Looking to buy those nifty little 125 x 125 graphic ads on sites related to your niche? Maybe you’re just looking to buy a text ad. Whatever your need may be, there is a market for these effective ad spots. I have found the following 3 sites incredibly useful for buying and selling ads on websites. If you know of some better ones, please post them!
Digital Point Forums
This monster of a forum can be a very valuable resource to webmasters, if (that’s a big if) used properly. Check out the Buy/Sell/Trade section and click on Advertisements. There are hundreds of new posts every day in the ad sales section. As you can probably guess, this free-for-all attracts a large amount of junk, but don’t be discouraged by the scams and junk posts because there are very often hidden gems to be found here. On multiple occasions I have managed to locate high traffic/authority sites with cheap ads for sale, so be patient when using Digital Point Forums. Also, make sure to check the iTrader feedback of every solicited ad, (think eBay feedback), and always read the replies to each thread. Just use common sense and you’re much less likely to get ripped off (which is a very common occurrence on DP). Start off with small purchases until you are well acquainted with the DP marketplace.
SitePoint Marketplace
Sitepoint is one of my favorite sites to frequent, there is a wealth of information to be found on their forums, and the marketplace is “pay per post” so this weeds out most of the scam artists. Over time I have purchased hundreds of banner ads through Sitepoint, and, if you’re smart about it you can make money doing ad sales arbitrage or brokering with Sitepoint. Out of the ads that I’ve purchased, 9 out of 10 of these were sold well below their market value. How do you know the market value of an ad? I will save that for a future post. As with DP forums, always check the feedback of the user you are buying from. Sitepoint takes this a step further with their phone verification system, but since the dawn of pay as you go phones, this still doesn’t completely guarantee a legitimate seller.
BuySellAds.com
This site has taken the webmaster world by storm, and they did it fast. Go to a popular design or webmaster related site and you can almost always bet they are using this service to sell their ads. Why? Well the question is more like, Why Not!? BuySellAds.com offers a simple way for webmasters to sell ad space on their websites, no more writing long, convincing posts on Digital Point. Gone are the days of successful webmasters paying $10 to post a single ad for sale on Sitepoint. What does this mean for the buyer? Affordable, highly targeted ad space that is readily available. You are only limited by the size of your bank account. The downside? Currently BuySellAds only serves websites that are related to webmastering, design, development, or SEO. So if your niche is outside of this realm you are better off finding ads on Digitalpoint or Sitepoint. If you’re looking to sell ads, don’t get too excited; they have a 100k impressions/month minimum to become a seller.
