Hey guys, I am new to the whole advertising on my site stuff, for the first eleven months of my sites existence I have put up the adverts to those who help me out with parts of my site etc. My website is completely run powered by vBulletin (yes please don't turn this into another of "those" threads) but I purchased an add-on called vBAdvertiser which allows me to handle my very own advertising and it offers the advertisers a log in where they get heaps of stats regarding their adverts and stuff. I was wondering if any of you out there handled your own ads, eg: didn't rely on adsense, clix galore etc I mean placed your own ads on your site for people who have brought them. I was wondering how you advertised to people that they could buy their own ads, what prices you would charge and if 40-50k visitors a month was enough visitors to do something like this. We were hacked recently and I lost all of my data so I am busy working on getting it back and making my site look good again and was wondering whether to put adsense on, or try and get my own adverts going. I am useless when it comes to all of that adsense stuff so don't know how to set up advertisement things and so am wondering would it be easier for me to run my own ads selling different positions across the forums/ sites etc. Any help or advice anyone can provide would be greatfully appreciated, and I thank you in advance for your time.
It really depends on the topics your forum covers as to what advertising you can get. Getting 40-50k visits each month is more than enough to secure advertising. What you need to do is put together a brief media kit that shows your stats (1-2 pages in PDF format usually). You also need to figure out what type of ad boxes you want to display on your site (i.e. a bunch of small 120x60 ads, or a few larger 468x60 ads), and where they will go. Ads that appear near the top/above the fold are generally worth more, but on forums it's also desireable to have ads in between the posts on any given thread. Once you've worked out all that, start contacting companies in the industry and just offer something cheap for now (i.e. $2/CPM). Do that until you've got several advertisers signed up, then you can start tweaking the pricing until Supply = Demand and you get a good balance.
As an advertiser myself, I can only tell you that the kind of traffic you have is enough to bring in advertisers. For me, personally, I don't need to log into something to see "stats." I keep it simple. If I don't have enough visitors, sales coming from a site within, say, 30 days, I pull the ad. Sorry I can't help you with the rest of your questions.
Thank you both for your replies - I really appreciate them as I don't really trust adsense etc as I had that installed once (when the site first started) and found adverts to gay porn etc appearing on my site no matter what keywords I put and seem my site is something for all ages I quickly got rid of them and after a recent hacking decided I would see whether it was worth running my own ads. I appreciate the responses.
You can run your own ads easily. I use the software below for some of my sites. http://www.restorecredit1st.com/ As you can see it is a nice example of the software handling all the ad serving. http://www.clippersoft.net/ Relatively inexpensive ad serving. Works well and has been around for some time now.