Personalized banner ads and content based on interest profiling make targeted marketing on the Web the next 'killer ap'. How do I get some of this for my site?
How do I get noticed and start selling ads? To be taken seriously you not only need a good-quality site, good traffic, and content advertisers are interested in, you need to be able to show some stats about your visitors. Surveys and registration information can be persuasive – even more so if it is professionally done and the results audited. You need to be able to accurately report campaign activity. You need to have proper ad management software. You have to be able to generate traffic reports in the format ad buyers want.
How much traffic is enough to get started? Face it, it is easier to manage an ad campaign working with two or three big sites with a variety of content and millions of visitors than it is working with 10 or 20 small sites. If you’re a small niche site you might get away with less traffic but your visitors need to be very interested in something particular advertisers want to spend money on selling them. Ad buyers like to buy big blocks. Suppose your site has 250,000 total page views per month and you sell 200,000 ads in a month to one advertiser. You're going to have to out the ads on 'run of the site', meaning the same ad on every page for the whole damn month. Your visitors are going to get quite tired of seeing the same old ads on every page. Even if you are supplied with several banners to rotate the clickthrough is going to be abysmal after the first week or so. Ad buyers know this so they like to buy on big sites where there ads are spread out more and can be targeted more by section of the site. Unless you have a very special site or a very special, targeted campaign, it's usually not be wise to buy more than 10 to 15 percent of any site's inventory. So you can't be too thin, too rich, have too much RAM or have too much ad inventory.
Are all widgets created equal or are some widgets more equal than others? If you really want to make money selling content on the Internet you might think about building custom content – infomercials. Think of a magazine like Computer Shopper. It’s almost all ads. I, like most other geeks, only buy it when I need to look at the ads. The more ads the better. The ads become the content. If you create the right kind of Internet content promoting or discussing a commercial product, you can almost certainly find people anxious to read about it. The trick is to find advertisers who want to reach that particular type of train-spotter. Be careful about which widgets you choose to throw your life away on.
