Dear Aunty B,
I have built a website and now I am looking for advertising revenue.
The website appeals to two different types of people: students and older people. Can you give me some suggestions as to which advertisers I should approach?
PI,
Geelong
Dear PI,
Ok let’s go back to the beginning. Who comes to your website? Your answer is people really, as students and older people is very broad. So people – and I suspect not many as you are new – come to your website.
Now the really crucial question: what is it that makes the advertiser want to reach your people?
Don’t tell me that advertisers want to reach students. They can reach students in a thousand different ways – and a lot more students for a cheaper amount than you are probably offering.
Again: what is it that makes the advertiser want to reach your people? The answer is simple: it is the mindset of your people.
By the way, and I just had this thought; you are not Mark Zuckerberg in disguise are you? Because this is the very question he should have asked, and that his investors should be asking now, because it is why Facebook will eventually fail as a business model, unless they come up with some big radical new plan that not even I can think of.
It is also the reason SmartCompany does work as a business model. Why? Because you lot who read SmartCompany are looking for business solutions. The advertisers on SmartCompany are selling business solutions. See? It’s a fit.
Take our sister site, Property Observer. Property investors read that and guess who advertises on it? Yep. You got it: Property developers looking to sell to property investors. Another match!
The good old days when newspaper barons walked around beating their chests and proclaiming that they had built huge audiences of people with high income and then shoving any ad down their throats are over – which is just what Facebook is doing.
Why are people on Facebook? To chat, gossip, swap information and so on. Are they in the right frame of mind to look at a business solution? No. To look at property ads? No. To look at… well you get the drift.
Blame that thing called the internet but unless you understand the motivation for people to be on your site and you can match that to your advertiser’s motivation to being there, it’s back to the drawing board.
Oh, and yes, you can try Google ads, which will give you a little bit of revenue, but never enough to build a business.
Be smart,
Your Aunty B
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Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
