Auction my Advertising space

Good idea or not ???

[Uhuru]

Over the last couple of month I have been able to raise the traffic on one of my sites significantly.

I have been runing banners served by 3rd party Advertising Management Company, but I do not think I am maximising my revenue potential by going down this route.

I believe there may be more benefit selling the advert space direct. I am thinking that the easiest way to do this may be to auction the advert space on an online auction site with a reserved price (e.g. per page, per run of pages over a fixed period).

This will will make it easier to market.

Has anyone tried this? is it any good? and if it is, any tips. It is a niche site so will primarily appeal to a limited number of advertisers.

tia

[cedricmann]

As a buyer of such advertising, I find that it is generally a buyer's market... there are a handful of sites I see that do "okay", but in general, it's easy to buy hundreds of thousands of impressions for pennies per thousand. With a niche site, you may expect to do better if the right buyer comes along.

You might want to watch other peoples' ebay ad sales for a while and see what happens there -- that should give you an idea if you can do better than your current rate.

[Uhuru]

Thanks for the info.

I have had a quick look through E-Bay and decided to place a number of impresssions for sale. I see this a test of the concept and whether its viable or not

[ChrisXenon]

I found my site listed #1 in Yahoo.com for a key phrase which bought in lots of USA traffic. BUt we're a UK shop and most Americans wouldn't want to buy from us - so we paid for the excess bandwidth but didn't get the sales.

I fixed this by placing a series of national flags on our index page, and selling them off to owners of similar shops in those countries.

The traffic now leaves one click after it arrived - fixing the non-productive traffic problem - and I get paid per week for rental on the flag link.

I just surfed some respectable sites, found their email addresses and made the proposal.

Chris

[eljefe3]

>>I just surfed some respectable sites, found their email addresses and made the proposal

Great call ChrisXenon. The best way to find good sites/affiliates/advertisers is to surf the pay per click engines to see who is bidding on these keywords. If you can offer them the same clicks for a lot less, you should be able to convert a pretty good percentage.

[ade_uk]

bay9.com allows you to auction off space in your mailing lists - might be of use to u?