Can you all give me some direction on how to do advertising banners?

I signed up with reporting.net and got signed up with some companies. Can you tell my if that is a good place to use, or should I try another site?

What should I use to cycle the banners on my page? I'm working in a Win2k environment.

Thanks.

[edit: e-mail notification]

Give me a idea of how much traffic you get a month and I will try and steer you in the right direction.

Not much at all yet. I just created the domain and board two weeks ago.

Page views this month (07/2002): 5350

Junethesis,

Honestly your going to have a hard time making any money with that few of impressions.

Here the basic of banner advertising, there are 3 differnet ways advertising companies pay, and each company is different.

1. (CPM) Pay per impression, each IP is only count once in a 24 hour period, so if you visit your board 20 times a day, you will only get credit for 1 impression. You have to have alot of traffic for these banners to make anything, most of the going rates are around .20 per 1000 unique impressions.

2). (CPC) pay per click, they will send you a bunch of credit card banner and click here you might win a prize, most of the going rates are around .05 - .07 per click.

3). Affliate program, here you can choose the banners you want to display most of the time, but you only make money if someone click on the banner and buys something from the website within 30 days.

For CPC and CPM most of the advertiser don't like message board based websites, and will not look at your application unless you have over 25,000 -100,000 impressions per month. One of the better companies that have a low minimun of 3000 unique impression per month is www.fastclick.com they are also one of the better advertiser.

Your best bet might be number 3, for that I would goto www.cj.com they have thousands of programs and probally have several fishing supply companies.

Hope that helps

Thanks, that does help a lot. I know my impressions are not high right now. As I stated earlier, this is a brand new site, so I can't expect to have high counts yet.

My other question was what do you use to cycle the banners on your pages? Is there a special program for that, one that works well on Win2k?

I think Fastclick gives you a JavaScript that takes care of the rotation.

All the companies will give you a code to put on your board that will take care of the rotation.

if you tell me what way you are leaning (CPM, CPC or affilate), I will try and give you a bunch more of the better advertisers, because there are alot of crappy companies also ( and i have tried a bunch)

We use phpAdsNew to serve our banners. It's free, easy to configure and manage, and very flexible for us to serve unique ads to our different communities. The reporting backend is decent too.

We also had decent success with CJ. We were selective about which ads to place though, we tried to stick with companies, products, and services complementary to our site and mission.

Well, I'm leaning towards affiliate for now, and probably CPC also.

I was looking at phpAdsNew, but it involves installing a lot of software on the server: PHP, MySQL, etc. It sounds like the JavaScript way would be easier.

Here is a small list of some of the better web advertisers. Don't know if they will approve you site, but you might as well send in some applications.

www.advertising.com
www.burstmedia.com
www.fastclick.com
www.maxworldwide.com
www.adtegrity.com
www.247media.com
www.doubleclick.com

Let me know if you need more.

Just adding a couple more.
www.overture.com
www.valueclick.com
www.tribalfusion.com

doubleclick? fastclick?

Update: I'm up to 13,700 page views this month so far (in 8 days), so traffic has increased significantly.

I was thinking of using a flash banner to rotate my ads. Have any of you tried that before?

Sounds like things are really movin' on your site! That's great news.

I don't use ads so this is difficult to comment on but.. If you try something new... listen to your users via the forum or email to a degree. Watch your stats to see if it's affected. That's about all I can suggest.

Thanks Deb, for all your help.

I'd like to NOT use advertising, but that seems to be the only source of revenue besides selling merchandise. I've got to keep the bills paid somehow.

I guess I should go do a search on here about alternative means of revenue streams.

There is nothing wrong with advertising... please don't get me wrong. AND.. I take it back... I did allow one advertiser for about 6 months. LOL I set banner size, content and approved the small banners myself. I'm picky... and have turned down many 'offers' and try to please visitors.

You might be able to find webmasters that agree to sign up for ads within a newsletter email program. There are affliate merchandise programs. (like amazon or bn which don't usually bring in that much but it's something.)

50,000! That should get me some ad revenue, right?

Don't count on it Catcherman, I'm not trying to be negative but it is really tough to make income off of banner ads nowadays.

This month my site will get close to 500,000 hits, but even with that is will be next to nothing for income.

Glad to see your site growing, send in you ap to several of the ad companies in this thread, and try it for yourself.

Fastclick is paying the best right now.

Don't bother with Valueclick.

When I tried them with 30,000 hits a month, they told me they won't except sites with message boarsd.

103,000 now.