While starting a ad driven website, we relied on Google Adsense. We were trying to bootstrap the site on very little funds. It wasn't until we'd been running

While starting a ad driven website, we relied on Google Adsense. We were trying to bootstrap the site on very little funds. It wasn't until we'd been running for a couple of months that we dared to try and find local advertisers. In 1 month we were able to make more than double with local advertisements than what we had made the month before with Google Adsense. Our traffic didn't grow very much in that time, but local advertisers were much more willing to buy space on our site than we anticipated. If I could do it again, I would try to book specific advertisers from day one. Slap a guarantee on there if necessary, but only use Adsense to fill in the gaps.