a handful of people check out the guide in rough fashion so they could check it out and provide feedback.  They pointed out a few things I’ve added to the guide, but for the most part it’s pretty much a direct copy of the presentation I made at Meetup202 LA.  A few of the people that have already seen it have used the tips I’ve given away to get some campaigns up and running.

For what it’s worth, I consulted with a few affiliates who I trust to get their feedback on whether I should turn this into an eBook and make some money, because this guide definitely gives out some great information that you can use to fatten your bank account.  However, I didn’t want to be labeled a guru or an eBook marketer so I decided to go the Nickycakes route and release it as a guide on my blog.

I’m sure there are some small parts I’ve missed, but I believe that I have covered pretty much what you need to know when it comes to buying banner inventory.  If you guys see anything that I should change in the guide, just make a comment on those pages and I’ll add it if necessary.

Without further ado, just click the link above in the menubar or click here for my Guide to Buying Banner Inventory.

Here recently I finally took part in my first media buy and I ended up losing my $250 because of the mistakes I made.  I was all dreamy-eyed because it was my first media buy and it ended up costing me my entire investment because of it.  You live and you learn.  Thankfully, it wasn’t an expensive buy and I will chalk it up as a $250 lesson learned in media buying.

I was wanting to promote a niche dating site and I thought I had found the perfect site to contact for a direct buy. After a few back and forths with the domain owner and we agreed on a flat fee of $250 for a 30-day long run of the site. I was going to share the banner inventory with another banner, so I would see half the site’s traffic. When I asked how much traffic his site received, he told me, “[Sitename].com gets around 3000 unique visitors per day.” and “The site gets around 300000-350000 impressions on average monthly.” After my 30 days was up, I ended up getting a total of 17,398 impressions, resulting in 86 clicks and 0 conversions. I have run this offer for well over a year now and the average conversion rate I see is 12-18%.

So here’s my $250 worth of media buying advice to anybody who is about to do their first buy.

1. Check the demographics of the site you’re interested in buying banner inventory on. Use Quantcast, Compete or your favorite demographic website. Even these results will not be perfect. Your best bet is to ask for a media kit, if one is available.  Make sure the demographics match what works best for your offer.
2. Whenever you ask for the amount of traffic a site has, ALWAYS ask for proof of this.  Check the website’s source code, see if they’re using any type of analytics tool, such as Google Analytics.  Ask for a report of the last 30 days worth of traffic, at least.
3. When scouring the details of this traffic report you just asked for, see if you can determine where his traffic comes from. Is it type-in traffic or is it from organic search results?  If it’s a bunch of type-in traffic, you can probably bet that your target audience will develop banner blindness quicker.
4. While you’re still analyzing that report, check which countries this traffic is coming from.  You better make sure the traffic comes from a country that your offer allows!
5. Finally, do some math to find out how many conversions you will need to be profitable.  If it was a flat-fee per month, it’s easy to figureo out what it will take to be profitable.  If it’s a CPM buy, calculate how many conversions you will need per thousand impressions to be profitable.  Using data from other traffic sources, about how many clicks does that translate too?  Using that information, what CTR should you be expecting?  How do these figures relate to other traffic sources you’ve tested?  Does it seem realistic that you might be profitable?  I hope so!

P.S. Yes I’m a fucking idiot for not doing proper research. Thanks for noticing. =)