How do i know when its fair for people to advertise with me

[Orange]

Im building a site for my local area and im starting up a diretory section where i want to offer local businesses so advertise there services with me for £5- £10 a month. Im ust starting out so im only getting about 400 visitors a week, but i havnt even made 30% of the pages I want to. Im expecting i could easily get this up to 4000 views a week. But yeah.. I want to know when i should try to get advertisers when It would be creating enough value for them for it to be fair. Im not asking much so it will be worth it for them even if they get like 1 referal from my site every 3 months if its a services that costs alot. But yeah.. what do you think? has anyone got a site that does this?

[PhilK]

I check out your site a couple of times now. Personally, I would still work on the design a bit. Make it easy to navigat, read and consume the presenter info. To attract advertisers you need to make sure you reserve spot for the ads that are of interest to your future customer.

Apart from that you could start right away. Why not? You alredy have more visitors per week than an awful lot of other blogs and website. You are not forcing your customers into a deal. All you need to do is find someone how believes in your project and finds it is worth the investment. As you said yourself, it is not a huge inversment we are talking about.

Think about starting off with a fire sale of ad spot. Inspired Money Maker started a firesale last week. I never thought about placing an ad at his site. Still reading his post about the sale I thought: Well, why not? I would have spent that $5 anyway.
That is how he got me to advertise.

Also think about using such an automated ad tool for your site at the beginning. Let me know what you do - I might be your first customer!

Hope this helps,
PhilK

[darkun]

Hey Orange,

Please take the following as constructive criticism

There are plenty of income streams you can set up for your site to earn you some income...however on looking at your site I have doubt about your traffic numbers. I'm afraid to say that I couldn't wait to leave your site, in fact my first words when viewing your site were 'oh my god what is that'

Your site looks amateurish and even juvenile with the massive banner and those incredibly huge buttons in nasty colours. Your design needs a major overhaul before I would suggest contacting anyone for advertising.

I think you have some great content but I can't believe many visitors would hang around long enough to read it.

An admirable idea to note every town in Cornwall, however seeing as they aren't links to specific areas I can't understand why they are there.

Finally the google search box is partly swallowed by those town names.

Those are my thoughts on the home page alone, I wasn't inclined to progress further.

All the best with your site mate