Hi All,

 

Ive started a new project and Im hoping it will become a life-style business.

 

Im hoping to make a revenue from advertising. I plan to have AdSense ads in most of my pages but would be open to letting companies buy the advertising space I have on the site for a fixed price for a period of time.

 

I was wondering if this is something that actually happens anymore?

I was thinking of either doing this across the entire site or offering it on a page by page basis, i.e. you could sponsor the forum but not the main site. If I did do this I was thinking of controlling it by the database, but I dont want to spend the time developing part of the site that wont be used.

 

Whats the best practice these days and what have others done to try and incorporate corporate sponsorship/adverting and AdSense together.

Edited February 22, 201610 yr by Kieranw7261

It depends what you project is. Big affiliate programs like adsense are usually most efficient when it comes to the amount of clicks because they can generate all sorts of ads not only based on your sites subject but also on each users personal preferences. The downside is that your payment per click is relatively low. Sponsors pay popular bloggers a lot of money to gain access to the bloggers' network, but that usually means featured blogposts about the sponsors products, campaigns, events etc. which in the long run can damage the credibility/integrity of the blog.

It's certainly possible, just don't underestimate the amount of traffic you need to make decent money from ads alone. Also take into account there's an increasing amount of people blocking ads plus there are even efforts from ISPs (which I completely disagree with but that's another topic).

 

I would begin by concentrating on building your traffic, you can slap AdSense on there to get a feel for the value of your traffic and experiment with spaces, sizes, etc. There's no point building your own system out until you have something to sell (no traffic = no ads to sell).

 

As for how to incorporate a hybrid system, it's pretty simple. Sell your ad spots at a fixed price per period, or on a CPC/CPM basis (potentially with a bidding system in place). Then continue to use AdSense (or another network) to fill in for any unsold inventory. You can use your AdSense earnings as a base point or minimum cost when selling directly.

 

Additionally I would consider other ways to make sales apart from banner/text advertisements.

Yes that still happens, I'm actually just finishing a site that does just that.

 

The site has various ad spots which the client can assign ads to manually so their advertiser can choose where they want their ads displayed, if no ads are available for a particular spot then it falls back to Adsense.