Are you accepting paid reviews or ads with offers that are lower than you think you deserve? You probably are, I am. Why? Because we need to make money to survive and if it’s a choice between accepting low price ads or not getting anything at all, we tend to lower ourselves. Advertisers are going to try and get as many people out there for the lowest price they can. They don’t care that you have two kids, a mortgage, a dog with health problems..

Paid To Post
If you’re selling paid ads or reviews on your website you will need to take into consideration the time you spend on the review and how much your time is worth. Depending on your situation in life you may feel you’re worth more, but let’s start with minimum wage. If minimum wage is $5.25 per hour you know that you shouldn’t get any lower than that. Think about the amount of schooling you’ve had or your writing style to decide if you’re worth more. Personally, I feel like I’m selling myself short if I accept any less than $10 per hour. If you decide that you’ll accept nothing less than $10 an hour for your writing, then take into consideration the worth of a link on your website and how long that link and review will remain on your index page. If it will be pushed off by tomorrow, you should consider it to be lower than if it stays on the index 2-3 days.

Moving on to the review, there are a couple of things to keep in mind here as well. First, would be the amount of time you spent on the review. Not just in writing it and planning it, but also researching it and interacting on the website. Even if you enjoy the website and go deeper into it than you normally would, you are experiencing their website and your time is money. If you discuss the website with someone else to gain perspective, consider that time as well. Second, consider any images you made or entered into the review. Images in the post have had a better success rate for many paid posts and advertisers will usually pay more for this.

Optionally, you can consider any costs you have. If you need to make a video for the post, you’ll consider the cost of your camera. You may also consider the cost of your computer. If your computer costs $1200 and it lasts for 3 years, you’ll want to make back $400 each year. If you do 100 paid posts per year (1 every 3 days) you would want to add $4 into the worth of those paid posts. By this login you could also consider the cost of your internet and a percentage of your electric bill (if you’re not already writing them off in your taxes).

Banners, Adverts, Etc
Adding a link, banner, or advert to your sidebar takes minimal time, so the worth of this link is determined differently. I’m talking about just ads, not pay per click or affiliate links. Many sites out there will help you, such as Text Links Ads, by reviewing your website and higher or lowering the amount. They sell the ads for you so they’ll have a pretty good idea how to keep them selling.

If your website has 1000 unique visitors per day and a following of the same 10 people who comment, you can expect a fairly nice amount. One of my friends who uses Text Link Ads had numbers like this and she was making about $80 per ad, selling 10 ad spaces. That’s $800 per month. Of course, keep in mind, you’re going to lose some of it in fees. If you go through a place like Text Link Ads they’ll take some fees, and if you accept them yourself via Paypal there will be fees involved with the transaction.

However, those are text links. If you’re selling an advert or a banner spot, you can expect more. The advantage to image based ads is that they can grab more attention and they can be animated, to get more of their message across. They’re also much larger than a text link. A banner or advert will be worth more than a simple text link, but they will be more of an intrusion. Make sure to consider the quality and relevance of the link/ad before accepting it.

Relevance is more important than people may think. On this website if I had a choice between a banner ad for diapers and a banner ad for computer equipment, it would be an easy choice. The diaper ad would have little chance at survival on a site like this. You want to choose a good balance between bids and relevance, because a non relevant link will not continue to advertise on your site and the relevant one may not still be there for you next month.

Please feel free to comment if you’d like to add to this.