Beyond Banners

[Musicarl]

We have a music site that gets over 2000 visits a day. Our only income comes from Google adsense, and we don't use it on our homepage. We're putting a sales package together in an effort to get a sponsor. We have a particular company in mind, and have mocked up some pages with them inserted as a sponsor.

What else do we need? Should I put together a media kit with our stats and some positive press? What stats are relevant? Should the whole thing be done through email, or do we print up the media kits? Who do we contact at the company?

As you can tell, we're new to this. We have just one site and refuse to pollute it with banners or pop-ups. I think the sponsorship route makes sense, but don't want to come off as a total amateur. Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks,
Carl

[Compworld]

If you want to to make money with your site, you have two options. 1) Subscription, but most will not join if they can get that stuff for free somewhere else. 2) Banners (maybe two, one on the top, then one on the bottom).

You should put together a power point presentation, and then save it in Adobe PDF format with stats, prices, company info & history, etc. Also, set yourself up with an ad server so that you can serve the ads with your own software, and provide tracking for the advertiser. Additionally, you might want to set yourself up with a payment processor (I.E. Paypal & AuthorizeNet, etc.), as well as an online shopping cart for where a potentional customer can signup for advertising and place an order automatically w/o out having to wait to speak with someone about their options.

So, as you can see, its is a tedious task, but the better sites do that. Do not be afraid of banners, NY times, WSJ, CNET, CNBC, MSN, and a host of others do it and it helps pay the bills (and yourself too).

CompWorld

[alika]

What you can do is to check out other website's media kit. Some are available right there on the web, others are available upon request by email. That way, you can have a fairly good idea as to how to present your information

[undulance]

I work for a small company that has built a product search engine and we are trying to BUY advertising on one or two sites with light to moderate traffic. We have technology that can produce very unobtrusive, highly contextual ads that take up very little real estate and therefore could be served in addition to whatever standard ads are on your site, so it's an additional monetiziation opportunity for your site. Its a new type of advertising that could be used in lieu of or in addition to banner ads. Again, please note, we're not selling anything, we want PURCHASE ad space (but for this new type of ad) from a site that is willing to explore a new type of ad delivery mechanism. Content sites, especially product review would be best. Anybody willing to help us prove the viability of this concept? (Again, you should end up earning money).