How many visitors before looking for advertisers?

advertsing,

[dcallan]

Hi folks,
I have a question with which I hope you can help me with.
My site is currently getting about 420-450 visitors a day and am considering starting to actively look for advertisers to help generate money for the continuing development of the site.

My question is though is this enough, will advertisers take me seriously or should my visitors aday figure be sumwhere is the k's. Also what sort of pricing is usually charged for the advertising.

Regards
Dave Callan
Ireland -

[Visit Thailand]

I do not want to sound negative but 500 visitors a day is not an awful lot.

But sales is not what you sell but how you sell it.

If your site is highly targetted then you may have a better chance with lower numbers.

If you have no experience in sales esp. ad sales then would recommend talking to a rep and seeing what they say. Do not go for the big boys but find some small outlets and put your feelers out, get a feel for the market and what hurdles you may face and take it from there.

What is your site about? Is it localised etc?

[sullen]

agree.

Sites that quote their traffic in order to get advertisers really annoy me though - since no stats programme is clever enough to take account of AOL, bots and 0 page stats they are generally meaningless in terms of actual potential traffic for an advertiser - you could mention this. (1 AOL session gets counted as lots because several IP addresses will be used, same for bots and 0 page sessions shouldn't be counted at all, but usually are).

I even saw one site which had a signed statement from a notary saying the stats were genuine. Would he know about all those things? No. I feel like reporting the notary.

Anyway, why not try signing up to some affiliate schemes?

[chiyo]

OK those 450 visitors a day. Are they unique? How many are robots, scrapers and other non-human viwers? How many of those visitors actually are humans reading the page for the content rather than robots (and other SEO'ers or competitors checking out your code)? We have a rough estimate that around 50% of our "visits" and 30% of our "unqiue servers" are not really human!

450 is a reasonable number for a very specialised site which attracts a specialised user base that are inclined to buy what an advertiser is offering. It helps if your site attracts rich people. For example joke sites need to reach 1,000's a day before being anywhere near marketable. However an established quality information site on yachting which attracts rich people may be very attractive to boat sellers and rum sellers even with just 500 or so real visitors a day. Despite this, no ad agency will touch you, as there are no margins in it for them, so you have to do it yourself.

That said, we didnt start selling ads on our specialised mainly business-professional sites until we were getting 2,000 uniques a day. -uniques defined as excluding any robots or scrapers, hits to our RSS feeds, any hits that dont downlaod an actual page such as image only hits, and all of AOL (so small it doesnt matter).

[onlineleben]

As already mentioned above, try to get some affiliate programs running.
Assuming that the site in question is the same as mentioned in the thread "help needed - Affiliate Program Suggestions" which you started on Dec 9, 2002, I think there are different possibilities to make some money (at least as much to cover cost). You just have to make yourself something special and promote yourself.

If your site even covers a very specific niche, affiliate products that you endorse on your site may work much better than topic related advertising.
Hope this helps.