Newbie Question about selling Ad Space

minga · #1 10-21-2007, 10:19 PM

I've finally gotten to the point where I'm comfortable selling some ad space on my site. I'm happy with the design, getting some content out there, and still working on SEO (slowly but surely!).

I'm selling some ad space - banners on the web site and print/electronic ads in my newsletter. I'm lost when it comes to pricing. Any suggestions of how to price the banner ads? Here's what I've got so far. I make around $25 per month with the AdSense links, so I priced the banners from there. Here are my basic traffic stats (I have a niche market!)

1500-3000 visits per month (~5000 page loads/month)
750 uniques / month
3.5 pages/visit
45% direct traffic
39% from search engines
15% from referring sites

between 90-95% of my traffic is from the state of Michigan (my target market!)

I think the banners may be under-priced since they sold out fast - I only have 2 left to sell...

Let me know what you think! Feedback on other aspects of the site are greatly appreciated too!

kaus · #2 10-22-2007, 10:39 PM

Just to make a suggestion only because this is what I have been told. it is better even if you are selling ad spaces to limit them only to those within your niche (gambling etc) I was just looking and seen you have two outgoing links to a legal services on your homepage

sirtiner · #3 10-22-2007, 10:47 PM

Hi.
just so you know, your site doesn't look good in firefox, just so you know.

minga · #4 10-23-2007, 12:52 PM

We had a pretty long discussion about that. I didn't think my web site traffic would help the pre-paid legal business. It's a 3-month thing, so I'm planning to have something more poker-related in the hopper soon.

minga · #5 10-23-2007, 12:53 PM

I know it looks like garbage in Firefox. I've hired a web developer to help me with that... couldn't figure it out for myself and figured the $$ spent would feel better than banging my head on the desk !

sirtiner · #6 10-23-2007, 01:23 PM

it is easy to fix, im not a pro but i guess you haven't write where the things should be, so some things uses firefox own css and not your css or somthing like that, i had the same problem when i did my page.

kaus · #7 10-23-2007, 01:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by minga

We had a pretty long discussion about that. I didn't think my web site traffic would help the pre-paid legal business. It's a 3-month thing, so I'm planning to have something more poker-related in the hopper soon.

I am not talking about your traffic or losing it to the advertisers. What I mean is you are linking to areas that are not related.

minga · #8 10-25-2007, 11:40 AM

I'm pretty sure the unrelated advertiser will not renew after 3 months. It's likely a mistake to put that up - but that's how we learn.

Back to the pricing question - what is the proper way to price these banner ads?

Thanks again!

Randy · #9 10-26-2007, 09:19 PM

The proper way to price ads is to get as much for the ads as your advertisers are willing to pay for them. You might as well start off by accepting any offer, doing it short-term, and then raising your prices gradually as time goes by.

cogger · #10 10-29-2007, 12:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Randy

The proper way to price ads is to get as much for the ads as your advertisers are willing to pay for them. You might as well start off by accepting any offer, doing it short-term, and then raising your prices gradually as time goes by.

BINGO!, let's see how bad they want it. I have done this method on past projects.