Hi All! I have a news website that has a LOT of old content but has been lying un-updated for about a year now. Still, it does get some traffic (30-80 hits a day) and occasional hits on it's clickbank banners. Now, I received a proposal for posting an ad on that website. I have asked the client about the kind of ad he wishes to put up - banner, text, 125X 125 block.. I wish to know what are the right kind of rates to charge for this - say a banner on top. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
Don't get your hopes up too much. Through the years, I've had a number of these types of vague emails - "We would like to advertise on your site." Most are cagey about what they want. When they finally tell you what they are hoping for, it's usually a in-text link on a page where their link would be inappropriate or outside the overall design of your site. I had one affiliate program approach me by giving me a link to one of their existing affiliates. The other affiliate offered something similar to my site but was just different enough that we really weren't competitors. They had this really cool setup that compared the page content to present complimentary products - something like Amazon offers but it looked more like site content than an ad. Great, I thought. The catch? The implementation was custom to that site and I would have to recreate it on my own. Uhm, no. Don't have the programming skills for that. They told me I could hire someone. Oh, yes, I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars for a custom API to your system on the premise I might earn some commissions. Uhm, no. Hopefully, you'll have a better experience but just don't get too excited about it yet. I don't have any suggestions for pricing. A lot depends upon the topic, the competitiveness of that topic, how the page(s) rank and unfortunately the Page Rank of the pages. Good luck.
If it was my site I would probably say $10-$15-month $50-6months any less it is a waste of time and it might be hard to get more unless you can pull out some high traffic stats. I have had a few people and advertizing agencys contact me about sites and ended up buying ads, so I does happen/along with many bogas people.
I kinda agree with YMC, I have had so many people flake at the last minute. Drives me nuts! People are like that however and there is nothing we can do about it. I've had people ask for ad space on many of my websites -- normally I just go for 3 times the price I'm earning from another ad. One affiliate ad I had on one of my websites was earning about $40 per sale and selling 2 or 3 times a month. I used that as a guideline for what the ad space was worth because if I'm making that much .. their ad could make about the same. Be sure to send an invoice to the buyer instead of just giving them your paypal address. Make sure to note what the payment is for and all the details of the agreement. This will protect you from people who say one thing and then try to argue about the agreement and request a refund. It's safer for both sides that way. Keep us updated please! Good luck hun!
Thanks for your advice SCH, averyz and YMC. Appreciate it a lot. I was contacted by a person (middleman or some kind of marketing rep). She offered me some $150 for a link to their client's site (backlink) and since the site was lying kind of defunct I accepted the offer. I raised the asking price to $200 a year and for once small backlink I now don't have to pay for the upkeep of my hostgator account and the site's domain renewal. That transaction went rather well and I am now open to more such arrangements provided the advertisers (or clients of backlinks) don't do anything illegal or deal in gambling and stuff. I did remove my Google ads from the site - Google was anyways paying near zilch, so it did not hurt me much. I will update the thread when (and if) I hear from that "client".
That is such great news! I'm glad it worked out well for you and everything went smooth! Keep up the wonderful work , hun!
I would suggest you to price around 4-5$ cpm. Calculate it! you will roughly get your monthly revenue with "cost per thousand impressions". Then you can add 20% to that for monthly sales. Lets say you have 10,000 monthly impressions so cpm would come to 40$ add 20% to it that is 8$ so you can price monthly banner ad in your prime position for 45 -50$. Hope it helps!
You can also do it based on PR So if your site has a PR5 ranking then you could look at around $40 per month for 125x125
Yep, clarify the ad first. I've had lots of these emails and they turn out to want inline text adverts. For your current traffic, i would say $20 a month min.