Advertising

I have a site (not the one in the signature) that gets about 2700 uniques per day on weekdays and about 800 uniques a day on weekends. The site is an adsense site. I've never sold advertising on it before.

Today, I got a pretty interesting email message:


Browsing on the Internet I came upon your website ($name) and I find it very interesting and useful.
My name is Daniel Lee and the reason I am contacting you is my interest in purchasing advertising spot on your site.
I will be very thankful if you tell me how much a text link or banner 120x60 / 125x125 on your home page or all pages will cost.

Question #1: The word "$name" actually appeared in the message... it did not have the name of my site in the email. Should I be suspicious?

Question #2: If I did want to sell advertising on this site, how much would I charge? None of my competitors list their rates on their pages... Sure, I am interested in allowing someone to advertise if it could be profitable. Is there are formula for calculating the "going rate"?

Thanks.

P.S. Hope I put this in the right forum-- wasn't sure where it belonged.

 

I get a lot of these. My personal opinion is that reputable companies know your name.

 

This was probably sent from some automated application searching for sites with certain criteria.

Im a noob at the whole thing really so not sure what you would charge. You can get an idea by maybe placing an ad in the Link Sales section here at DP forums .

Tell them you want to buy a banner on a site with 2k-3k uniques and see how you go :0)

Best of luck mate , let us know how you get on!

 

oh yeah regarding the guy you emailed. Email him back and tell him you're working on pricing and you'll come back . If he replys then he's for real.. otherwise blacklist his email address and continue

 

look at the email address, that's what i do, if it's really long (ex ) then obviously it's spam. i would email him back though if the email addy looks legit, he probably is using keywordelite/software

 

Looks like spam to me. I've gotten a few of those in the past.

 

Not saying this one is, but a lot such messages come from spam bots.

They will know you are home if you reply to it. They then send you offers on how to advertise and monetize your site.

If you reply to those e-mails, they then put you on a mailing list that they sell.

Sneaky sons of bitches.

You should consider using captcha in your advertising package if it continues.

For that amount of traffic, it's fair to advertisers to charge no more than $50 a month.

It's small, but if you can rack up 10 of them, that's 500 bucks.

If you do want to reply to him, consider using a throw-away mailing address, like a Yahoo account.

 

Thanks for the advice everyone.... I think you're all probably right... I've thought about it and my instinct tells me not to reply... I get lots of spam as-is... I suppose this is probably just another spam message. If it were real, I think it'd be more personalized.

Thanks for the replies!

 

I got emails like this for advertising on my sites. I replied and the person on the other side did reply back. If you want to sell ad then you should reply; there is nothing to loose. Good luck.

 

With ($name) in the email ... you truly had a moment of wonder if it was spam or not??

Someone (the spammer) needs a lesson in merging from their database program ...

 

Maybe not a spammer. Charge him be fore ad placement. Simple

 

Update since my original post---

I have gotten three more messages, worded exactly like the first one... the only differences were the reply-to email and the person's name. It's clearly spam.

Look out for it in your boxes.