Understand your audience
Before advertisers sign the contract, they want to know who will view their ads. In order to provide potential advertisers this information, you need to know who visits your site, reads your blog and uses your products. Demographic data with age, gender, income, and interests are useful to match ads and your site. This information can be obtained from user registration data, surveys, polls and your own interactions with visitors.

Think about relevant products and potential advertisers
Your blog and website might have a strong focus in a particular industry. In such cases, potential advertisers are easy to identify. For example, a travel blog should target airlines, hotels, destinations, attractions. Some websites need more scouting than others. General social networks, portals target a much broader audience.

Determine your ad rates
This is one of the most frequently asked questions. Wish there was a machine that outputs a specific number for how much you should charge for advertising. Too bad such machine does not exist as there are too many variables for it to consider. However, you have several questions to answer before setting a price:

• How much your competitors charge for a similar campaign?
• How many visitors, pageviews, and impressions you have daily?
• How much does it cost you to design, develop, operate and maintain the website, or blog?
• How long is the advertising contract? Are they likely to continue their ads after the first campaign?

Prepare a media kit
Once you understand your audience, you can show off the value of your advertising program. The media kit should describe your website and its audience. Additionally, it should list all available ad placements and ad specifications (ad dimension, file size, animation length).

Make the first contact
It all begins with the first message, so do your own research and understand the advertiser’s company, its products and target market. In your message, you should describe how advertising on your website will bring high quality visitors and customers to the advertiser. The message should not be from a long, standard template without any details about your website or benefits to this particular advertiser. The message should be personal, should describe your offer and should initiate an action within a specified time frame.

Reply and follow up
Don’t wait forever for your message but don’t push it too aggressively either. Your reply must address all questions and requested information. Your follow up should be polite and appreciative of the person’s time.

Negotiate and close the deal
If you took your time to determine your ad rates ahead of time, you know your lower limit and can walk away if appropriate. A deal can be very flexible: standard rates with a standard contract, lower rates for a longer contract, and lower rates for an exchange of services or partnership. Negotiation should be a win-win situation for both parties, each get their goals, maybe not all, met. To avoid possible legal problems, make sure there is a written agreement between you and the advertiser. The agreement can be formal (signatures, stamps, approvals) or informal (email messages from both parties acknowledging the details, length, and amount involved).

General tips
• Don’t afraid to approach potential advertisers if you believe you have a great website with quality contents and quality audience
• Don’t send a mass message or your messages will be marked as spam and simply ignored
• Do check out your competitors or other sites in the same industry to see their advertisers
• Do use an ad management/tracking system to increase your productivity and provide accountability and transparency to your advertisers

AdSpeed Ad Server is a reliable and powerful ad serving and ad management solution that serves your ads, track impressions, clicks, and report ad statistics in real-time. Driven by the changing needs, Ad Servers continues to develop more innovative features and to offer a wide-range of advertising services.

Other formats such as Classified ads totaled $1,116 million in revenues declined by 4%. Lead generation format revenues totaled $728 million. And E-mail ad revenues totaled $149 million.

About Pricing models ad revenues
According to the report, Performance based pricing solution is the most prevalent pricing model since 2006 that maintained a strong sequential growth rate. It is followed by CPM/Impression based pricing, which declined as a percentage of revenue over the past several years. Hybrid pricing model has seen the greatest loss in percentage revenue, dipping sharply from 17% in 2004 to 4% in the first six-months of 2009.

In 2004 CPM/Impression based pricing was on top among other solutions with 42% and improved constantly until 2006. However, since 2007, it declined continuously. Moreover, Performance based pricing solution simultaneously increased rapidly to clinch the top share. In 2007, Performance based solutions accounted for 57% and CPM pricing solution accounted for 45%.

In the current year for the first half, Performance based pricing accounts 58%, CPM has 38% and Hybrid related solutions have 4% in the total online advertising revenues.

The drop in online advertising revenues shows that economic crisis can also hit online marketing. During this situation, the growth of Performance based pricing solutions shows that customers are closely watching the results and they are not spending the same as earlier.

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To grab this opportunity marketers are using mobile websites to reach the customers. Mobile websites are different, as they are designed to fit the small screens of mobile devices such as cell phones that can access Internet. It makes a good business sense to launch mobile websites for car dealerships, which provide many advantages when compared to traditional mobile marketing.

Instant connectivity to customers
Mobile websites provide instant connectivity to customers, as anyone can access from hand held mobile devices. This feature will allow dealer’s instant connectivity to customers as they can be utilized anywhere and any time to view inventory, locate dealership, or to contact dealer’s sales or service team. A dealer can update the inventory, pricing and photographs of a car desired by the customer in real time, so that the customer can view that immediately on the move.

Customer feedback and surveys
According to the study, nearly 70 percent of automotive Internet users use consumer-generated content while shopping for a new vehicle. Dealerships can get customers’ feedback on their products and services using mobile websites in a simple and hassle free way. They can know the customer’s requirements as the mobile websites help in conducting simple on-line surveys that reach customers’ mobile phones. They reduce cost, improve the speed of the survey and provide added customer convenience. Dealers can get immediate alerts on customer dissatisfaction.

Service reminders
Mobile websites help in notifying the service updates directly to the customer’s mobile phones. Dealers can reduce costs by replacing the call centers with mobile websites. They can alert the customers in real time when their vehicles are ready to for delivery.

Marketing on personal media
Auto dealers can market their vehicles or products directly and effectively to their target customers through the mobile phone. They can send information such as special offers, best deals, new arrivals etc along with graphics directly to the customer’s mobile phone. Marketing through mobile websites ensures maximum reach and penetration of the dealer’s car promotions and sales proposals increasing the overall conversion rates.

Today, many potential buyers and existing customers like to be well informed about the product before visiting the auto showroom. Providing this information through a multimedia mobile website on their personal mobile devices is far more effective rather than a mere text message or a phone call from the call center. The car dealers with a mobile website definitely have an edge to stay ahead in the present competitive market when compared to dealers without it.

Search Optics, Inc. was founded in 1998 in San Diego, California, as a pioneer in providing online strategy, E-commerce development, and  automotive internet marketing services with a core competency in the retail automotive industry. Approaching a decade of service, Search Optics, Inc. has grown into a leader in providing online interactive  automotive marketing solutions for retail automobile dealerships.