Questions about advertising

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Questions about advertising

Questions about how much traffic, rates, research resources

aghill

8:48 pm on Jul 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

Background before I start asking questions... I recently started a "hobby" site and have decided to try and make a commercial venture out of it (read: sell advertising). It's a very niche site.

Some of the questions on my mind are:

How much traffic should I have before approaching advertisers?

What's more important to advertisers, page views or unique visitors?

How well do advertising/affiliate programs work in generating revenues for the sites?

Any recommended reading/research resources for online advertising?

I know the questions are kind of generalized, and open ended. Sorry.

rcjordan

8:57 pm on Jul 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

Welcome, aghill! I suggest sifting through these for a start. In general, I'd say that most (privately-placed) advertisers on small, independent publications are generally ignorant of traffic details --they often buy because your site is in the serps and they feel the demographic is close enough to be worth the chance.

[webmasterworld.com...]

Jenstar

8:58 pm on Jul 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], aghill.

How much traffic should I have before approaching advertisers?

This will depend on many things - your target audience, how many competitors you have, how selective the niche market is, etc. If no one else has any competing sites, you would be able to start charging for advertising much sooner than you would if you have eight direct competitors with half a million page views per month. Don't forget that people will be more willing to advertise on a smaller or newer site when the advertising is priced accordingly.

What's more important to advertisers, page views or unique visitors?

Both page views and unique visitors are equally important. You could have a lot of page views but very few visitors, or many unique visitors who may only click on one page. An advertiser will likely want to know both.

How well do advertising/affiliate programs work in generating revenues for the sites?

This will depend on so many different factors, such as page views, how targeted your affiliate/advertising is to your site, saturation, etc etc. It will mainly be trial and error - some sites do incredibly well, but others might not even cover hosting from these programs.

Any recommended reading/research resources for online advertising?

Start reading the previous threads in this forum. You will find a wealth of information here :)

This thread [webmasterworld.com] is an excellent read for information about offering advertising on your site.

aghill

9:05 pm on Jul 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

RC & Jen,

Thanks for the fast response. All information is greatly appreciated.

Shak

9:09 pm on Jul 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

most important thing to an advertiser:

quality of visitor

I made the mistake a few years ago of creating a site with millions of page views and 000000's of visitors, but traffic was "junk", people looking for free stuff and not interested in spending money.

biggest mistake I ever made...

Shak

aghill

3:21 pm on Jul 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

Good point Shak. I think the typical visitor, is a desirable demographic. (There's just not enough of them yet!)

Net_Wizard

5:05 am on Jul 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

How much traffic should I have before approaching advertisers?

I remember my very first attempt at selling advertising space. I was naive then at that time, no knowledge of marketing or advertising, all I knew was, I have traffic. :)

Luckily, my site at that time was at a very niche market and I'm so proud of myself to have an average of seven thousands unique visitors per month.

I did found an advertiser for my site, worth a few bucks and that just motivate me to do better.

I wonder what would have happened to me if I haven't found that advertiser?

firstmark

5:37 am on Jul 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

I don't suggest a new hobbyist webmaster try to sell advertising at first.
Adnetworks sell a lot of inventory online for a reason. They are easy to work with and economical if you don't get enough traffic to warrant selling your own inventory.

Implementing affiliate program links on your own, maybe adding banners, and popunders from a network should be the route tried first in my opinion.

Imaster

6:23 am on Jul 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

You could also try other ad networks such as Fastclick, advertising.com, etc where you won't have to do much expect paste the code and review the ads on a timely basis.

This suggestion could be particularly useful in case you don't get enough advertisers initially or as fillers in case of non-paying ads.

You could also try google adsense which would provide you with a good opportunity to earn some decent revenue.