4 ms·

Go find companies that sell programming related products like IDEs and libraries, go to their corporate site, find the person most like a marketing representati

by mkr-hn 16y ago

Go find companies that sell programming related products like IDEs and libraries, go to their corporate site, find the person most like a marketing representative, and pitch your ad space to them.

davidw 16y ago
Hrm. Are there any steps in between that and AdSense? I'm not sure it's a terribly efficient solution: * I'm not a great sales guy, and the opportunity costs (consulting money) are not insignificant. * I don't have a good idea of how much to sell space for. * Other people have to have a better handle on this stuff than I do. If they can make me more money than I would alone, why not split it? Or at the very least, make me more money than AdSense and not make me waste my time trying to track down companies ("Hi, uh, IBM, want to buy some ads?")
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  The difference between selling your own ads and using a network is the middleman. Google takes a cut, so you potentially end up with less. If the paid time that would be lost while selling ad space outweighs the cut Google takes, it might not make sense. I suppose there's also the possibility of hiring a firm that deals with that kind of thing, but I don't know anything about that. It's probably not cost-efficient if your startup isn't big enough.
  - davidw 16y ago
    I was sort of curious about that middle ground. LangPop is not 'my startup', it's a side project type of thing that I'd like to make some extra cash from.
    - dillydally 16y ago
      The middle ground is something like iSocket or Federated Media.
- jdietrich 16y ago
  The first and last step is to start thinking about the 'true' purpose of your website - as a lead generation tool, a system that converts interest into sales prospects. You're the very top of the sales funnel. The essential purpose of langpop.com is to establish which languages are most popular. Implicitly, most people coming to your site are trying to work out which language is 'best'. The obvious strategy is to work your website towards answering that question and in the process gaining more information about your visitors and their purchasing intent. As it stands, the only thing we know about anyone on your site is that they have some vague interest in programming languages. The more concrete our picture of your visitors, the more precisely we can target advertising, the better it will convert and so the more you can charge for it. The Adsense algorithm tries to do this implicitly, but it does it relatively poorly. For example, the "about the languages" section could be expanded massively, with a (keyword-dense) review of each language and (affiliate) links to books, tutorial material, IDEs, code review tools and so on. Adsense links on these pages should see better bids and better clickthrough, but that's entirely secondary.
  - photon_off 16y ago
    Spot on. For an example of a site that takes broad interest in tech and tries its best to funnel it, look at http://builtwith.com http://builtwith.com , particularly the "build" tab. They provide a list of affilaite linkbait for each technology you might be interested in. It's not that bad.

by mkr-hn 16y ago

Go find companies that sell programming related products like IDEs and libraries, go to their corporate site, find the person most like a marketing representative, and pitch your ad space to them.

davidw 16y ago

Hrm. Are there any steps in between that and AdSense? I'm not sure it's a terribly efficient solution: * I'm not a great sales guy, and the opportunity costs (consulting money) are not insignificant. * I don't have a good idea of how much to sell space for. * Other people have to have a better handle on this stuff than I do. If they can make me more money than I would alone, why not split it? Or at the very least, make me more money than AdSense and not make me waste my time trying to track down companies ("Hi, uh, IBM, want to buy some ads?")

mkr-hn 16y ago
The difference between selling your own ads and using a network is the middleman. Google takes a cut, so you potentially end up with less. If the paid time that would be lost while selling ad space outweighs the cut Google takes, it might not make sense. I suppose there's also the possibility of hiring a firm that deals with that kind of thing, but I don't know anything about that. It's probably not cost-efficient if your startup isn't big enough.
- davidw 16y ago
  I was sort of curious about that middle ground. LangPop is not 'my startup', it's a side project type of thing that I'd like to make some extra cash from.
  - dillydally 16y ago
    The middle ground is something like iSocket or Federated Media.
jdietrich 16y ago
The first and last step is to start thinking about the 'true' purpose of your website - as a lead generation tool, a system that converts interest into sales prospects. You're the very top of the sales funnel. The essential purpose of langpop.com is to establish which languages are most popular. Implicitly, most people coming to your site are trying to work out which language is 'best'. The obvious strategy is to work your website towards answering that question and in the process gaining more information about your visitors and their purchasing intent. As it stands, the only thing we know about anyone on your site is that they have some vague interest in programming languages. The more concrete our picture of your visitors, the more precisely we can target advertising, the better it will convert and so the more you can charge for it. The Adsense algorithm tries to do this implicitly, but it does it relatively poorly. For example, the "about the languages" section could be expanded massively, with a (keyword-dense) review of each language and (affiliate) links to books, tutorial material, IDEs, code review tools and so on. Adsense links on these pages should see better bids and better clickthrough, but that's entirely secondary.
- photon_off 16y ago
  Spot on. For an example of a site that takes broad interest in tech and tries its best to funnel it, look at http://builtwith.com http://builtwith.com , particularly the "build" tab. They provide a list of affilaite linkbait for each technology you might be interested in. It's not that bad.