Forum Moderators: skibum
A little background: I run a site for a fairly niche market, and average 2k page views a day. The site caters to a regional crowd, yet I think I can sell advetising to clients both in the region and outside of it (targeting the consumers within the region). I know the traffic numbers aren't great, but from everything I can see my site is the most popular out of 5 direct competitors.
My current thinking is that my traffic is not high enough to make decent profits from affiliate advert programs, but I can make more money selling CPM advertising directly to potential clients. My initial CPM cost will probably be $6.99, whereas a similar site but with national/international appeal is asking $13.00 CPM for 125x125.
Any thoughts or recommendations?
Contacting potential advertisers in your field is probably the best way to achieve max CPM. You can infill with Adsense or an aggregator like Burst. Testing some affiliate ads might be worth it if there are some well-targeted programs available. Expect very low CPM with general ads, but you should do better with your targeted customers. If you gan get $6, you'll probably be doing well for today's market. (Depends on your industry, of course.)
I'm still brainstorming ideas on advertising. Something that has recently come to mind is instead of going about it traditionally (CPM, etc) I might go backwards by setting my sales goal, then try and find a pricing method that meets my needs and those of my potential advertisers... something along the lines of a flat daily/weekly/monthly rate. I think that may be easier to get across to potential customers in my niche.
NOW, you need to get some idea of what impact your web site might have on buying behavior. This is difficult to put a number on, but you and the ad buyer know.
What is their profit margin on each sale? If you're web site is about cars or real estate, then you jack up the price. If you're on candy bars, well, you have a problem, don't you?
I'd use a 4 percent response rate for a rule of thumb. (Yeah, I'm a publisher, heh), then you can figure what's it's worth.
After than, it depends on the field. Are the products sold on price or brand? (Brand is better for you.)
Good luck. It is worth checking out. Listen to what the ad buyers tell you.
As a follow up.... I just sold my first advertising! I decided to email one of my prospects today on a lark, with the intent to get a feel for what to expect. Well, they called me back and are excited about the opportunity. I'm going to throw a banner into rotation for a flat monthly fee.
This advertising is sold as an alternative to press advertising and a way to get companies much cheaper name and product exposure, as well as direct sales (they quite happily spend loads on press advertising with no known return).
This gives much higher revenues for us than banners, straight links etc., but it does depend on our niche position with a well targeted audience, which is what yours sounds like.
The hardest part is that we have to spend some time on the phone to them and provide them with paperwork / media packs etc.....just like the traditional press would.
If we start with links and banners, the CTR is poor, whereas putting in the effort to construct a page gives a much higher CTR. Now, even if the companies wanted to go the CPM route, we wouldn't suffer much of a drop in revenue....but it does take careful targeting of the companies and some real presentation efforts.
Hope this helps.
1 site I receive 500-1000 unique visitors a day, and in 1 week in Feb. 5 manufactures, and stores e-mailed me requesting advertising. I explained it all to them, and worked out a deal with one guy even.
Since then, none have paid, and none have e-mailed me. Even the guy I worked out a "deal" with he said he wanted to add more products then do the deal. I also had osmeone in JAN locked in for 6 months.. no $ yet.
My advice is to get them to pay oyu when they make the deal!
Back when I first did this I didn't have AdSense as an alternative, therefore the space I had to offer was essentially worthless (at least in terms of generating current income).
I made arrangements with companies and to entice them offered to run their advertising for free for a week or two so they could see how it would work out for them.
If they still seemed interested after the free period(they all did) I then sold them the advertising on a monthly basis, always giving them a lot of slack in terms of paying just sometime before the 30 days was over.
I've had ups and downs. Some "late pay"'s but never any "didn't pay"'s.
What I do know is when I initially contacted companies the only ones that answered were the ones I really didn't want to do business with. These were sites selling borderline snake oil. Companies who seemed to take liberties with the truth in their selling claims. As it turns out these are the companies that have money to spend and are looking for alternative opportunities to advertise.
Maybe I sold my soul to the devil (although their advertising in no way influenced the content of my site). Now I could afford to do without them but feel that I owe them gratitude because they advertised with me when no one else would. (They also offer a way to diversify income rather than just generating income from AdSense.)
Since these early days my site has become ranked top 10 (actually a fair number of #1's) for several of its keywords.
Now days I get email from people asking about advertising rates and advertising availability. Everybody thinks I'll sell space to anyone who is the highest bidder.
I've not had a good experience with these people. I've been burnt with a no pay once. Now days I'm pretty much to the point that I usually don't bother to answer email enquiries unless it really seems professional and gives me a lot of information about them up front.
