How to locate advertisers?

[Sandstone]

I have a prime advertising spot (upper right hand) that I want to use for paid advertising. Where do I find advertisers? Is there a website that links blogs and advertisers? Would it be in poor form to out of the blue e-mail larger businesses in my niche? Ideas?

[Angelique]

I'm not at that stage with my site yet, but I learned a few things from this interview.. maybe it will help you. Good luck.
Mixergy Interview

[chadcharlie]

Try these guys also: Online Advertising Marketplace | BuySellAds.com

If you start cruising websites you like, though, hover over their ads and see if you can identify the referrer. Or look for "powered by" by lines.

Take care,
Chad.

[Curtis2011]

Originally Posted by Sandstone

I have a prime advertising spot (upper right hand) that I want to use for paid advertising. Where do I find advertisers? Is there a website that links blogs and advertisers? Would it be in poor form to out of the blue e-mail larger businesses in my niche? Ideas?

You could just search for your keywords on Google, then see what businesses are advertising via Adwords on the sidebar ads.

[Matthew Cluff]

1) You could have a footer link on your blog for "Advertise with us."

2) You could use that space for Google Adsense.

3) You could put an image there for an affiliate product. (That way every time you send someone through that link to a sales page and they buy that product, you get a commission; therefore, you'd still get money this way.)

[chadcharlie]

Originally Posted by Matthew Cluff

1) You could have a footer link on your blog for "Advertise with us."

2) You could use that space for Google Adsense.

3) You could put an image there for an affiliate product. (That way every time you send someone through that link to a sales page and they buy that product, you get a commission; therefore, you'd still get money this way.)

Footer link is a great idea, actually! If you want to sell space, make it be known and have clear contact. I was scouring for ad space on mid-authority blogs last month for a video project and some pages had excellent links to contact them about advertising, others I had to dig for.

It's worth having it there.

How has it gone, by the way? You put this up a week ago or so.

Take care,
Chad.

[azmat]

Hey Sandstone,
I agree with Curtis2011. When I wanted to advertise my site I first googled for the main keyword for my site and found which sites were using adwords. This give me a good list to begin with. In addition, I would use spyfu.com to get a feel for how much they were spending monthly for their adwords campaign. This gave me a rough idea of how much to charge them. Then I simply started calling them and offering them a week of free advertising to show them the results. I made sure they would have absolutely no risk to try me out.

At the time I had adsense on my site so taking that down for basically free advertising was a bit tough. But I wanted to grow my income and I decided to take the chance. You will have to evaluate what works for you. Worse case it doesn't work and you can go back to your old monetization strategy. Best case you significantly increase you income. Hope that helps. Best of luck.
-azmat