When to start advertising? How many impressions and subscribers?

[Philip Toews]

I've just launched my site. Initial reception has been good. I hope to get my SE ranking up there within 6 months of efforts (eg. link requests to other sites).

I have a highly targetted audience (people teaching English abroad). I have about 5 ad slots available per page:

- top and bottom banners
- 2 medium size verticals on the left of the interface
- one tower in the main part of the page.

I am currently using all the space for internal promotion and self promotion.

I launched 3 weeks ago and am now getting 300 page views a day (as opposed to zero 21 days ago). 15 people a day are signing up for my newsletter. The newsletter has space for three ads (more like the infomercials that sitepoint's newsletters have) and 6 sponsored links.


I'm confident that I can get a decent amount of traffic within 4-6 months. By decent I mean 100,000 page views a month.

Here are my questions:

1. When should I start advertising? Should I convert over to some affiliate revenue first and then over to ads later?

2. Based on the volume I want to get (100,000/month) can I get ad networks to pay me for multiple ad spots on the pages (eg. if current cpm for a top banner is $1.25 then can I get a total of say $4.00 cpm if I fill up all the 5 ad slots).

3. How do ad slots in newsletters get priced? I have a highly targetted audience...should I seek out advertisers myself and design campaigns for them based on "infomercials" rather than simple graphics?

4. I can base my business in Canada, but much of my audience works abroad...will this affect my acceptance by ad networks?

5. The newsletter is pretty content rich (as much as sitepoint's are)... how many subscribers should I wait for before looking for affiliate or ad revenue?


Thanks in advance for your help!

p

[aspen]

30,000 a month is a nice number. You won't earn much at that level though, and definitely not before it. A steady check and recovering your costs usually doesn't happen until around 100,000 a month.

[Philip Toews]

If I start to hit 100,000 what kind of income should I expect versus costs. It currently costs me $35/month for 18 gigabytes of bandwidth.

Ballpark...?

Also...what about the CPM from multiple ad slots on a given page...(see above)



p

[Stephan Whelan]

Philip,

You've got a highly targeting niche there which works both for and against you. Advertisers will be much more interested in you because you are niche, however the disadvantage is trying to actually find advertisers in the first place.

The other thing i'll say is if your talking about www.teachingfish.com then I'd suggest getting more bandwidth allowance as I can't get onto your site due to a "bandwidth limit exceeded" error message

[Philip Toews]

Thanks for the heads up...that just happened in the last couple of hours. I'm on it. That leads to some questions:

I checked cpanel and it said I've had 1112 megs go through so far. I have only had around 6300 page views. Why is the bandwidth so high? Here are some possible culprits...can you help me out to understand:

1. I have three php scripts that create pdf files fromt the mysql db every hour every day. Is that eating bandwidth if people are not downloading the files?

2. I have a php script that does a MySQL dump, compresses the resulting file and then mails it to me AND writes it to the ftp servr for one of the sub sites hosted under my account. Could that be the bandwidth culprit?

3. According to webalyzer I've had 1027677 kilobytes go through the site...that's just over one gig...for just over 6267 pages. My average page size is 50k...so where is all my bandwidth going?

[Stephan Whelan]

How big is your MySQL dump compressed? That would be my gut feeling for where you bandwidth is going.

[Philip Toews]

the 2 dumps are 170k a day (that's the compressed file) that get both mailed to me and ftp'd. Are you suggesting that the mail or the ftp or both are affecting bandwidth?

p

[Stephan Whelan]

Bear in mind that everything that goes through your server will count as badnwidth from your hosting company. Doesn't matter if it is email, ftp, http, etc...

170k per day doesn't sound too excessive but have a look at what else is going through your server during that period of time.

[Philip Toews]

How do I check all of that? I have a newsletter that goes out each week ....how do I get bandwidth numbers for everything?

p