slickhog.com

When one of my sites reached roughly 200,000 unique monthly visitors, I thought it may be a good time to start getting some private ads.  So, two weeks ago we introduced private ads.  I wasn’t expecting any quick sales immediately and I will be happy if we make a single sale in the first 30 days.  In other words, I have no idea how long it may take to generate some private ad sales.

The ads are priced well below the industry standard.  I charge under $1.00 CPM in an industry where CPM ranges between $5 and $20 ($20 CPM is a bit exaggerated - you should consider revising your ad campaign if you’re paying $20 CPM for your ads).

I also began promoting, what I thought were great ad prices, using keyword search advertising.   In the past two weeks, we received about 100 hits and no conversion yet.

There’s a couple of things that could be going wrong:

• Search keywords in my ad campaign may not be popular
• Actual text of my ads may not be appealing enough
• Target audience may not be specific enough
• My site’s focus may not be appealing to advertisers - it’s a news site focusing on one area of the news

If everything went better than the expectations, life would be boring!

In the coming weeks I will be updating you on the steps I took to generate some private ad sales.

I will definitely take a closer look at the weaknesses mentioned above, but I will also come up with a new promotional plan.  If that doesn’t work, I’ll try another, until it works.

I’m treating this as a research, learning most of the things on my own.  So come back soon for an update.