im really confused so as wat to charge for my growing forum dir
i started with 1 forum now there are more then 500 forums with 600 + uniques a day and growing ,
last month it hit high of 9000 uniques a month
this month expected to cross 15,000 uniques. (look at the screenshots below)
jus wanted to know wat kinda ad rates i shd charge so as a web owner would be comfortable and happy paying it.

1 i hav option of 5 banners on top

5 text links in home page

there will be some upgrade announcement with forumrating soon .

also i need recommendation on how many ads be kept in index page .

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Business Forum - A community for business & finance

Good stats and a good location for ads.

Your traffic is better than ours here at AF as far as raw unique visitors, but still quite similar, so our rates might be some good ones to make note of. You can find those here. Our header ad and featured sponsor text links are just like yours - header is sitewide, text link is just on the index.

Our rates at AF might be a little low, but that is just a personal style for me, if you will...I'm one who prefers to always have advertisers instead of having vacant spots. What I would suggest is to start with something on the low end and slowly increase the rates until you start to see that it's hard to sell the spots....Start with $7-$10 for a banner spot (with 5 in rotation)...if they sell very quickly, increase it next month...that's what we did here at AF.

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...some super-sweet signature

sure i agree with that, also how much i could for a link advertisment ?

hey well i checked the advertising page, ill make a similar one so its easy for advertisers to buy spots ty

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Business Forum - A community for business & finance

I'd suggest the same that I did for the banner ads...start low and work your way up...$4 - $7 per link and increase until they are hard to sell.

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...some super-sweet signature

ill keep it at low initially, as surely once satisfied ill have more of recurring customers

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Business Forum - A community for business & finance

There are two schools of thought. One is to set your rates low enough to have buyers for all the slots right off the bat then gradually raise your rates. This is what AF is doing and it is a successful methodology. The other school of thought is to set your rates at a level that equals what you think the spot will be worth in six months given your trends and allow the spot to bought for periods of greater than one month so advertisers can "set and forget". When renewal time comes they have a larger base of inbounds from which to make their decision about whether or not it was worth their 50 bucks in the first place.

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