Advertising

dahayeser

I am just wondering if anyone could advise me on how best to attract advertising to a website and what benchmarks advertisers would look for.

For example if I set up an irish rugby (so audiance would be interested in sport and the age profile could be anything from kids to 50+),
the site would be

1. updated on a daily basis,
2. show up prominantly in google and the main search engines
3. achieve 5000 unique visitors per month

Would this be likely to interest to potential adverisers ? If not what would be required? If so how long would I need to be able to prove this readership?

I am between jobs at the moment and would greatly appreciate any constructive advice / tips / thoughts.

mneylon

Getting direct advertisers without any traffic will be hard

You might, in the interim, look at both Google Adsense and some affiliate programs.

However you'd need to focus on content and traffic if you wanted to get advertisers

dahayeser

dahayeser wrote: »

1. updated on a daily basis,
2. show up prominantly in google and the main search engines
3. achieve 5000 unique visitors per month

Thanks Blacknight. I am looking at this as a longterm project. If I had achieved the above 3 points - say proof of 3 months of 5000 unique monthly visitors. Do you think I be in a position to get direct advertisers then?

sheesh

look at google adsense requirements for advertisers and see if you can achieve that.

cormee

dahayeser wrote: »

Thanks Blacknight. I am looking at this as a longterm project. If I had achieved the above 3 points - say proof of 3 months of 5000 unique monthly visitors. Do you think I be in a position to get direct advertisers then?

You'd probably need closer to 2000 unique visitors per day before any advertisers would take notice of you.

dahayeser

cormee wrote: »

You'd probably need closer to 2000 unique visitors per day before any advertisers would take notice of you.

Really?? that much?

What is the general opinion on adsense ? I have always felt that it would be a huge amount of work - marketing / blogging etc for very small rewards.. has anyone here found it to be any different?

jetsonx

First of all - you would have to give away your advertising for free for the first couple of months.

Ask any business person how many cold calls they recieve about advertising a week and listen to their annoyance . Unfortunately, the market is full of advertising shysters promising all sorts of "fantastic opportunities". Most of these are spivs.

When your site has proved its effectiveness and you've got formal acknowledgement from the clients that they are seeing results, then start charging them. If not just pull the plug on them.

cormee

dahayeser wrote: »

Really?? that much?

What is the general opinion on adsense ? I have always felt that it would be a huge amount of work - marketing / blogging etc for very small rewards.. has anyone here found it to be any different?

That figure applies to getting advertising from media agencies, you will probably find private advertisers happy with a lower number but even then I'd say you'd be looking at no less than 1000 visitors. The downside with private advertisers is they can be very difficult to get money out of. I've had to resort to solicitors letters in the past to get sums as low as €300. I try avoid dealing with them now.

Adsense is fine from the pov of just adding the code and forgetting about it. Revenue isn't great though, in my experience you'll get about €100 per 50,000 page views.

mneylon

Adsense - easy to setup. You can spend a lot of time tweaking the placement, colours etc.,
If the site has the right kind of traffic then you can earn quite well.
There's lots of variables at play though, so obviously the more traffic you get the more likely you are to get a reasonable return from it

Niche advertisers *might* work, but again they'd need to be seeing some kind of return on their investment

I can't speak for other businesses, but I know we are plagued by advertising sales people trying to sell us advertising. A lot of them seem to invent the figures as they go along

Another option would be affiliate marketing, though like Adsense you won't earn anything unless the site has got visitors

To be honest if the site's niche is good etc., I'd focus my energies on content and SEO. If you have good content and the SEO then you *should* start to see the traffic. Once you have the traffic you can start monetising it.

(SEO in this context means giving pages sane titles etc., not anything "magical")

dahayeser

cormee wrote: »

That figure applies to getting advertising from media agencies, you will probably find private advertisers happy with a lower number but even then I'd say you'd be looking at no less than 1000 visitors.

Just to clarify cormee, you estimate 1000 unique visitors per day, not not 1000 hits / page views is it?

Just having a quick look around at some of the prominent irish sport sites there seems to be very little banner advertising out there. The vast majority seems to bee google ads except for the GAA site Hogan Stand which seems to have no problem attracting private advertisers .. not sure what to read in to that, maybe the fact that they have a print publication too makes a big difference.

cormee

dahayeser wrote: »

Just to clarify cormee, you estimate 1000 unique visitors per day, not not 1000 hits / page views is it?

Just having a quick look around at some of the prominent irish sport sites there seems to be very little banner advertising out there. The vast majority seems to bee google ads except for the GAA site Hogan Stand which seems to have no problem attracting private advertisers .. not sure what to read in to that, maybe the fact that they have a print publication too makes a big difference.

Yes, visitors not pageviews.

derickmc

I brought in an average of 300 to 500 euro per month on an umbrella property site which ran until 2005. Had properties for 5 to 8 auctioneers on line and sold banner ads to a various trades. I was averaged 2000 to 4000 unique visitors per month. the figures depended on if the auctioneers put my link on their newspaper adverts.

Things have no doubt moved on and the economic climate has changed completely but I think some of the figures mentioned might be on the high side. 5000 unique visitors is significant, if you can reach it consistently for a few months .. then prove it san start approaching potential clients.

cormee

derickmc wrote: »

I brought in an average of 300 to 500 euro per month on an umbrella property site which ran until 2005. Had properties for 5 to 8 auctioneers on line and sold banner ads to a various trades. I was averaged 2000 to 4000 unique visitors per month. the figures depended on if the auctioneers put my link on their newspaper adverts.

Things have no doubt moved on and the economic climate has changed completely but I think some of the figures mentioned might be on the high side. 5000 unique visitors is significant, if you can reach it consistently for a few months .. then prove it san start approaching potential clients.

160 visitors a day isn't significant. Consider that with an optomistic CTR of 2% and your advertisers will notice very quickly they're not getting any sort of ROI. The ROI will obviously depend on the product the advertiser is selling but in most cases the 40 or so visitors you are sending them each month aren't going to command anything close to €300-€500 banner ad fees.

Sabre0001

So much for my 'get rich quick scheme' :pac: