Selling advertising can be your first step into monetizing your website. It will require a lot of work and some strategy but once you have it going, you can literally sit back and enjoy incoming revenues. The trick is to ensure that you design your business or website in such a way that lets you achieve steady sales from advertising. So whether you're managing a blog or selling an e-zine, it's important that you understand the things you'll need to implement to help you maximize your business. Here's how:

Define your niche or industry.

Selling advertising means attracting advertisers that have a specific industry. The industry you'll be involved in will also affect how many advertisers will want to buy ad placements on your site and how much you can charge. Technology, gaming and personal finance, for example, are just a few of the industries that let you charge higher fees.

Find out who your website attracts. Who are the people who visit your site, participate in your surveys and games or leave comments on your forum or discussion boards? You'll get a pretty good idea of the type of advertisers you'll draw in by knowing your audience. Furthermore, niche or industry-specific sites have better staying power than general-interest sites. That is, unless you find a way to become the dominant site.

Build a strong traffic to your site.

Remember Greg Kinnear's character in the movie 'Lil' Miss Sunshine'? He desperately wanted to sell a seminar about winning but was not exactly living up to his own standards. The same is true when you're selling advertising. Trying to get people to buy space on your website when it is essentially a non-entity is useless and ineffective. Why would people want to do business with you and of all the websites they can place ads with, why should they pick yours?

Look at how well-established your website is. If you were an advertiser, would you pay to place cheap ads on a website that receives only 100 hits a day or would you rather buy more expensive placements from a website that gets 10,000 visitors daily? If you have a strong following, the ads that will be placed on your site have a much better chance of getting noticed by more people, which is your advertiser's purpose of placing an ad with you in the first place. Strengthen your site and put effort in building traffic.

Remember that online, traffic builds reputation. The more traffic you have, the more reliable you are. And the better your reputation is, the more you can charge for your ad placements.

Understand the 'hot spots' on your website.

Certain areas on your website are well sought-after real estate. Top center, top left and top right spots, for example, are prime locations for advertisers that want more exposure. You could sell these ad spots for a higher price and sell other locations for a lower fee. It's part of your advertisers' promotional strategies to choose their ads carefully, whether yours is a website, a newsletter or an e-zine.

Vary your charges. Offer textual ads, text link ads, graphics and animation. The more attractive and strategically located your ads are, the higher fees advertisers should pay for them. A reminder, though: you can only charge high rates if your site has industry, 'juice', recognizability or influence. Otherwise, you'll have to build your rep first or sell ads at low rates. You can then increase that rate later on.

If you're still confused about ad positions, visit other websites with similar content such as yours and find out how they design and place their ads.

Show your potential advertisers where the goodies are.

When you begin selling advertising, put up ad blocks to indicate free spaces on your site or e-zine. Then advertise them by letting your advertisers know they are available. Place signs such as 'Your Ad Here' or 'This Could Be Your Ad' and include a link to a landing page where they can e-mail you for details.

Customer service is highly recommended.

Regardless of what the main purpose of your website is, once you start selling advertising, you will be doing business with people. Take care of your advertisers and offer consistent customer service. Make ordering your ads simple and efficient. Offer several payment options (credit card, Paypal, online checks, etc.). Then top it off with great customer relations.