Advice needed please

[ragoflex]

Greetings,

I hope it's cool to post this here. I need some advice.

I run a website (Streetball.co.uk (http://www.streetball.co.uk) ) which currently racks up between 30,000 and 50,000 page impressions a day.

As well as attracting quite a lot of visitors, it's also very targetted traffic (the site is about street-style basketball and generally attracts boys / men between 12 and 25 years of age who are into sports).

It's now grown so big I'd like to approach advertisers / sponsors.

Does anyone have any idea what sort of money I could get? I think a CPM scheme would work best for me. What sort of rate do people think I could charge?

Any opinions or advice would be gratefully received.

Thanks

[Chris]

I'd start off by joining ad networks if you can. Such as TribalFusion.com or Google's Adsense (google.com/adsense).

[Stevens]

All 1's and 0's aside, if you want to jump to sponsorship, you need to leave your chair. It appears that you have already gathered the demographics of the site, so if you want to sell advertising you need to approach folks (like literally) that target your visitors. The easiest thing to do is create an "Advertise with us" section on your homepage. You've heard the saying "If you build it they will come." Explain there your demographics and provide an e-mail address or submition form for readers to fill out and you can possibly get some leads there. There are a lot of other things to consider before you approach people for targeted advertisements. If targeted advertisers are your goal, but you don't have a lot of time then join ad networks and stick up an "Advertise" page as well. You should be able to get the cash to flow as you wait to get lucky with advertisers.

The price to charge depends on who you are dealing with. You could consider yourself like a newspaper-type establishment and go on weekly fees...like the ones in newspapers. This can run somewhere around $150 US which is about how much an average-sized ad runs per week in an off-color newspaper. Do some research on this. Location on your site also makes a difference (homepage or buried). Having a newsletter that you can add advertisements to helps a bit also, but I'm sure establishing a good newsleter might take a bit of time. Also, networking is a good way to get your foot in the door. Knowing people who know people always helps. If you've got some jack contact an advertising agency to do your bidding for you. They are actually advertising people.

If you just want to get paid for having a lot of impressions then the ad networks would for sure be the way to go, but if you want to do something like target your advertisers you'll need to do a bit of homework. The latter is the way to make dough though, but don't expect to get paid to do nothing.

This is all just food for thought...I may be completely wrong...

ERIC