Although we have covered a couple of excellent ways of finding pages/sites to advertise on, I feel I should point this next one out as well. In doing so, this should give you more than enough help in having a stacked portfolio of sites to contact and get your offers up and running.

It’s as simple as setting up a Google Adwords Placement Campaign except you wont have a campaign. You are simply going to use their “Identify Placements” feature from within the interface to come up with all sorts of goodies. If you dont know how to setup a placement campaign it’s super simple. Follow the steps in Adwords until you get to this point or read their info. You should be familiar with Adwords and Placement Targeting as well as the Content Network because essentially while these are considered PPC type ad services, you are actually buying media placements thru a third party. You can either try your hand thru Adwords or you can contact the webmaster directly.

There are 4 ways you can use this tool to find places to advertise.

1. Categories - Selecting a category is the easiest. You will get a list of results where you can advertise thru a Placement campaign with Google.
2. Describe Topics - Remember those keywords I told you to save? Now you can plug them into here and get even more placements.
3. List Urls - Remember when I told you to save all the domains from the Search Engines and Alexa? Plug them into here and Google will help generate even more placements.
4. Select Demographics - If you know who exactly want to target you can use this feature to retrieve even more sites.

It’s no big secret and dead simple to do but I can tell you that with the way Adsense pays out these days, you are likely to strike up quite a few deals by going to the webmasters direct. Either way you will get on these sites whether it’s by utilizing Google itself or getting in touch with the property owners and working on an exclusive advertising slot.

Contacting Webmasters

Although previously covered, I want to go over this again. You need to come off as a Professional here. Coming off as a regular type affiliate marketer is not a very good idea. You can try it, but unless you start taking yourself seriously dont expect anyone else too, ESPECIALLY when they are going to rely on you to properly pay your ad rates. A good way to do this is get yourself a business entity such as an LLC or S-Corp. If you are making substantial money anyway then chances are you have this all taken care of. If you dont, then now’s the time to do it because you can write off your advertising expenses.

With all the domains you save up you are now going to go to each of them and locate the contact details. Some will be different and have a contact page, an advertise page or some will be hidden. In the case they are hidden, simply Whois the domain and see if you can contact them there. Worst case scenario is that if you cannot contact them in any of these ways, just leave them. Here is a sample email I would send:

Hi Such and Such, (Webmaster name or site name)

My name is Ruck and I handle the Advertising for Convert2Media.com which is a full-fledge marketing agency. I ran across your site (whatever.com) and was intrigued. You seem to have a nice site and wanted to know if you were interested in allowing our company to allow us to advertise with you? It would be a very simple process and we would pay you up front.
Regards,
Contact Details

This first email which initiates the contact needs to be simple AND vague. You dont want to give them your life story. You’ve simply stated that you work with an agency and that you are an authoritative figure (I handle the advertising) and that you are willing to pay them upfront. You have not given them any clue what you are going to be advertising because at this point, it dont mean shit to them and honestly, they dont mean shit to you. This is a 50/50 game right here. You are either going to get a simple no, I am not interested or the typical Yes, I may be interested, what did you have in mind. If they say no and your in a large vertical I usually just move on unless I simply cannot go on breathing without being on that site. I leave it to you on the negotiation part because normally this becomes a pissing match and has not really worked in my favor.

When you get the ones that are interested to reply to you, it’s now time for Super-Sonic status. This is going to be the part where I tell you that you have to pull the finger out of your butt because their is a series of events and a process that has to be completed and you dont have much time considering you need to keep the webmaster/owner warm with a timely/quick response back. In this second email back to them, I will show you how to buy yourself a little time that will allow you to research the site well before jumping into actually paying them. This may seem a little shitty to the site owner as you did contact them to advertise, they are interested but then again there might actually be a chance that you go against your word and kill the deal. I’m sorry folks but that’s the way it is. I am trying to show you how to save the most time possible here.

If they are interested now is the time to pull out that site and go look at it. You need to pay REAL CLOSE attention to the ad placements on the site (if they have some) and if they do not, you need to make notes on how their site is structured so you can suggest the best possible ad placement. By taking notes on what sizes of banners or where the text link ads are located you can fire off this second email saying:

Hello (Webmaster/site Name),

Thank you for your response. Our agency was looking the 300×250 banner ad you have displaying on the left hand side of the content on your pages. We are interested in advertisinging our exclusive diet product which allows users to test for free. We can pay you first and all it would be is a simple code to paste onto your site. We are interested in an exclusive relationship with you and your site if all goes well which would allow us to pay you each and every month. Could you send over your ad rates?

Regards ->Contact

See yet again we are vague here. We dont actually want them to know our business. We want them honing in on that this is going to be easy (which it is). Dont give them anymore than you have to. Try to avoid Partnerships and any type of revsharing at all costs. Jeez, I cannot tell you how freaking confusing and jumbled that can get. Pay a flat rate unless you think you can handle it otherwise. Taking on partners that you have no clue about is bad business, I dont suggest it.

When they reply now you are going to get ok let’s do this, or I have changed my mind. In the case they changed their mind, this is actually a lot easier to negotiate since they were a bit interested in the first place. Typically if they are on the fence I will run site analytics (covered tomorrow) and find out how much traffic I can actually expect and then jack on their usual rate meaning I will pay more. If they are interested and are ready to keep moving forward, now we have the situation on our hands which is going to make us work our little tails off and find out if the site is truly worth going after. If you had spent all the time researching the site beforehand then you would have wasted hours coming to a Yes/No conclusion. Using this technique first, it only cost you a couple of emails.

We will go over the process tomorrow.