Advertising or selling your blog space to individuals or companies is the most used method to monetize websites or blogs. I myself and have seen that most of the webmasters try to sell their blog advertisement slots by providing a link like “Advertize here”, etc. But do you think this will work? How many of us get to sell the ad space directly, I think its very rare. May be very popular blogs or websites with high traffics may get some advertisers.

How do we promote our blog to Advertisers?

There are some effective methods to sell your advertising space to potential advertisers could be the following

Direct Contact

Send an email to the webmaster of websites which are related to your blog and tell them that you have space to advertize. If interested, get in touch with you or send the link to buy the ads.

Special Offer

Give a special rate to advertisers to get started. To be frank, I have not yet got any potential advertisers yet, but a few which cannot be considered as consistent income for my blog.

Factors that influence the sale of Advertisement Space

• Traffic – Traffic is the most important factor which can influence the sale of your ad slots.
• Quality of Traffic – Use Google Analytics or any website traffic analyzing software to display the traffic information of your blog. This could be helpful for selling your ads if your traffic stats are impressive. Quality of traffic means the source of traffic. There are different ways that you can get traffic to your blog, like search engines, social networking sites, direct traffic, referring websites, etc. Traffic from search engines are considered to be the best and could be consistent. Social networking sites like Stumbleupon, twitter, facebook  or Digg can really boost your traffic if you are active on such sites or if any of your blog page gets to the top lists.
• Tool to sell your Ad Slots – Its very important that you capture your advertiser rather than giving them time to think too much or check with other competitors. Google Adwords is the most preferred advertizing tool used by most of the internet users and its working well. You should have an automated system to sell your ad slots. You can check my blog where I use an excellent tool which helps me sell some ads slots automatically. This tool is a Wordpress plugin called OioPublishers which is an excellent and a must have tool for every blogger who wants to sell ad slots for his blog or website.

I use Picasa for editing and enhancing the image quality the images that I take during my travel. Picasa is a free tool from Google. I have been using this software for long time and I am very comfortable using this. Its very simple to you and if you are blogging and want to use the images from your camera or want to enhance the quality of your image, make is smaller for web upload then this is the best and easy one. I had been using Adobe Photoshop which is also one of the best, but its very costly. When you have free tools available, then why do you need to go for a paid tool. Photoshop has much more feature for advance image editing, but we do not need all those feature to edit our images to upload to the blog posts.

What can you do with Picasa?

• Organize your pictures
• Edit your pictures
• View videos
• Share your pictures through web or emails

You can organize all your pictures, edit it and the best and the most used feature for me is the I am Feeling lucky button in the editing pane. Picasa works on Windows XP and I have even tried on Vista.

Download Picasa

I have just upgraded my windows live installation which has some very useful changes and I had been looking for these especially the image croping tool and the auto linking.

Now you just need to add the links to the glossary and when ever you type a word which is in the Glossary, it will be linked automatically.

Some of the new features that I have noticed :-

• Image Enhancements
• Crop tool added
• Border styles with reflection is something new for the Windows Live Writer

Now you see a new check box where you can enable auto linking for that term

Now I have added some screenshots to this post without using any image editor. For example the above image of the link inserting form, I just took a screenshot of the screen and pasted on this post, then used the crop tool to crop to this size.

So upgrade your Live writer now if you are using it already or just download live writer from writer zone