Attracting Advertisers For Your Site

So you have a web site and your building traffic, and hopefully you're
showing a profit from your own product sales and/or through affiliate
programs. Now it's time to look at attracting advertisers who will pay you to
run their banners and/or text links on your site (and in your ezine or
newsletter, if you have one.)

Know Your Visitors

The first step is to compile demographic information on your site's visitors.
This is extremely important information for any potential advertiser, and is
important for you in targeting potential advertisers.

There are two simple ways of collecting demographic data on your visitors.
You can run a daily or weekly poll, or you can collect this information
through the subscription process if you have a newsletter or ezine. For
example, Listbot allows you to ask demographic information of those
subscribing to your ezine/newsletter. Otherwise, simply polling your visitors
works too.

Don't try and collect too much information, as most people are unwilling to
spend the time to fill out a long form or survey, and may be quite hesitant
to give too much information. Just concentrate on the basics:

Country Gender Age Home Ownership Education Marital Status Children in
Household Income

This information will be enough to give potential advertisers a good sense of
who visits your site.

Know Your Traffic

Potential advertisers are also going to want to know how many unique visitors
your site generates (and the subscription base of your ezine/newsletter, if
you have one.)

Many hosting companies make available your site's statistics - either as part
of your monthly fee or for an additional fee. If they don't provide this
service, you can find outside sources such as superstats.com, who offer
various packages, depending on what stats you wish to track and how much
you're willing to pay.

At the very least, you will need to know your monthly unique visitor count
for each page of your web site. Most services provide stats on a daily,
weekly, monthly and yearly basis, and collect much more information than just
unique visitors.

Determining Your Price

Now it's time to determine what you'll charge for advertising on your web
site (and ezine/newsletter.) I suggest offering three advertising options:

Prime Ad

Standard Ad

Basic Ad

These can pertain to both banners and text link advertisements. Prime ads are
large (full color or bold text), and appear at or near the top of each page.
Standard ads are scaled down versions of prime ads and are generally smaller
in size and may or may not have color or bold features, etc. These usually
appear somewhere in the middle of your page or in a side column. Basic ads
are simple text links or very small banners and are normally placed at or
near the bottom of a page.

In setting your price, you can use a general rule of thumb: $ times the
number of unique visitors for the length or term of the ad (ad run). Prime
ads: .007 cents, Standard: .006 cents, basic .005 cents.

Example:

Prime ad for your main page for a one month duration.

Unique visitors to that page - one month: 150,000 Prime Ad price: $.007

Calculation: 150,000 x $.007 = $1,050 /mo.

So, for a prime ad on that page of your site to run for one month would cost
the advertiser $1,050.

* For advertising in an ezine or newsletter, just substitute your
subscription base for the unique visitor figure. (Remember, if yours is a
weekly publication, be sure to times your subscription base by 4.333 to
arrive at a monthly figure.)

This is just a guideline - it's always a good idea to find out what your
competitors are charging advertisers and adjust your price based on that
information.

Advertiser's Informational Packet

Once you've collected all the above information, you need to come up with a
way to present this information to potential advertisers. I suggest a short
and to the point Advertiser's Informational Packet. This should be available
in both an online and off-line version.

Our Advertiser's Informational Packet is ordered as follows:

Company Information and Background

Our Advertising Efforts and Partnerships

Web Site & Newsletter Demographics

Advertising Options & Current Rates

Payment Methods

It's always a good idea to offer incentives or discounts. Give a price break
to those who commit to advertising for several months or for those who take
out more than just one ad, etc. Personally, I like to offer new advertisers