Looking for Advertising advice

[prempt]

Just looking for some advertising advice from some of the people that have been in the business for a while. I have a domain name, that shall go nameless, that I have had for 3 years and started to develop 1.5 years ago.

It currently has a PR of 5(subpages rank 3-5pr), it also has very good content, upwards of 1000 pages that are all ranked on the first page in most of the search engines for their terms. It is also indexed by quite a few Local,federal and educational sites.

It averages about 2-300 uniques a day. I only placed advertising on the site for the 1st week that I was developing it because I was kind of new and wanted to see what revenue it would generate. Link ads that paid an average of .20 per click were the only ads on the site. It generated about $30.00 per day until I decided to remove all the ads and just develop with future revenue in mind.

I haven't had any ads of any sort on the site for almost 16 months. Now I am interested in getting ad revenue to keep up the site as well as pay for my time and effort. I have left the top header of every page blank with that in mind(approx. 400X100).

I know for a fact, being the type of site it is, that companies who advertise products dedicated to the type of info I supply, would have an average of 30 percent click through rate, with at least a 50 percent buy rate from that 30 percent.

I figure the average sale would be around $20.00 if not more. My question is this, would it be better to sell the exclusive right to one company or sell page rights? Keeping in mind this site is considered a reliable source of information to some pretty big organizations(in a lot of countries not just the USA). So I will only be offering the ad space to well known reliable companies.

I also will not be selling any link ads at all. In fact all my traffic has been generated without link exchanges. So I want to keep it that way.

Given that the company that advertises on my site will be getting a boost from our credibility as well as us getting good press from them, what would be a good starting point, money wise? And should we offer in monthly or yearly installments?

 

[b.a]

At first time you can try with placing affiliate products on your site. If you believe that relay 30 percent click through rate, with at least a 50 percent buy rate from that 30 percent. you can make much more than just selling ad space for monthly basis. Of course if there are good affiliate programs for your sites topic.

 

[prempt]

Thanks for the advice. Hadn't really thought about that. Always assumed that affiliates were for portal type sites.

 

[GoPC]

Try looking at your competition and seeing what has been working for them... sometimes it's paid advertisers, sometimes it's affiliate advertising... sometimes it can be contextual ads like Google Adsense or YPN.

In fact, it may be a combination of all of them.

Take GOLF for instance. Looking at the "big boys" on the net... the Golf Magazine sites... they ALL have smaller perifieral ads on their sites. They SELL this space to advertisers and generate a monthly rate per ad that is, well, STEEP in many cases but they can demand it due to their volume of visitors, the dedication of their viewer base and the niche presentation of their product/service.

If your site caters to a similar dynamic, you can promote block sales on your site based on solid statistics. If you cannot say that about your site, you pretty much have to PROVE that with stats through contextual ads or affiliate advertising.

The PLUS with Affiliate Ads is that you can make them LOOK like Paid Block Ads... which makes the transition easier to actually getting paid blocks because the visitors to your site see it happening anyway... sorta. At least it looks that way. What I'm saying is, they won't feel like the first guy in line, so that helps.

Adsense LOOKS like ads... so it's a harder sell to block advertisers later... but, in the meantime, you can make GREAT ad revenue based on your traffic and conversion.

There IS a time and a method for what you put on there and why and it's all based on the PURPOSE of the site as it is viewed by your visitors. If it LOOKS like a site simply in order to support ads, you will loose some of your visitors and their dedication to supporting your advertisers. If it's tasteful and content rich, your visitors will be loyal to you and your advertisers and you will see increased click through and revenues.

In the end, don't go Block until you can demand the costs that exceed your PPC or affiliate advertising. You will be costing yourself in the long run.

There's a reason that Golf Digest can charge $25,000 per month for an internet ad on their site.

Best of luck to ya and if this post helped out at all, I'm happy to help. I've many years in the ad game and would be happy to help you in any way I can. I've negotiated deep discounts for biz all around the Country for both physical and digital media. I know I can save you money when that time comes.

GoPC