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[Laura McCallum Company: Immunotec Inc Contribution Level: 3]

I am starting to get interest from other distributors in companies related to my niche to advertise on my site. I am fine with this, as long as they pay, but aren't sure how much to charge and how to set it up. Anyone here have experience with this? I will have about 3400 unique visitors on my site for the month of January. (Last month was only 2100, so traffic is growing quickly.)

I know my rate would be related to traffic, and go up as traffic goes up. My plan is to allow content style, keyword focused pages that sell a person's product in the form of a tier 3 webpage on my site, which means 2 clicks away from the home page. It would have to fit in with my site's theme and overall look and feel. What's a Tier 3 ad page on a 3400 visitor/month website worth? The highest number of page views I have had for a Tier 3 in a month so far is about 900. Much of course depends on the popularity of Product X that they will be advertising. Is there some sort of formula to go by for what is fair? Thanks for your help.

[Richard Bravo Company: Life Force International Contribution Level: 9]

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hey Laura ... fancy meetin you here!

There's a bunch of ways to serve ads on your site.
As a matter of fact it's one of the topics I'll be covering in detail in my upcoming Wordpress Optimization training.

But to get you rolling in the mean time here's some ideas ...


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BuySellAds - http://www.buysellads.com
You can register your blog here to make your ad space available to advertisers on a monthly fee basis.
Go to their site and they have the whole program spelled out.
(note: This is also a great place to buy ad impressions to promote your own stuff )


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CPA / Affiliate Offers
There are several ad networks you can join as an affiliate. Some are easy to get into, others not so easy.
Most of the CPA networks will require that your blog be running and active, which it is, then they will conduct an interview process with you prior to acceptance. I'm considering adding a segment on this to my training as the interview process stops a lot of people in their tracks.

These are some of my favorite cpa/affiliate networks:
ClickBank, NeverBlue, Hydra, ClickBooth, Commission Junction, eJunkie, PepperJam, MarketHealth, Azoogle, MaxBounty, Link Share. I'm also an affiliate directly with other marketers such as Ryan Deiss, Frank Kern, Michael Koenigs, and others. I recommend you look for partnerships like those where you can promote affiliate products within your specific niche that are outside the popular networks I've listed.


You can serve ads from any of these networks at your discretion once you are approved for an account.
Keep in mind that commissions using this option are typically based on CPA (cost per action / cost per acquisition / cost per sale) Meaning you make money when someone performs the desired action the advertiser is looking for. This could be range anywhere from a zip code submission to making a purchase.


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OpenX - http://www.openx.org
This is a great platform for serving your own ads.
There's a little technical knowledge needed here. Primarily you'll need to be someone comfortable with html, a little php, installing scirpts code and manipulating your blog theme.

If you can do that or find someone to do it for you, ths is a very powerful platform thath can rotate banners, text ads, Adsense, Amazon ads, in-house ad units, etc.

You can create "zones" on your site that display different sized ads from a multitude of advertisers in various areas of your site.

In short - I love this software!
You can install it directly on your server or use their free hosted service.
If you have cPanel hosting the install is available in Fantastico.
Or you can go to Openx.org and open a free hosted account.


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If you are going to provide direct ad sales, meaning someone can contact you directly and buy ad space.
In general, banner advertising these days is based on impressions or page views - how many times is the ad shown in a 24 hour period?

So for example, let's say you have a 125 pixel x 125 pixel banner in your sidebar, then you can go a couple routes to sell that space ...

A) You could charge a flat monthly fee, say $10 per month.
In this case the advertiser pays $10 per month whether they get 1,000,000 page views or 1.

Or ...
B) You could charge based on impressions - say $1 per 1000 page views.
In this case they only pay for actual page views. If they get 5000PV then they pay $5 for that billing period.

Make sense?

You can set up billing via Paypal (I personally don't like them, but they are hard to avoid some times) or you can look at alternative merchant account services such as Google Checkout and others.

There's a few other places and options you can look at but I would say what I've listed so far is more than enough to get your feet wet. I'll probably cover more details as i said in the Wordpress training or in subsequent training for people that attend the course.

I hope that helps for now.
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[Laura McCallum Company: Immunotec Inc Contribution Level: 3]

Wow, Richard!

I was hoping you would answer. You have got to be one of the best on target posters here.

Thanks so much- you always over-deliver. You are the best! Give us some time to digest this all- and I may come back later with some questions about all of this. A lot of it is over my head right now.

If there is ever anything I can do for you, please let me know.

People like you are what make this site rock!

[Nick Cifonie Contribution Level: 1]

Another idea may be to find someone with a site that has similar traffic and a complimentary, but non competing product, and swap ads. You let them toss an ad on your site, and you put one on theirs. The traffic YOU get may be worth much more than whatever you charge a mon th for the real estate.

Nick

[Kurt Henninger Company: Shaklee Corporation Contribution Level: 5]

Two ways that I've used (as an advertiser, not as an ad space provider) and you can offer this too are:

1) $30 for a keyword focused article with anchor text back to their site. In this way, you benefit from more content on your site, they benefit from targeted exposure, plus a one way link to their site.

2) Text links. A good starting point is $30 a month for that kind of traffic IMO. It's what I've paid for them before on sites with that kind of traffic, and I've broken even on that advertising, so seems to be a fair assessement. Now, granted, the link was above the fold and in a great spot.

3)Bonus item Why not just put some Google Adsense on your site for a bit while you are getting things sorted out? Let Big G figure out what is a targeted ad or not, and you benefit in the interum by an additional revenue stream. It won't be a huge source of revenue, but its really set it and forget it.

Plus, a smart advertiser can hop on the Google content network and target your site on a CPM basis and a feel to see if they want a banner ad on your site or not.

Kurt

[Wendy Heyworth Contribution Level: 2]

Goodness Richard
I am blown away with your detail and have copied it all for future reference. I have only just managed to get google adsense on my site, it took me ages.must be a slow learner! i will certainly check this info out.
Thank you
Regards
Wendy

[Laura McCallum Company: Immunotec Inc Contribution Level: 3]

Thanks everyone!

[Jonathan Steele Contribution Level: 1]

Hi.
First, thanks Laura for telling me about this forum.

Here is how I come up with $75 per tier three page devoted to one advertiser only.

I have been running ads on my site for about a year. One text link on a tier two page pays me $75 a month. The site gets up to 75K visitors a month and the highest ranked page gets 5K a month visits.

So, I am getting about $0.015 per visit.

Most JV partnerships, where a list is involved, the list owner will want to make about $1 per name. So if he has 100 names and the JV product nets $50, he only has to sell two make the $1 per name average. Mind you, the list of names consists of warm leads.

But this is not a list, it is visitors. Lets say that in 100 people visiting the site, only 2 become subscribers. Lets say that there are 5,000 visitors. This means that there could be 100 signing up for a news letter. Even if not run well and only 2% actually convert, then there would be two customers.

Suppose each customer is worth about $20 per month.

So, paying 75 to make 40 does not sound like a very good deal. However, there are two factors to consider. First, what is the life time value of a customer. It the average customer stays on for several months, it could be that your paying $75 to make two or even $300.

One marketer on the web I know of spends 3 million a month to make 5 million and he is not using Adsense Arbitrage. He just has Adsense ads that direct to the joint venture product he sells.

People have approached and offered to pay as little as $100 a year. For the amount of traffic I generate and based on how much I am already making, this will be way too low. It is not even $10 per month. This is less than what the contextual ads pay.

Suppose you get 10 cents per click from your contextual advertiser or other ads (if your getting less, then you need to use the competitive filters). So if a single contextual ad getting 100 hits on a single page getting several thousand hits a month would be worth at least $10. Many contextual ads pay any where from $0.30 to a few dollars per click. This means that less clicks pay a whole lot more money than the $100 offer.

Put the $100 a year link and you have just diluted your site even more.

But the $75 a month still may seem high. Incidentally, I did not set this price. This is what an ad agency started paying me.

So, to add value to the process, I am devoting an entire tier three page to the sign up of the newsletter or white paper that the advertiser will be featuring. I will only be requiring a three month initial sign up. After that, the payment will be monthly if they prefer. If the advertiser does not have some way to capture a visitor, I will make them sign off that the outcomes may not be as good as they could be with some kind of lead capture system.

This works two ways. If the page converts extremely well and or the traffic continues to rise, the price can go up. If however, the page is leased for a year, they have the option to renew with only a 10% cap on the increase in price.

Second, when someone signs up, I will provide a tutorial on how to drive traffic to the page they are renting. I will likewise work to attract more traffic. If they are happy and making money, I will continue renting the page and we both win. With the added links they will bring to the page, it will continue to grow the site and the page rank of each page.

There is an added benefit. The less Google ads I have, the better the site looks to a number of directories and social sites.

As a goal, I am using $0.015 to $0.02 per page visit for a valuation.

So on my site that only gets 30,000 visitors a month, it will be considerably less expensive until the traffic increases.

Of course, this is just an experiment. But hey, I am a scientist, so how could I resist.

Oh yea, the 2 percent conversion. That is only true if you pitch the person 1 time which is what most salesmen do and then drop the customer.

My best conversion is 22% and the guy who trained me has as much as 37% closure.

You should be working toward at least an 8 to 10% closure if not higher.

Hope this helps.

Best wishes.

[John F. Kennedy Contribution Level: 2]

What I've done in the past is place an advertisers on a page with a article thats keyword rich within their niche, along with their own list of 5 keywords I place within the metatag of the webpage for $75 per month. You need to know a little HTML to do this.