Today I want to talk about advertising and banner swaps using Passionfruit!
Passionfruit is a website that simplifies blogging ads, regardless if you are buying/selling them or doing a swap!
You’ll notice on the opening page it’s pretty basic. Once you sign up you register your email and blog information, then you’re taken to your Dashboard.
Here you’ll see that I have Moments Like This as the only blog listed for advertising opportunities (both buying and selling). I currently have 3 ads running right now.
The great thing about Passionfruit is that they only charge you 3% of your purchased ad price. But if you’re only doing banner swaps and make a promo code (see below) then you aren’t charged anything!
The dashboard also shows you how many ads you’ve bought. According to Passionfruit, I bought an ad from The Darling Blog, but it was a banner swap. However, Passionfruit doesn’t distinguish between ads you’ve bought and ads that were free because technically I did “buy” the ad, I just had a promo code.
Blog swaps usually run 30 days and individual blog owners set the rules.
From my Dashboard I click the ‘My sites’ drop down menu and select Moments Like This. It brings me to the page you see above.
I can view what ads I have running and how much money I’ve earned. The middle screen is traffic from those ads but the data from that isn’t available yet.
At the bottom you can see that I am running three ads: One Shiny Star, Lackey Antics, and The Darling Blog. What’s great about Passionfruit is that its effortless to import old ads!
From the page above I click ‘Site setup’ drop down menu and there are an array of different options. For the sake of keeping this short, I clicked on ‘Define ad spots’- you can see that below.
Right now I have two ads available for purchase: Large ad and Medium ad. It is totally up to the blog owner what size ads they want and how many of each they want to offer.
You can even set requirements for each ad. For example: my large ad requires a $2 purchase and the promise to guest post on my blog. My large ads also shuffle each page view so that everyone can be at the top.
I’m offering my ‘Medium ad’ for free with the promo code ‘MOMENTS’ (put in during the time of check out in the designated spot) and these ads are slightly smaller than my large ads.
Setting up promo codes is easy and can be custom for each ad space. As you can see, on my ‘Medium Ad’ space I have a 100% discount but I could have put anything there (from 1%-100% off). I could even do just a dollar amount off of ads.
Things to note:
- After someone has purchased an ad from you (be it free or paid) it’s a nice gesture send and email and welcome them. This keeps things personal.
- Note the size blog ad you are purchasing or swapping for and make sure you have it available. It’s been my experience that ad space for popular blogs, especially swaps, goes pretty fast!
- Check out the blogs you want to buy from or swap with to see when the next space is available. This makes it easy to create a banner custom for that site in advance and when the time comes all you have to do is plug in your information-snagging the spot quickly!
- Passionfruit gives you the html code to put on your blog/website. Paste this code in the spot where you want the ads to run, once. I did it 10 times (because that’s how many ‘Medium Ad’ spaces I have) and the same medium ad posted 10 times! Once is all you need, regardless of the ad number.
If you have any questions about Passionfruit and how you can make it work for you, leave a comment or send me an email, I’d love to help out.