Last month my website passed 200,000 monthly visitors and, as a result, we have started receiving an increasing amount of interest from advertisers wanting to reach the target audience on my site.
We’ve landed a deal with Bell Canada, one of Canada’s largest companies, and are in discussions with two major online companies. Bell Canada came to us as a referral and the other two companies both came to us, presumably after doing a search and finding my site.
To date a lot of the revenue from our site has been from programs such as Google AdSense but we’ve increasingly looked at private sponsorship. Bell Canada was our first corporate sale and we’ve also sold smaller ad spots to some of the experts we profile on our website.
We have also recently been approached by a website representation company. They basically do the work of finding advertisers for you and are your outsourced sales team. The company I’m in touch with is a reputable firm as a few of the other websites in my industry are also using them.
Should I work with them? The upside is I could attract more brand name advertisers to my site and it could free up my time to be able to focus on building even more website traffic which, in turn, would drive more revenue. There is also no up front cost to working with this company.
The downside is they take 40% of everything they bring in and want to work towards an exclusive relationship. They are also charging the same rates that I am already charging and quoting for the different sections of my site. As my site continues to grow I’m sure we’ll get even more attention from advertisers as well.
My current problem is should I:
- Continue as is and wait for more advertisers to come to me as I grow.
- Bring someone on to be responsible for selling my ad spots.
- Go with the website representation company and let them sell my site.
What would you do in my situation?
Evan Carmichael
