We get the question all the time: How do I sell advertising on my website?
First of all, get some traffic. You can’t simply make a website, put some ads on it and watch the checks roll in. It just doesn’t, and will never, work that way. You have to have some serious online presence to get serious advertisers paying you good money to put their content on your website. And we’re not talking about a few hundred hits a month. This is big-time territory where 20,000 new visitors per month is the norm and still kind of on the low side.
In our experience as Gainesville Web Designers, the rule seems to be that you really need a certain “type” of website to sell web advertising. A site for a local attorney or retail shop is probably not going to get the amount of traffic needed to make money from ads.
No matter what the subject of your website though, the more you market it ITSELF, the more popular it will become. The more traffic you get, the better of you’ll be anyway. Think about it though. Is the goal of your website to make money off of advertising? or is it to sell a product or service? It just might be that your efforts are better spent marketing your specialty rather than cluttering your site with advertising.