New Website - Advertising Question

[poker69]

Hey, so I've launched a website for Poker players in my area London Ontario - population is about 350,000.

• In my first month of my site I have had 325 unique visitors.
• I rank 5th on google for London Ontario Poker
• I rank 7th for Ontario Poker
• I also get hits from variations including London Ontario Poker Tournaments, etc.
• I am looking to improve to top 3 in both searches for google soon

I am of need of some money to get going in the business and my question is how abouts should I get London companies to advertise on my site? Should I find websites in my area that I think would like to advertise on my website and send them an e-mail? How would I go abouts with the email? And how much is a reasonable price to let them advertise with a banner on each of my pages? How about a link at the bottom?

[haynesey]

I would wait until you establish a little more before you start selling advertising space.

Also personally i wouldn't sell space, keep adding more content about your chosen niche then add some banners for a couple of poker sites, don't over do it. Or even host a few small $100 freerolls for all players from the London area, I'm sure you will do well if you concentrate on content and becoming an authority site for your city.

[dimanise]

i agree with haynesey that it may be too early to get advertising. 325 visitors a month is too small. percentage of people that might click on the ad is less than 10% (depending on type of visitors and what they look for, need to research this), so for 325 a month you may only send 30 visitors, 1 visitor per day.

you could add google adsense to your site in the meanwhile but make sure not to overdo it. and for the pricing of advertising that you may get is exactly what i said above, approx 1 visitor per day, even if each click is worth the company 50c, you will only be getting 15 per month, and that's being positive.

have you gotten stats about ur visitors, are they actually from london ontario rather than london UK? how long do they spend on the site, which pages they go to?

[SunPoker.com]

You may also want to see if any affiliates would like to buy links on your site. That could help establish some income if the site has some nice content on it.

Mark

[Graham]

You are better off selling advertisements to poker affiliates. But like mentioned in the other post, I'd fix the current design first, and add some more conet. You will probably have to sell really longterm ads for peanuts, but if you need the money that may just be what you have to do. When I first started my site I sold some 125x125s for a year at only $50. But one thing you should always remember is to keep your advertisement/links (esp on the homepage to a minimum). If you just sell links like mad, it will probably be more negative than positive.

[kaus]

Also before you go ahead and sell ads make sure you are positive that it will be what you want in 6 mths or more. I sold a huge banner space on my last site that once I did get the traffic was really kicking myself for it and wondered how much of that traffic was being lost because of teh banners position.

take grahams suggestions in the previous post - use wordpress (free) and really push the local area games. Keep up to date on games...attend soem if you can but stay current and people will find you.