Tag Archive for advertising

Ask a lawyer about your hyperlocal issue plus learning to sell

August 9, 2012 No comments

There’s a couple of events coming up offering help for the two of the big issues hyperlocal publishers are often concerned with – legals and revenues.

Legals
The Media Trust is offering an online question and answer session with Nick McAleenan, of JMW Solicitors. Anyone looking for advice can simply post a question on the website, the lawyer will take a look and put answers on the site in reply. If you’ve  comments that you’re not confident whether to publish, not sure how to handle your subscribers’ email data or want to know how to respond to a threatening legal letter……the floor is yours. Submit your questions to the site here by Friday 24 August.

Sales
If you like the idea of setting up advertising streams for your hyperlocal website or blog but feel nervous about selling the space, the Hyperlocal Alliance and Lichfield Community Media are running a free four hour workshop to teach the skills needed to go out into a community and comfortably sell ads. The session is open for up to 30 hyperlocal site owners. The workshop is being held in Birmingham on Saturday 8 September – joining details here.

 

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Advertising on your wordpress.com site

December 5, 2011 No comments

As we all know, we can’t advertise on our wordpress.com blogs, which is rather annoying as many of you have found out over time that adverts ‘do’ appear on your wordpress site. WordPress do place their own Google ads on your site, but the chances are you will never have seen them as they are only displayed to users who are not logged in to the service. This is all covered by their Terms of Service.

9: Advertisements. Automattic reserves the right to display advertisements on your blog unless you have purchased an Ad-free Upgrade or a VIP Services account.

Anyway that is changing, you can now display adverts on your wordpress site and urn revenue from them. Before you go dashing off to sign up Bill the butcher for a £5 a week ad on your site, I should make it a bit more clear..

WordPress have announced that they are launching WordAds, with their partners Federated Media. This deal will allow WordPress site owners to sign up to show brand ads from Federated Media on their own sites and earn revenue.

So you can’t go and get local ads which are relevant to your site but you at least will be able to earn a small return for the ads on your site.

You need to have a custom domain on your site and not the standard my site.wordpress.com URL. Buying a domain and having it mapped to your wordpress site currently costs £10 ($17) if you do it all within WordPress.

I can’t see what the rates are for site owners, so it isn’t possible to say if you would cover your £10 investment or make any income from the adverts but if you have a popular blog hosted on wordpress.com, already with a custom domain it might be worth a punt.

To sign up for WordAds you need to be signed in to WordPress and then go to http://en.wordpress.com/apply-for-wordads/

Signing up isn’t a guarantee that you will be accepted according to this statement on the sign up page.

Selection will be based on level of traffic and engagement, type of content, and language used on a blog. Some blogs may not be accepted. Entering the form below does not commit you to the advertising program. It just signals your interest in learning more.

It also doesn’t make it clear if when you sign up to WordAds if it replaces the Google Ads or is additional to them. If you do sign up, please let us know your experiences and what the revenue rates are.

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Want to sell advertising on your hyperlocal site?

July 13, 2011 4 comments

In general at Talk About Local we work with volunteer run sites.  We try not to get involved in the hyperlocal business model debate. Other than to observe that if you want to run a business online your revenues in general need to exceed your costs.  We also pass on different approaches we have seen. Some people do want to raise some revenue to cover cash costs.  This is a new game for many – neither local ad rates nor an ad delivery method have been established.  It’s great to see new models like Addiply specifically targeted at local sites who want more control (Addiply has recently raised significant investment).

Jason Mawer of Oxbury Media has got in touch.

‘Oxbury Media Services provides a link between national brands and the hyper local media. We broker advertising on behalf of our clients…’

Jason has been approached by Groupon seeking to buy space on local websites across the country.  Jason says they are prepared to be  flexible and innovative in both payment and delivery method to secure inventory.  This is the first time I have come across a systematic approach to hyperlocal web advertising in the UK, but then i haven’t done any commercial work.  If you have a local site and are interested in a Groupon ad contact Jason on jason@oxburymedia.co.uk

Let us know how you get on.

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