So, you have a great website, blog, or both. You get a fair amount of traffic, and the site has a lot of really good area and real estate information. It also has a lot of content promoting you as an expert real estate professional. Where in there does it say that you are a great "widget advertiser?" And, why would your real estate clients care?
Yet, every day I see questions in real estate agent forums about selling ads on their websites, either with Google Adsense, or just placing banner or sidebar ads for local businesses. Let's examine how that might look, in many ways.
1. You get local title companies, furniture stores, landscapers, cleaning services, and other home related businesses to pay you to advertise them on your site. What might you charge? If you can't show a HUGE amount of traffic, then you will likely only be able to regularly get a couple of hundred dollars a year from any one advertiser. If you use a lot of your time SELLING your site for ads, then you might get a thousand or so dollars a year in ad revenue.
2. You have your time in getting the ads designed and placed, selling your site to advertisers, and possibly paying someone to set them up on the site.
3. Some advertisers might not like you placing free links on your site if they are paying for space, so you could be limiting the services you can provide for your site visitors by not allowing them to locate products and services they need in relation to your real estate information.
4. You have to collect the money, dun them when they are late, and resell them every year.
Now, when visitors to your site see these paid ads for a few businesses, yet can't find other links to the same services who don't pay you to advertise, what might they think? At the very least, they will search for another site with all of the title company links for their quick reference.
But, all of that aside, there is another very strong reason not to charge for advertising on your site ... it's just not as smart as giving it away! After all, you spend a lot of time and effort trying to build goodwill with local businesses that could refer you a customer at some point. Why not just provide a profile of each title company, landscaper, etc. on your site, with a link to theirs and their contact information?
First, you serve your site visitor better. Second, you build goodwill with many more businesses than you could possibly get to advertise with you. So, instead of $1000 a year from a dozen advertisers, you get a couple of referrals worth $10,000 in commissions ... fancy that.
