Some advice please?

Hi there

I come to you in need of advice, because I'm an idiot.

In short, we have a website, a news portal, that serves a niche vertical market, we get about 50,000 visits per month, and those visitors are engaging with our website (we serve 250,000 pages of info per month, so I'm assuming each user is reading on average 5 pages).

We also send out weekly email news headlines to a legitimate opted in list of 30,000. The email carries no advertising at all, which is intentional as we wanted to keep our email bulletins clean and free of junk. We do however rent out a separate slightly smaller list to others in our industry to issue their own HTML eCasts.

Back to the website, as that is what my question is about... We already have some advertisers that pay for prime banner positions on the website, but the nature of our market is such that there are only perhaps 5 business that would advertise (and 4 of them already do) - so we have a number of advertising slots to fill, and no-one to fill them.

So the question is, with the levels of traffic we have, is there even any point of looking at AdSense, Google Display Network, or DoubleClick to generate web revenue?

We've had some advice from an 'agency' but frankly I'd value the advice from people here far more.

Any and all input would be both appreciated and valued.

Thx

Well, if you were to go down the adsense or similar my guess is that as you're in such a niche then there would be noone bidding on the terms anyway (apart from those who already pay for the banners) so it wouldn't bear any $$.

Also if I was a banner advertiser and saw you started doing adsense, I'd cancel the banner payment and just bid on the terms that got shown on your site.

I'm also surprised that such a niche brings in so much traffic.

If you're a decent authority site with good PR then I can see people outside of the niche potentially paying $$ for text links etc but it isn't going to change your world.

Bytes, this is my expertise.The solution is very simple.

#1. I would reccoments installing and learning openx (openx.com). its used to manage your banner and adveritsing campaigns, as well as track.

#2. Screw google adsense. thats Pennies, you want dollars.. So I strongly reccoment that you install openx, (its free) then mix your advertising campaigns.

(a) Sell your Prime advertising positions. Make it know that people can purchase advertising direct from you. put up a page and your prices.

(b) Signup with a CPA Advertising company, search through their ads and include those in your banner and email campaigns.

using this method, on a single Email run to 10,000 members Each week, I include text message and then a (double refresh url to offer) Link to the cpa offer. This makes us anywhere from $5k to 12k per week. All depends on the offer, your group and your read rate.(email campaigns, I dont reccomend you using the CPA compaines offer text, I suggest you do your own write up, and your members will be more responsive. ) We get anywhere from $1.25 for a simple email optin from your memebrs to $35 commission for a member to try a weight-loss campaign ($2.99 s+h is all your member pays)

Stay far away from google adsense, its not worth the time and money. Yes they do all the work and align ads that meet the content of your site, but hey you can do that and reap a Extremely larger reward. We went from generating 20k per month with google adsense to almost 300k per month doing what i suggested...

Real traffic is worth Real money. Also Each one of your members on your email list (if they are real optins and read your email) is worth $500 to you.. From what I see your sitting on 15 Plus million a year. Get your ducks in a row and Cash out my friend..

Could you explain what "double refresh url to offer" means.

@op i'd do what sitehost said and would avoid the referrer blanking part because you do not want to face the inevitable...when your AM checks ur referrer they find it all blank...if you want you can go faking it

since it's a news site try creating opinion polls and link them to an email/zip/mobile offer

Sitepost, your advice is undoubtedly valuable, but our agenda is slightly different.

Allow me to explain, more.

Our website is undoubtedly an 'authority' site within our industry, we top Google for most keywords searches within our industry (based on SEO work done using information and advice from this very site, information for which we are eternally grateful), our advertisers are major corporates, one of which is a household name, they pay us $2000 dollars per month for an Ad.

Our agenda is not to exploit our list, or our website, rather it is to optimise the revenue either from advertisers within our industry, or for generic products that would also be of interest from outside of our industry - it is a B2B site, our opted in subscribers and site users are largely business owners and decision makers - the people that make buying decisions.

What we want to do is extend our advertising outside of our industry, and promote other commodity product that would be of interest to our readership - mobile phone deals, vehicle leasing, and other similar products that would be of relevance to our business owning users.

So I guess the question is, how do we get that type of 'outside' advertising without going through an agency (there is not enough margin to feed an agency and us).

Additionally, what other features can we add (opinion polls is a good one, we are also adding a 'suppliers directory' that we will charge for inclusion in), that we can get sponsorship and payment for.

Some of you guys will undoubtedly think we are dumb not to 'exploit' our list, but my hands are tied, the sites integrity and ongoing credibility is as important as any revenue potential -the long game is for our site to become the definitive news resource within our niche market, at which point more advertisers will come, it is additional revenue generation (which will be spent on site development) whilst we get to that point, that we are looking for.

Hope that all makes sense.

Further to above, I've had a look around at some CPA sites this morning - Commission Junction being one.

If we could find a CPA partner who will allow us to select Advertisers from a list: Adobe and Macwarehouse (our industry is closely related to print and design) were 2 potential advertisers on the CJ list that would appeal to our site users, that would be ideal.

By the way, we are UK based, if that makes a difference.