Selling advertising space

Riaan

A website that I've created and maintained, for work training purposes and at my own expense, needs upgrading. Up until now I got by with just 250MB of space but that's become totally inadequate. The site now needs serious upgrading and my webhosting account will have to be upgraded as a result. It will now cost me more than the comparitively trivial R130 per year the hosting cost me up to now, about ten times that in fact.

So I figured I should make the site pay for itself, by selling advertising space to companies in our industry. Or better still, I could in addition to making the site pay for itself, also earn some GAS money for my time and effort. But how does one go about doing so? I guess I should contact the companies, show them the site and it's monthly traffic and negotiate a monthly rate to have their logo's (with links to their pages) on my site?

Are there any standards that apply, for instance a certain fee per month for each 100 visitors or a certain amount of bandwith used, or something like that?

I would appreciate some advise from those of you who knows about these things. ?

Riaan

Anyone?

inflames

Hi Riaan,

Sorry missed this thread.

Try: http://amplehosting.co.za/

I use them to host my personal site. I will also use them to host Graeme's tubetamer website and another friends site.
The deals they offer is remarkable!

Regards,
Lean

inflames

Sorry, I have the Diamond package for R132 per month:

25000 MB Disk Space
400 GB Bandwidth
Unlimited email
Host Unlimited Websites

FatBoy

Hey man

Only seeing this now. I am not really clued up with advertising, but look at Google Adsense. The problem is that you need to keep track of the amount of clicks to be able to tell the okes how many hits they had etc, so you need an ad system, not just a logo with a link.

Maybe norio can advise?

Regards

AlanRatcliffe

Google adsense is a good, simple way to start. Google finds the advertisers and gives you a slice of the profit. Doesn't earn you much unless you get lots of traffic and clickthroughs.

If you have PHP and mySQL on your server, get yourself OpenX adserver - can do anything you want it to do http://www.openx.org/

For a smaller site, it's usually best to charge a monthly fee, IMO. You can use an impressions or clickthrough model too, but it's easier to keep track of billing if it's on a month-to-month basis. Monthly fees also allow your advertisers to budget accurately.

Riaan

Thanks guys, I'll have a look at the links. Fortunately my webhosting company (Afrihost) can provide data about the site's traffic and so on. It's a small site, and most of it is password protected so that only employees can access it, with only four pages open to the general public.

Nonetheless, it still gets between 2000-3000 hits per month and ranks high with a Google search. I think a monthly fee for displaying a logo and link would work the best, as Alan suggested. I'll contact a few of the companies whose products we use, and offer them dirt cheap advertising, just to cover the costs.

For those of you who want to have a look, it's www. worcestersurgery.co.za. It's still a work in progress, and my British born colleague still has to correct the grammar and spelling... :-[

AlanRatcliffe

Nonetheless, it still gets between 2000-3000 hits per month
Hits, page impressions or visits? Very low for hits (depending on page content and how it is counted). Google wouldn't make sense for such a fairly low traffic site (even if it's page impressions), so stay away from that. However the site is a specialist one and caters to a specific, specialist userbase, so if you put your own ad system on your member's only pages you should be able to interest companies who want to target your members - i.e. the pharma and medical supply companies. Sound them out.

One thing does strike me though - is Worcester Hospital a State hospital? You may find there are regulations/laws about advertising on an "official" site. I dunno... Just a thought...

Riaan

One thing does strike me though - is Worcester Hospital a State hospital? You may find there are regulations/laws about advertising on an "official" site. I dunno... Just a thought...

@Alan: My experience has been that with certain things in the state sector, it works a bit like in the army. Sometimes you don't ask permission and just go ahead and do something, working on the principle that it's often better to later say "sorry" than to initially ask "please may I..." ? In most cases, if you pull it off successfully, everyone is happy and all go around patting themselves on the shoulder... ?

I don't think there'll be problems with advertising in order to finance the site though, conferences are sponsored the same way and by now the site has become an almost indespensible tool for many in the region, due to the resources available there. The provincial management is very impressed with the concept, and they'll no doubt be even more impressed if I don't ask them for money...private-public partnerships is one of the buzzwords nowadays.