I’ve talked about before how direct ad-sales is the best way to truly maximize your revenue capacity. We own a lot of XXXX.org domains - we then get custom advertising for the site (often times contacted by advertisers to our high SE rankings), and make pretty damn good money. Recent case in point: Site with 100 impressions a day earning maybe $30 a month from AdSense is now doing $250 a month in a direct ad-deal. Time spent on it? 30 minutes. This also underlines the power of domains, but that is for another day.

The more interesting example I wanted to point out is our Blog Flux Directory. For about the last month Jacob had been managing our new self-serve ad-system. Basically any category/tag page can have top/skyscraper bought out. Direct link to your website. All ads would be vetted, so of course it would be relevant (and thus not a PR-based sale).

We released this system about 2-3 weeks ago via a massmail to our members (emails are key). We had about a dozen sales, each at a minimum of $50 a month.

This is a great start. I have a site that does micro-ad sales of roughly $15 a month. The site generates over $10,000 a month (with little intervention on my part). Blog Flux is not only bigger but also far more reaching in its scope.

But this is only the start. Sure we had people come advertising themselves (we have both blogs and commerce websites as advertisers). Our next job is now to go out and find specific advertisers for the largest keywords.

The point here is - we created an self-service ad system, we let our own users know about it, and have already started to make more (with revenue of $750, we have displaced roughly $50). $700 extra per month (most of them are subscriptions) that will keep recurring. Our CPMs are damn high, but I am sure our advertisers are also getting their return back.

Google Adsense is a nice base. But don’t let it be your flat base.