Monetizing your website is extremely important. With the current surge in online advertising, getting the most out of your online ads is extremely important. Besides boosting your site’s page rank and driving more traffic towards your site, having well-constructed contracts with your advertisers is the most important step to maximizing your online advertising revenue. The question is: where do you start and who should you turn to for help?
First off, I would start by asking a few key questions. What kind of traffic does your site currently draw? What pages on your site are you going to monetize? Where on your pages do you plan to sell ad space? Whom do you want to sell ads to? Do you want to sell imprints? Or do you want to sell straight ad space? These are all extremely important questions. You can create the basis for your online advertising contract from your answers to these questions.
Once you finally sit down to create your contract or if you decide to use a professional (which I highly recommend), you are going to want to follow some basic contractual guidelines.
Cover the scope of your entire agreement:
• How will you display ads?
• Who will serve the ads?
• How you will be compensated?
• Time frames for both compensation and ad placement.
Terms and conditions should always cover things like site downtime or hackers. It is a reasonable expectation that, from time-to-time, a web site will have some unforeseen downtime. Make sure you account for those types of oddball variables in your online advertising contracts.
Remember to define your audience, your scope, your placement and your rates. Do not get into overtly complicated deals with too many clauses because you are an independent contractor and chances are the people buying ad space from you are not. You do not have an army of attorneys at your disposal; they very well might. It is in your best interest to have someone professional look your contract over, if not write it entirely. In the end, you should do what feels comfortable to you.
