Selling Ad Space On a Website

Q:We are an online grocery retailer offering our in store product available through an interactive web site. Business is growing, but we want to increase the income through selling advertising and promotions on our site. What are companies looking for in terms of hard data to support paying for online advertising? Any idea of what to charge?

A:There is a good article detailing the pros and cons of Adsense at http://www.small-business-software.net/affiliate-alternatives-google-... Have you checked to see what your Alexa.com ranking is? Many companies will base there interest on how well your traffic score is. Go ahead and check it out. Simply plug your domain name into the search and it will bring back your score. If you are not in the top 600,000 you need to work a bit more on building that. Monetizing your site is relatively easy once you have a good flow of traffic. If it where me I would look into Adsense by Google. Incredible way to add that extra income stream to your site. http://adsense.rickwalls.com The "cons" they show as bad from a design point are the fault of the webmaster. Take a look at the format of the Google ads at http://www.sarasotawedding.com/ or http://www.sarasotacalendar.com/. I think that article was written before Google recently added more design and ad size choices. In addition, the article says, "Webmasters with multiple sites will have difficulty determining which websites are producing the money in the Adsense program", which is simply wrong. You can create as many channel names as you want, and you'll know precisely what site is earning what. The article says, "With affiliate programs many webmasters implement a new browser launch with each click off the site. Adsense removes the visitor from the website and there is not currently an option to launch the visitor into another browser," but, many people would consider that an improvement. They all know how to use a back button and a lot of surfers do not like new windows being opened. After all the criticisms in the article/editorial, I was surprised to see the conclusion. Overall, adwords are great supplements to websites where affiliate programs are either not performing or when affiliate programs don't exist that target the sites content." My only criticism of adwords is the 200 domain limit for the adwords filter. Depending on your site, you may need to filter more than that to avoid running ads for your direct competitor.