Okay, I'm relaunching my site soon, as an optimisation resource site. There's gonna be articles, hints, tips and general advice on all the ways to optimise your site for search engines.

i've got space for a top banner, and a smaller banner on the side.

what sites should i allow to advertise on my site? i was considering things that would compliment my advice, such as sites offering paid optimisation, web designers, hosts etc. sites that have related ideas, but that are not in direct competition to me.

i've not used an ad-rotator before, but believe this to be possibly the best option?

what sorta prices should i charge for advertising? should i charge per impression or per month? is it better to go per month when your hits are low, and then move to per impression as your traffic builds?

ideas / suggestions, hints, tips, everything! is greatly appreciated.

thankx guys,

Since you're an optimization resource site for any site, you could allow banners for just about anything (excluding the normal warez, hate, porno, etc.). It might be best to have banners for similar sites, but I don't see that as a necessity.

I would suggest charging per month with the price starting very low until you build up a good customer/client base.

You might even do some reciprocal banners with a rotator until you get your hits up.

Dave

sounds like a good idea dave...and re: another thread...if i were working with an ad rotator, i could set a 2:1 ratio in favour of my site...thus gaining traffic for every visitor i send away

its all a game, u just gotta know how to play it to your advantage

i'll get the site design bug-free and user-friendly, the articles written, then concentrate on the advertising campaign

thankx for the ideas, anyone else have any suggestions? prices? something like $10 per month or less to start with? How to pay? should i get a paypal account...do i have to be 18? should i get paid by cheque?

so many questions...

Here's a few tips from my experience of selling advertising:

Only sell per month or for large numbers of impressions. You don't want to be messing around with tiny amounts of money.

Set your montly price based on a very low CPM. For example, if you get 25,000 impressions per month, sell it for $25 and throw in some extras (such as a newsletter mention and a main page text link). Any money is better than no money, so sell cheaply. If you get a lot of people buying from you, put up the prices. Simple supply and demand.

If you're selling advertising be careful with people paying from America. I had an advertiser who paid me $100 per month by cheque. The bank charged me £6.50 to cash it because it was in dollars! So be careful if you arn't getting much money in. You may be better of with Paypal for US payments as, if you want to, you can keep the money in the PayPal account, and then spend it on something online which is charged in dollars, saving you from paying any comission.

I would accept any advertisers who are willing to pay (but not the obvious ones (porn etc.)). It doesn't matter to you if the advert does well, as long as you get paid

thankx for the advice. hopefully it'll benefit other people as well as me.

at present, with little or no advertising i'm on very very low impressions, as you can imagine. so i figure i might get an ad rotator and put in some hosting affiliate banners or something, until i get up to the stage where i'm on say 100+ uniques per day.

at that point i'll start looking for advertisers who are willing to pay...make business sense?

i'll probably start off with just "send a cheque" schemes, then get a paypal account when i start getting frequent payments (and when the payments have paid for the account), otherwise, i'm wasting money without knowing if i'll be getting it back.

you build a business slowly, if you have a great business and no clients, you have no business. if you have too many clients and no business, you have no business. its a balance, get it right, and you'll make thousands

thankx for the advice...

You might want to check out BidPay.com.

Part of their advertisement says: "UK Sellers, Now receive a cheque in British Pounds!" So here is a place where you can accept payments from all over and get it in pounds. There is a transaction fee for the conversion, but I could be passed on to the purchaser.

i'll probably start off with just "send a cheque" schemes

Some people don't like the check route because of the time delays in the postal system. Electronic might get more business. Of course, you do have to start somewhere and only accepting checks or money orders can be a good place to start.

As an example, it was suggested $25 for a site receiving 25,000 impressions. That's a good starting place. If your site receives less than 5,000, you might want to still make the lowest price around $5. Any less can be more difficult to deal with and not worth the money.

But these are only suggestions.

Dave

that was the route that i was heading in. so its more of a per impression pay than per month?

i'd have to work out which would make me more money, per month or per impression, which one i could make more convincing and sell better to the client.

thankx for the info on the payment site, its been noted!!

anyone with any other ideas about banner ads on your site, anyone with suggestions as to how to run them / advice on how they run theirs etc?

the plot thickens...

Just another thing, if you don't have many impressions (I found this when I first started talking to advertisers, they were wanting 100K+ per month and I was only getting a few thousand) its best to sell per month, because you can throw in little extras (like text links) and push the price up to a reasonable level.

sounds like a plan to me...i'm slowly building up the tips and tricks of the trade. i'm gonna sit down, (when i have 5 mins!) and build a business plan for when i'm ready to impliment it, so its all completed.

thankx for the ideas guys, they're much appreciated!! i think the idea of text links as an "optional extra" thrown in while few hits are achieved is a great idea, it'll help to sell your program that little bit more. i'd still like to set up my own program eventually, but i'd need a big site with many many hits to do that i'd guess...one day then, sooner the better!

many thankx to you all...