Prepare your Advertising Kit

What’s in an advertising kit?

Your advertising kit is everything a potential advertiser would need to know before making the decision to advertise on your website. It contains information such as:

• What opportunities are available on your website
  • The price for these opportunities
  • The technical specifications for the opportunities
  • Case studies and testimonials from past advertisers
• Who your readers are:
  • Age
  • Country
  • Gender
  • Interests
• The volume of readers you have
  • Monthly unique users
  • Monthly pageviews
• The interests of your readers

To pull together your advertising kits you’ll need access to something like Google Analytics to get the data, and Google Sheets to create some basic graphs (eg a pie graph for gender split)

Mediakits

Download our sample media kit from within the Monetization Method course.

A mediakit is simply a document (typically in the form of a PDF) which showcases your website to potential advertisers. It’ll share the potential reach of your website, and your credentials, and sell your site as best it can.

In a mediakit it’s typical to see some or all of the following:

• About the website
• About you (if it is somewhat based around your personal brand)
• Pageviews and visitors per month
• Followers on all your social media profiles
• Gender split
• Age breakdown
• Geographic breakdown
• Brands you have previously worked with
• Testimonials from previous advertisers
• Services offered
  • Branded posts?
  • Social media posts?
  • Newsletter inclusions?
  • Sponsored sections?
  • Product reviews?
  • Contests / giveaways?
  • Affiliate partnerships?
  • Etc
• You contact details

Much of this will come from Google Analytics, and the rest you should know as the website owner.

Here are some examples I’ve found online:

https://soultravelblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Media-Kit-2019-Soul-Travel-Blog.pdf

https://misstourist.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Miss-Tourist-Media-Kit-May-2019.pdf

Ratecards

Download our sample rate card from within the Monetization Method course.

A rate card is simply a document that lists the prices of all the ads and opportunities on your website.

From an advertisers point of view a ratecard lets them quickly glance at what is on offer, and whether your price expectations align with their marketing budgets.

It also quickly shows them all the ad units and placements that you have available on your website. Note: This is only at a high level, the indepth ad specs are covered in the next module on Spec Sheets.

There is no need for your rate card to be a well-designed masterpiece. It can be as simple as a nicely formatted spreadsheet, and typically no more than one or two pages (depending on how big your website is.

Spec Sheets

Download our sample spec sheet from within the Monetization Method course.

A spec sheet is simply a document you have readily available to send to advertisers which shows all the ad creatives available, their size, type, and format.

It will also cover the technical requirements of the ads (more applicable for rich-media and video ads).

The spec sheet serves two purposes:

• Is a single source of truth for all the technical requirements for your ads. It should cover every possible placement on your website. You can send it to potential advertisers while doing sales so they have an easy to read ‘menu’ of options.
• It saves time once ad advertiser is confirmed and booked in. You can simply send them this sheet, and tell them this is what they need to abide by, instead of typing an email to each individual brand advertising on your website.

How to Find Advertisers to Sell To

Okay, so now we understand the benefits of selling display ads direct, and know what the general site requirements are, how do you know which brands to approach?!

Here are my tips to find relevant advertisers for direct ad sales:

💡 Jot down all the brands you know might be interested off the top of your head. Since you have a website in this niche, you likely know at least a dozen brands which operate within the same industry.

💡 Look at all your competitors websites. Are there brands on their websites which should also be advertising on your websites?

💡 If you are already running display ads on your website programmatically through something like Google Adsense, spend 30 minutes browsing through your own website and see which ads appear. Sometimes brands will be directly targeting your website, or targeting the keywords or topics you have on your website. These brands are already using display ads, so perhaps you can go direct and offer a more comprehensive marketing package (think sponsored articles, email ads, social posts….as well as display ads).

💡 My personal trick: I like to get my hands on a year or two’s worth of magazines that relate to my niche. I pick these up in large bundles from second hand book sales and websites. I then go from cover to cover writing down every advertiser in them, and the size of their ad (tiny, small, medium, large). The advertisers on the inside cover with full-page ads are more than likely well known brands and have the biggest budgets. Turn to the back few pages and you might find a classifieds directory with 10 – 20 advertisers on each page. These guys will have a smaller budget, but picking up just ten of them at $200 each is an extra $2000 for your website.