Making Money From A Content Site

Choose ad sizes that you'll be using around your site

Currently accepted standard ad sizes are:

• 468 X 60 Pixels (Full Banner)
• 120 x 90 Pixels (Button 1)
• 120 x 60 Pixels (Button 2)
• 125 x 125 Pixels(Square Button)
• 125 x 400 (Tower or Skyscraper)
• 88 x 31 Pixels (Micro Button)

You will often find variations of the tower ad. It's up to you to research what the large sites are using, and which one fits into the format of your site.

The list above is by no means conclusive. For example, CNET has also recently implemented a 360x300 square ad that sits right within the content of the page. You can often see this ad by browsing around News.com

Price your Inventory

So how much should you charge for advertising space on your site?
Here is a checklist to help you evaluate this.

Tip: You should price your inventory on a CPM basis and not on a CPC basis.

1.) How unique is your audience, how many other sites are there that advertisers can use to reach the same audience?

2.) Performance of advertising on your site in the past (exchanging banners with other sites, banner networks, and affiliate programs can be used to measure this).

3.) What banner rotation system do you use? Do you have a simple set of CGI Scripts, or a 10,000 dollar system that automatically profiles your visitors, allows targeting by domain, keyword searches, browsers, operating systems etc.

4.) How high profile is your site? Are you in the news a lot? This can help you increase your CPM rates as advertisers may want to be associated with a site that's frequently mentioned in the media.

5.) Lastly don't forget to take a look at the rate cards of your competitors if you can. It always helps to under-cut their price (to a reasonable extent).

6.) Do you have a domain name? If you don't you can automatically forgo even the thought of selling advertising alone. A banner network or affiliate program is the only way to go if your site is hosted on free webspace.

7.) Your audience. Is your site reaching CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, or 15 year old kids looking for video games? Is your site reaching computer professionals or newbies? Is your site getting visited by freebie seekers or people who regularly purchase over the internet? Conduct a survey to find out.

8.) Have a sliding scale of pricing according to the amount of ad space purchased. For example offer $30 CPM for advertisers buying less then 50,000 impressions, $25 CPM for advertisers buying 50,000 to 100,000 impressions, and $20 CPM to advertisers buying 100,000+ impressions.

9.) Banner sizes. Of course the bigger the banner the more it will cost. 468 x 60 Banner ad space will be several times more expensive then 88 x 31 micro-buttons.

10.) Number of ads per page. Do you have one 468 x 60 Banner per page on your site? Or do you have one 468 x 60, two 120 x 90 and four 88 x 31 buttons? The more ads a page has the lower the clickthrough rates for each individual advertiser will be.

11.) Has your site been audited (see below)?

Getting Audited

Some larger advertisers will demand that your site be audited by a company like I/Pro before they give you a single penny. This company provides auditing of newsletter subscription numbers as well as website traffic. Having your site audited is a great excuse for raising your ad rates and will definitely give you the edge over your competition.

Create a Media Kit

Make sure you put out an "advertising for sale" sign on your site, this means a media kit. A Media Kit includes information about your rates, your traffic, various forms of advertising and sponsorships available, banner specifications, and demographics.

Conducting a survey of your audience is very helpful as it tells a potential advertiser a little bit about the people who visit your site, and the people their advertising dollars are going to be reaching.

Take a look at the media kits of major sites to see how they've laid theirs out and what information they provide. Of course, you're always free to see how we've done ours here at SitePoint: www.sitepoint.com/mediakit/.