Hi
There is a German ad network that sells sponsored posts on forums so I thought that this might be a good idea to offer as another advertising option to my clients.
Today I integrated the new advertising offer into my mediakit as follows:
An advertiser can buy an advertising post that is posted in one or more forums and is made a sticky. It can include up to 4 images and max. 5 links.
Additional images and links can be bought for an additional charge.
The post is marked with a prefix [ADVERTISING] and the title can be chosen by the advertiser.
The sponsored post stays sticky for a selected number of months and after that falls in line with the user made posts. The post is closed for replies.
The thread will be created by me via a user called “Sponsored Post” and User Title “Advertising” to make a distinction between content and advertising.
The basic price is for one post in one forum that is sticky for 30 days.
Each additional forum and each additional month sticky costs extra.
Did anyone tried this before?
What are the responses to this kind of advertising by your users and your advertisers?
What do you think about this Idea?
I know a site called satelliteguys.us uses something similiar to that, not not as post, but sponsored links on top for each advertiser.
I don't think this option will work very well. (sticky closed thread) Most people don't read the stickies unless it looks to be something very interesting.
I guess you can force guests to read the sticky if you are using advanced forum rules (vbulletin.org plugin).
For something like this to really work well, you will need to have a big community, I doubt mid sized community will benefit from this and I don't think advertisers would be interested in your community if your community is only get couple hundred visits a day.
Also, wouldn't this conflict with AdSense?
The reason I am asking this is because I am running google ads already inside a thread that shows on the right of the first post and last post.
Forcing users to read an advertising is not an option (not for me at least).
The value of an advertising post is the offered benefits to the user like introducing new products, offering free samples etc and of course backlinks.
For the AdSense part, you need to implement conditions that prevent AdSense to show in your Advertising post.
(Thanks for that, did not thought about this when I came up with the idea :))