Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

Not all of us have hit the household status we all wish our company names had. So if you aren’t a Sony or a WalMart, have you ever considered the fact that someone might be trying to find your company or product and either spelling it wrong or searching for a slight variation because the person who recommended you pronounced it incorrectly? And even the best SEO can’t rank your site number one for every single variation of your company name or brand. The last thing you want to do is lose those potential customers to competitors, when they were trying to find your site in the first place.

If you are lucky, Google might direct some of those misspellings to your site via their “Did you mean: ____” hint that it shows above the results when they believe there is a good chance that someone made a typo. But you have to be pretty well known to have Google do that for all your potential misspellings and typos of your company name. Keep reading…

Sometimes it is nice not to have to rely on Google AdSense or various CPM, CPA or CPC networks to generate revenue for your blog or website. And it is even nicer when you can supplement that income with additional revenue generated from direct buy advertisers, meaning they are advertisers that want to advertise directly on your blog without having to go through a middle man - meaning the advertiser gets more bang for their buck and you get the entire advertiser’s ad spend for your site without having to share it with a third party who takes a cut of your profits.

When you reach a certain level of traffic and repeat visitors, especially if you are well known as an authority in your space, it is often more profitable for you to solicit advertising directly, as opposed to using a third party such as AdSense or a CPM network for your advertising. What is the certain level? It will vary depending on your niche or market area, but if you are one of the top blogs or websites in that area, you can likely command the money to make it worth the effort of doing it.

Many people don’t want to deal with the added workload it takes to sell advertising directly, when they might only make an extra hundred dollars a month, but when you could be bringing in an extra ten, twenty or thirty thousand a month, usually the annoyance of the bit of extra work isn’t as much of a concern.

So now that you’ve decided to make the jump and accept direct buy advertisers, here is how you should do it to ensure that you aren’t leaving any money on the table and are making the process as user friendly for those advertisers as possible. Keep reading…