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Making Money With Advertising
One of the classic ideas for making money from a web site is by selling
advertising.
Without wishing to throw a dampener on your enthusiasm, I will tell you straight
out that selling advertising is hard, particularly if you don't have established
contacts with possible advertisers.
If you do, decide to try to selling advertising, here are a few basic steps:
- Take a look at your competition. Remember advertisers have a huge choice
of web sites on which they could advertise - so ask yourself why they would
choose yours? A review of your competition can also help you with the next
step...
- You will need to work out your advertising rates:
- Your advertising rates could be based on per-click charges, in this case
you will (at least) need software which can count the number of clicks each
ad. Do remember that in this case, the number of clicks is not under your
direct control - for example, what happens if one of your advertisers comes
up with an advert which none of your visitors wants to click?
To implement this idea, you will need some kind of software to count
these clicks. For banners you can use an
ASP,
CGI or
PHP banner
rotation script.
- Your advertising rates could be based on the number of times each advert
is displayed ("impressions"). This is a popular method with larger
web sites, which often charge per thousand impressions ("CPM").
In this case, you will (at least) need software which can count the number
of times each advert is displayed.
To implement this idea, you will need some kind of software to count
these impressions. For banners you can use an
ASP,
CGI or
PHP banner
rotation script.
- Your advertising rates could be based on weekly or monthly fees for
displaying the advert. While this method is fairly popular with smaller
sites, it can put advertisers off, because they simply wouldn't know your
site's level of traffic - and therefore couldn't determine whether the
advertising fee was for a few advert displays (a low traffic site), or
millions (a high traffic site).
- Advertisers (like most potential customers) like to know precisely
what they will paying for, before handing over any cash.
Therefore, you ought to be able to provide them with this information,
either directly on your web site, or when asked.
Some web sites even put together a "Media Kit" which contains
these kind of information:
- What your web site is about (brief summary)
- How many visitors you get, and your main sources of traffic
- Demographic (nationality, sex, job status, income bracket, etc.) information about your visitors (you might consider conducting a survey)
- Your track record - how long your site has been running. past advertisers,
possibly testimonials from previous advertisers, etc.
- Advertising options and rates on your site
- Any statistics or other information that is provided to advertisers
(example: will they be able to see how many impressions and clicks that
their advert got).
- Finally, you ought to be realistic, and think about what happens during
the periods when you don't have enough advertising customers to fill all
our ad space.
What will you do?
Will you be able to afford to continue running your site during such lean times?
One idea, that might generate at least some revenue during such times,
would be to display
affiliate program adverts.
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