Individual Ads

I manage a site that is for moms in the Dallas Texas Area.

Several years ago I started selling banner ads to local companies (mostly work at home business) and managed them my self using OpenAds.

I'm wondering if anyone else has had success with this approach?

I have two types of ads:
Standard - The ad shows up in one of three random slots on about every 4th page on the left hand side.
Premier - Show up at the top of every page and also gets a standard ad.

I also do Google, but they only show up on public forums which is about 2/3 of the site.

It's a bit time consuming as I have to keep in contact them each advertiser, but it does give us the option to barter goods as well.

Thanks
Todd

www.dallasareamoms.com

hi todd,

i really like what you are doing with your ads. i want ads on the left side as well.

what hack did you use for the ads?

how much do you charge?

I use this hack to put the left column on the site:

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=91888&highlight=left+column

And I use an ad server package named OpenX (http://www.openx.org/). It used to be called OpenAds and before that it was called phpnewads.

It's a free ad server that you run on your own server. It has lots of features and you can allow your advertisers to manage their own banners (I don't do this, I just do it for them). You can set it up to display only x number of impressions or clicks or just unlimited.

It was kind of straight forward to install and run.

What we charged has changed many times...in fact it's always changing. We charge different amounts based on who it is. If the person is an active member we give them a break and we are always quoting different amounts to find the sweat spot.

I wish it was integrated to paypal or something...whereas if the person didn't pay their next bill it would just stop displaying the ads. As it is now you can enter an end date, but it needs to be updated when they pay. All manual work, which sucks.

The left column is also a good place for out of the way google adsense ads.

Hope that heps. Left me know if you have any further questions.