How much traffic is needed?

To advertising or classifieds viable.

[ken_b]

I hope this is the right forum for this question. If not, feel free to move it to an appropriate forum.

Our hobby site has slowly grown in traffic. Now my brother and I are wondering at what point a site becomes viable as either a advertising medium for other businesses or perhaps a home for a classified ad section.

A modest number of referers indicate that visitors are including "for sale" in their search queries. I can tell from email that others are visiting the site looking for a source for the items that our site features. I would guess that a larger number are looking for parts for those items. In fact I have been discouraging folks from asking about items *for sale* for a few months. That has cut down on email asking such questions.

I have trouble seeing a site with our traffic level being viable as an advertising medium, but one of my ISPs has encouraged me along that line.

I'm more inclined to go the classified route. But am uncertain about whether to go with a custom program or an out of the box & hosted plan.

Not sure how specific I can or should be here.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

[willtell]

From personal experience, I would say start small and be very cautious.

Don't invest allot of money into something that may or may not work. If you have the time, manage things manually for awhile.

Try and find ways to test the waters as much as possible.

Above all, do not go into debt, that has killed many a good product and idea.

[brotherhood of LAN]

are there any affiliate programs related to your content. ie search google for "'keyword' affiliate program"?

[mack]

what i did was download a free banner advertiding script that placed affiliate banners in the banner programe that way i dont have to sell any ads, i can just check my stats to see if it is viable. i also set up a classifids section for users to place car adverts (for sale) i am getting about 1000 page views a day and that = about 3 new adverts a week and a click through of about 3% on the banners.

[ken_b]

Willtell;

Thanks. Small is pretty much what I had in mind to start with. The classified software is something I can do pretty inexpensively as far as package, installation, and basic hosting is concerned. I'm not sure if bandwidth would be an issue though. I still have to research that a bit.

Brotherhood...;

Thanks. I did the Google search for affilliate programs and wasn't real impressed with what I found. But I may not have done the search very well. I guess I need to follow up on that a bit more. Affilliate programs are something new to me.

Mack;

Thanks. I'm not sure I quite understand this part...

*...about 1000 page views a day and that = about 3 new adverts a week ...*

May I ask if you are saying that 1000 page views per day is translating into 3 new classified ads placed on your site per week? Feel free to decline answering if that is probing too far into your business.