Selling direct ads to your visitors is a great way to increase your revenue by simply removing the middle man. The only disadvantage between the middle man is that the middle man usually supplies you with your advertisers. You wouldn’t have to go around searching for them. Therefore, I would only suggest you to begin selling direct ads to your visitors when you have a decent audience that would be willing to purchase your ad spots. Listed below are a few ways that you can increase revenue coming from direct ads.

1. Build Up Traffic!
   I’ve seen many web publishers do this already and it won’t work. You must have the traffic in order to pick up the advertisers. You can’t get the advertisers and then get the visitors later on. It doesn’t work like that way.
2. Set Up Ad Spot Locations.
   Do not fill up your site with millions of ad spots for private advertisers. There’s disadvantages to doing this which would include, having a lot of ad spots not filled. Advertisers do not want to see many unfilled ad locations as it would leave them to believing that there aren’t many interest in your ad spots. You do not want potential advertisers thinking that. Start out with just a couple of locations and as you fill them up, add one or two at a time until you have a decent amount on your site.
3. Set Up Advertising Page.
   Set up a page where you list all the ad spots you currently provide, quite a bit of information regarding your websites statistics and the pricing structure. If you’re dealing with Paypal as a payment method, add the Paypal button up so that they can instantly pay you for that location.
4. Use an Ad Manager.
   There are plenty of ad managers out there for use and I believe Google has recently released one but it’s still in Beta. Try using the one many people are quite familiar with which is OpenX. It can do everything for you automatically without the hassle of having to manage which ads go where and etc.
5. Advertise Your Ad Spots on Forums!
   Last but not least, advertise your advertising page on webmaster forums. High populated webmaster forums can bring you many advertisers and in return also returning advertisers. Make sure you give them what they want and you will definitely notice the impact of webmaster forums.

After all, your bringing in more revenue by doing these few tips. Include discounts for long term purchases and allow more than one payment client. Not everyone use the same payment source so it would be beneficial to do so. Feature your advertisers from time to time so that they feel that they’ve got a good return for their money spent. It’s all about business!