There are a variety of ways to make money with your blog. One of those methods is by directly selling advertising space. If you are getting enough traffic, people will be willing to pay you to advertise on your blog.
There are a couple of different ways to manage this kind of advertising. You can do it all manually by having advertisers contact you through the contact form. Or you can manage the advertising automatically through a plugin or service.
Managing Your Advertising Space
When you manage advertising manually, you take care of all aspects of the transaction yourself. Generally this means starting off with some kind of email exchange and a discussion about your pricing. This discussion may occur even if you have clearly posted pricing policies. People just like to try and negotiate sometimes.
After you agree on pricing, the advertiser will give you the banner image or anchor text along with the coinciding URL link. At that point, you will have to place the code for your ad into the blog.
Don’t forget that you will need to make payment arrangements and confirm payment or perhaps set up some form of invoice and billing.
All of this can be time consuming and most of it can be automated.
There have been several business and plugins that have come about in an effort to assist web masters automate this process of ad placement.
Some of these plugins come with services, such as a marketplace where your ad space is advertised. Generally, services that provide such marketplaces, like buysellads, take a commission of the advertising price to subsidize the service.
Other plugins charge a premium price to give the blogger a robust plugin that assists in managing their ad space.
In this post, I want to talk about Komoona, a free ad management service that’s completely free.
Manage Your Blog’s Advertising with Komoona
I’ve been using Komoona for several months now, and I really like this free product.
You can see them in action in my side bar under the Sponsored Ads section.
First off, there are a couple of features that I wanted in an ad management plugin:
- Ease of use (both for me and the advertiser)
- Flexibility in ad placement
- Being able to fill the space with my own ads if no one has purchased space
- Flexible pricing options
- Billing Management
Over time, I’ve found that these were the most important factors for me when I manage my ad space. Komoona addresses all of these issues and more.
What is Komoona
First off, what is Komoona?
When you visit their website, you’ll see right of the bat, they describe themselves as providing a free tool for anyone visiting your website or Facebook page to create and pay for an ad on your site.
They emphasize that their tool is completely free of charge.
It is a tool that gives you as the webmaster complete control over your advertising. You set the placement, pricing, give visitors and easy way to create and pay for an ad on your site. komoona takes care of all the rest regarding technical issues, billing and invoicing.
How Does Komoona Work?
Komoona is very easy to use.
You simply sign up free for their service.
Once you sign up, you have access to a control panel that allows you to manage all aspects of your ad space.
As you can see, there are a lot of options for you.
You then create your ad placement. You can design your ad placement to your satisfaction. There are a lot of different settings of ads that you can choose:
When you have the design of your ad placement to your liking, you set the pricing for your ad. The pricing can be set for various lengths of time: 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days.
One of the big benefits is that you can set the price at any level. There is no minimum price. This allows even the smaller blogs to set a lower price to fit their traffic levels.
Once, you are done customizing your ad space, you’ll get a code that you can place in your blog at the location where you want the ads. Voila! You’re done!
You can see what the ad placement looks like in my side bar.
How Does an Advertiser Buy an Ad From You
Komoona makes it simply to purchase an ad as well.
First off, you do need to set up your billing setting. You will need a paypal account to get paid by Komoona. Here’s their 3-step instructions to explain how billing works:
Once that’s all set up, an advertiser visiting your website can simply and easily purchase advertising space from you.
On your website, Komoona provides a couple of options for an Advertiser to start the process of purchasing Ad space.
They can either click on the banner ad, or use the Komoona Conversion booster that pulls out from the side.
Here’s what the Komoona conversion booster looks like when pulled out:
You can edit the text to your personal liking or keep the default text in the conversion booster.
This is a great way to help you increase your conversions.
When the advertiser clicks on either of those options, they will get a simple pop up to start the 3-step process of creating their ad:
Step 1
As you can see, they can custom create a banner or simply upload their own banner
Let’s assume most people have their own banner to upload, so they click on upload a banner. Then they go to step 2:
They simply choose their banner to upload and plug in the URL and move on to the final step:
Here they are given the option to pay for the ad by checking out with paypal.
That completes the process of buying an ad on your site. Easy isn’t it?
I did open up the payment drop down to show you one other option for payment by using a web master code. When you create your account with Komoona, you are emailed a special web master code. This code allows you to place ads for free. You can also set up special discounting through the Komoona dashboard where you will be given coupon codes that you can enter for discounts. This allows you to place your own filler ads for free, or run special promotional discounts for your advertisers. It’s a great tool that really rounds out Komoona’s service.
Final Thoughts
This is a great way to automate the process of buying ad space on your website or blog. Komoona really simplifies this process, while giving you a lot of customizing options. Also, I like the fact that they give you some extra tools to help you convert your ad sales. The one downside to their service is that you have to manage your ads from their website, rather than your own. However, I think that’s a small sacrifice for such a great free tool.
Richard is a full time professional, husband, father and blogger juggling all the responsibilities of life and running a blog. Richard enjoys writing about life and online money matters.
Hello –
I just signed up for Komoona services and would like to start selling ad spaces on my website. I was doing some research and a tutorial on how to do this and came across your blog post.
Here’s my question: In my dashboard there is no way for me to start creating ads. I have a tab that says Reports and Stats; another one that says Manage Tags; and a third that says Manage Accounts. How do I find the tools to start creating ads?
Any help you could provide would be geatly appreciated!
Thanks!
Hi Monty,
You can create ad spaces under the manage tags tab. There, you can expand your ad tags and it gives you the options to edit your different ad spots. It will give you options on they ads spots that you want to offer your audience. Oh, You have to place the komoona ad script on your blog first. If you have wordpress, you can simply put it in as a text widget.