Question for anyone who runs a website and sell advertising space on it

[CobraJohn01]

I have a small website that I'm running (baseball related). I've had it up since November and the site is expanding and the word of mouth is helping to increase the interest. Down the road I was thinking of selling some space for advertising to make some extra income. Just a couple banners or ads. Nothing crazy or tacky or anything. I might have to rely on local businesses more than large corporations or nationally known companies just because the appeal might not be there for a large company to "waste money" spent on advertising for a non-major website.

My quesiton is, for those of you who have done this or currently do this, what is the process you use not only for inquiring with potential advertisers, but also how you determine the price you'd charge them for their advertisment. And do you make it a one time, specific time frame thing? Or do you do it on a month to month or contract basis?

Any insight anyone could provide would be great.

 

[CobraJohn01]

Anyone?

 

[Ride Along]

Here's what I'd do: Put the banner on your site with "advertise here" in the space, on click, link to a page that explains terms, conditions, fees, or a phone number to call or e-mail address. Cruise some sites similar to yours to see what they charge, but ultimately, charge what you want. Make the space available a standard and common banner size. If you have a lot of traffic, people will be willing to pay more. I would start with, maybe, $20 a month if you have 50 visitors a day. It won't cost you anything, and you'll be able to see if there is interest. If you get a lot of bites, start raising your fees. Make people give you their own banner files, you don't want to waste the time creating banners for them. Just what I would do, not industry standards. What's your web site address?

 

[CobraJohn01]

Thanks for those suggestions. Good ideas you have there. My website is www.TheTribeSource.com. I usually get a little over a couple hundred hits per day. Sometimes I get surges where it's several hundred. Sometime only around 100.

 

[djc]

google adsense

 

[CobraJohn01]

I use adsense and I've made a whopping $3.42 sense since November. I'd like to do something a little more profitable.

 

[Ride Along]

I didn't see the word 'news' in your keywords. You may want to beef those up a bit. Though google and yahoo tend to give results based more on content than keywords, it can't hurt. I also googled "Cleveland indians news" and you didn't come up within the first five pages. You can do things to help boost your placement by putting your desired search hits in stupid places. Like, if you were selling tulips, name your graphics files 'tulips' and 'buy tulips' and crap like that. Also naming links and pages things like 'see our tulip collection' may help boost your placement. If you are able to do that, you may get more hits so you could charge more.

100 visits a day is respectable, though.

On pages formatted like the one you have, I usually see the banners smack in the middle of articles. Ones at the top of the page are easy to ignore.

Good luck.

 

[CobraJohn01]

Thanks for the suggestions. I will certainly look into what you suggested.

 

[djc]

your adsense placement sucks. thats why you aren't making any money. they won't catch anyone's eye on page 5 on the bottom left.

put your ads above the fold, i.e the first page.

stick some between your articles. blending is key. see first site in sig for example

 

[CobraJohn01]

I had one at the top under the header box. I removed it temporarily to place that announcement there. It will be returning. But I know what you mean.

 

[YesterdayAgain]

I just Google searched "websites for teams that will be stomped by the Detroit Tigers in 2007" and your site came up #1.