New Site and Advertising

I am finalizing the the new site design for Community Color. I have only two sites pointed at the new server.

The new site is much faster than the old site, and I hope it will be able to handle a hundred times the traffic of the old server.

The Community Color project had over 10,000,000 page views last year. The old server would freeze up whenever I exceeded that amount.

Sadly, I made less that $3,000 revenue from the site. Last year I performed three test purchases on the site. I received credit for only one of the three purchases. It makes me livid. I am sending hits to advertisers by the thousands who are not crediting me with the traffic.

I figured my best bet for salvaging the project is to replace the affiliate ads with direct advertising. The problem with direct sells is the collection cost. Spending two hours to collect $10 from an advertiser is a path to insolvency.

So, what I decided to do is to sell the ads in units of 100,000. The price for the unit will be $25.00.

As mentioned, I had 10,000,000 page views last year. I should be able to consume 100 lots of 100,000 ads.

Advertisers can order an ad (I need advertisers in Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Southern Wyoming.).

If I approve the ad; I will place the ad on the site and send a Paypal invoice show the ad placement. If the advertiser is happy; the advertiser can pay the bill. If not; I will delete the ad after a week or so.

Now for the scary part. I am betting the boat on my ability to sell 100 ads for $25 a pop to make $2,500.

The market for local advertising has been so weak for the last few years that I am not sure there's a hundred businesses in the Mountain West that would buy the ads.

Anyway, I have the ad ordering program online. The ad is 738x90 banner that goes above the fold on the page. I have at most one such ad per page. The ad can be text or an image.

I am looking for ads in Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Southern Wyoming. Here is the ad ordering page.  You can order an ad. I will put it online and send a Paypal Invoice. If you like the ad, you can pay the invoice; Otherwise I will remove the ad.