Is this the right deal for our company?
While Online Publishers should work to develop sources of advertising beyond advertisements, here are some things to consider before jumping in.
Is the service a logical fit for your site?
Does the service you are thinking of adding or partnering with "fit" on your site? If it doesn't, you risk two things: losing credibility—your users will think: “Why am I seeing this service on this site?”—and a lack of users who might be interested in the service.
Does the proposed service conflict with any editorial guidelines?
In the past, for example, our clients have been approached about running advertising pages for short term rentals not as a searchable widget but presented as regular content on the site. There are several issues to consider in this example. First, it looks like your opinions can be bought—a credibility issue. If you have found a way to handle this, what happens if another advertiser/affiliate partner wants the same treatment? How do you sell this without overloading your site with content you didn't create?
What are the cost and time requirements for integration?
How much time will it take to set the service up? What kind of "dependencies", i.e. tasks, do you have to take care of before you can use the widget or service? This relates to the next topic ...
Return on Investment?
Third party services will talk vaguely about revenue opportunities. Ask to speak to a publisher / site operator who has a similar site as yours to talk with them about their experiences with the service. In our experience, unless you have a ton of traffic (think millions of impressions) the amount you can make with third party services or affiliate programs is negligible.
Regardless of the technology, use your (business) common sense. Consider, for example, a widget for ordering flights or hotels. How likely are users to use this widget on your site? If you saw this on a site that wasn't your own, would you use this? Or would you go to a specialized website? And what percentage of the sale do you get? When the economy and travel in general are down in terms of sales, this affects the cost of a hotel rate and subsequently affects the little amount of money you can expect to make.
Don't let us discourage you—by all means try out new programs (the Metro Publisher html sprocket makes this very easy to do)—but don't underestimate the cost and time and make sure that giving this a try is worth your time. Your best sources of revenue are original offerings you create by yourself or by teaming with local partners.
What services can you develop on your own or with local partners?
There are times when a "middleman" or affiliate service can help you provide an original service, but in most cases the margins are too low. So why not approach local companies and work together to create original services? The benefit is that you can ensure that the service is the right fit and you get to keep a lot more of the revenue!
What you bring to the table can be summarized as:
We bring the traffic and you do the fulfillment.
Or, we bring the traffic and know-how and you deliver the service.
Latest Comments