Design Challenges

Advertising your site to death.

Death, the end, or is it? Well, for your site, advertising can be a great thing or it can lead to its demise. Advertising forms the number one source of revenues for Web sites. Whether you have google ads, eBay ads, yahoo ads, or privately bought ads, you must be sure you have the traffic to support your ad pools.

So what does this all add up to? You must maintain a good balance between paid ads, revenue ads and house ads. In other words, you must be aware of your traffic count at all times or you can find your site oversold. Once your site becomes a Mecca for a great number of visitors you must hire an online traffic manager to keep their eyes on your inventory. However, you cannot just hire any youngster of the street, if you want to succeed you must hire someone with the drive to succeed, someone who can forecast as well as realize the traffic of each sector, homepage and ROS (run of site) traffic your Web site receives. This individual is key to serve as a liaison between your sales staff and the space available on your site.

The bottom line is that you must make sure your sale staff doesn't oversell your site. That is, they cannot go over the number of impressions your site receives over a finite period of time. If you promise more eyeballs than you truly have you will soon see advertisers dropping like flies during the winter time.