Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Greetings all,

I am looking for some advice / best practices for generating revenue through advertisement on a sport-related website.

I`ve signed up for a Google Adsense account, but haven`t started serving ads yet.  A couple of questions I am hoping to get help with:

• Pros/cons of Adsense?  Are there other advertising services out there that may be better than Adsense?
  
• Should I concentrate on building a bigger user base and generating traffic before I begin serving ads?
  

Any other advice is greatly appreciated.



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FightMatrix.com - combat sports analytics

Hey-

I`ve done some Adsense advertising on sports-related sites with mixed results. The best response I`ve gotten has been from smaller, focused sites that are related to whatever it is that I am selling at the time. When I`m working with these sites I usually work it out directly with the site`s owner and do a banner or something.

I think I haven`t had a lot of luck with using Adsense not because of them but because I don`t think I`ve written the ads properly. I recently ran across th Google Analytics Conversion University--it`s a great resource (http://www.google.com/analytics/cu/cv_tips_for_writing.html). I will definitely follow their suggestions when I use Adsense (or anything similar) again.

I`ve also used Quigo.com and was pretty happy with the results. They offer Adsense like ads on ESPN.com and some others. I ran text ads on the Florida Gators Basketball pages of ESPN.com and got a good click-through. MSN has got something similar too but I haven`t used it yet and haven`t really heard much about it either.

Good luck,
RF