Harrisonburg Blogs

Advertising on hbblogs

You may have noticed that hbblogs is now serving up ads by Google. I don’t know whether these ads will actually bring in any money, but they’re a very easy way to start advertising on the site.

Personally, I’m not especially optimistic about making money through adsense. It might turn out to be a decent little revenue generator, but I’m not counting on it. For those who are wondering, while the site is fairly time-consuming, it isn’t actually expensive to run (for now - if we ever have enough users we’ll go ahead and move to a dedicated server). But it isn’t free either. So while I’m not looking to make a profit, I at least want the site to pay for itself. By the same token, I’m not going to be impoverished if it doesn’t.

But the thing with the adsense is that until hbblogs gets an actual sponsor, it’s nice to have something there occupying the space that future ads will use. They look clean, match the colors of the site, and they’re contextual. Basically, they do a good job of fitting in and looking fairly inconspicuous.

Now, if someone wants to actually use some of that website real estate for a sponsored ad, I’ve also installed some software that will make that possible. I can sell ads by a set price per month, number of impressions, or by cost per click (although I’m leaving off cpc ads until I’m sure the software won’t be counting robots). To get started with that, just click one of the “advertise” links that have recently appeared on the site.

At the moment, I’ve got traffic analyzer software that’s giving me a good idea of just how much traffic this site gets. Right now, it looks like 40 unique, non-robot, visitors per day is about average. That’s actually a pretty good start, but not something most advertisers would be interested in. So for now at least, we have adsense.