Web Advertising models - What to charge

paulocon

Hi,

I have a website which attracts reasonable traffic from a targeted market.
I can easily find a large number of advertisers for that market, the problem I have is how to approach them with regards to having them advertise on my site and what to charge them.

Anyone know what kind of advertising models work the best, I would prefer something simple to manage like a once-yearly payment.

Also thinking of having advertisers submit articles to the site in their area of expertise, is this something that might work?

Cheers all....

leftofcentre

What is your traffic?

If i were you i would look to attract companies like http://www.century.ie

Sell on a monthly/yearly basis, not CPM.

paulocon

Cheers leftofcentre,

I must dig out exact stats for my traffic. Site only live a few weeks but already listed on most search engines and have a few registered users..

I might leave it boil for a bit more until listed in all search engines. Mulling over what marketing to do as well.

I do think the monthly/yearly model would be the best and easier to manage to boot...

leftofcentre

Be careful with marketing. If I was you i would only do adwords, even then do not buy generic words like property, only go for specific phrases like 'sites for sale', 'how to build a house' etc.

Do not do magazines, papers etc its a waste of cash.

paulocon

Hi Brian,

Have been looking at adwords ok.
Interesting views on magazines and papers, do you really reckon they are a waste of cash?

I would have been of the view that the more publicity I can raise for the site the better...

growler

have a look at

http://www.mypropertyforsale.co.uk/selling.php

they charge £99 for a listing.

growler

if you are looking for secondary advertisers, ie those who should be interested in talking to people who are buying / selling sites, builders, solicitors, mortgage brokers etc. it will really depend on what level of traffic you are getting, you could use a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) model so that for every 1000 times a banner ad is shown you charge say $50 ...have a look at your traffic and work out what this would cost n advertiser in a month if you had 2 / 3 advertisers or you could use a cost per click model so that you got say $3 for every time a visitor to your site clicked through to one of your advertisers.

Or you could outsource the sale of your adverrtising space to a 3rd party like tradedoubler ( there must be an irish equivalent) http://www.tradedoubler.com/pan/public/solutions/advertiser

paulocon

Cheers growler.

Just signed up with adwords. I've also got the site listed with MSN and Yahoo and am starting to see a nice bit of traffic from there. Waiting for Google to index me - hopefully that'll happen sooner rather than later.

I'm looking for advertisers of both types (i.e. people/agents who wish to list sites) and third-parties advertising their services.

On the lookout for someone from a business background to prepare a brochure/letter to send around from both points of view..

growler

but who would you send such a brochure to ? You won't know who has land to sell or even who might be looking to buy, the chances are that no matter how many brochures you print and post you'll be lucky if a minute percentage are interested at the time.

I would suggest the best way for you to gain maximum publicity for minimum costs would be to target the property supplements in the Irish papers, find our who the editors are and look to write a story about what you offer and how that differs from the current market offerings, if you have a successful sale you might consider waiving the seller's fee in exchange for using them in the story , i.e. get Farmer X to wax lyrical about how good your service was, how quickly the sale happened, how surprised he was at the amount of interest he had from both Ireland and abroad, how cost effective it was compared to using a traditional estate agent ( all backed up with figures/ stats / costs ) etc. etc. If you happen to have an attractive female buyer who might also be willing to compliment your service you might have a story worthy of publication.:)

If you can get such a story into even one of the nationals you'll see a jump in traffic and inquiries.

Also look at any publications targetting land owners, like the farming supplement in the Examiner, there are probably regular newsletters sent out by farmers' associations also.

Is this a full time job for you ? if not, and your costs are low, you could probably steal some market share by pricing your service at a level that means it's a no brainer for a land seller to use you even if they are also using other channels (estate agencies).... $100 is nothing if selling a $100k site, the more sites you have the more likely it is that you will be able to offer visitors what they want.. leads to satisfied customers...and so on.

Make it as simple as possible for a potential site seller to register their interest in your service and to actually sign up. The more complex the sale ( monthly charges, extras for more photos etc. the less take up you are likely to have).

When you establish a base of customers and sellers you've got a potentially profitable business model.

paulocon

Growler,

Many thanks for that.
As regards brochures, this would be aimed at estate agents..

Not a full time-job as yet, one of a number of projects I am involved in.
Good idea about targetting farmers, something like the farmers journal is a definite possibility...

growler

are you not competing with estate agents ?

paulocon

Hi Growler,

Don't see myself as competing with Estate Agents.
The idea is that anyone can list sites on there, either Estate Agents or individuals (in much the same way as daft.ie allows Agents or individuals sell/let property). It is of interest to Estate Agents as it is another avenue for them to sell property/advertise their services..