How do I pick banner advertising rates for a high-traffic blog?

I have a high-traffic adult blog that gets around 40,000 visits by around 20,000 unique visitors each month. Hundreds of people stay on the site longer than an hour. The total number of monthly hits is around 2 million.

Social networking tsunami – sink or swim?
Sara Yirrell, CRN , Monday 9 August 2010 at 12:28:00 Since social networking burst on the scene it has primarily been associated with teenagers and bored workers discussing their social lives. But it can be harnessed to actually benefit your business, finds Sara Yirrell. Social networking is a little like the Marmite of the business world – companies either love it or hate it. But with …
**DOMINATE** Your Niche Market (keyword research tracking) (keyword profesional research)

Niche Marketing: The Unmasking

Many people out there are taking unfair advantage of the Internet and the opportunities to conduct niche marketing on the Internet. More often than not, unfortunately, many of these brave soldiers fail in the endeavor of setting up a niche market.

Read the rest of this entry

Some people are “dog people,” others are “cat people.” I’m a cat person. Regardless of which pet you prefer, we can all agree that pets enrich our lives in many ways. They provide unconditional affection, they don’t care what we look like, and sometimes even they teach us a life lesson.
But I never expected my cat to teach me a marketing lesson! A niche marketing lesson, to be more precise.
At this point, the dog lovers reading this are saying that this cat person is crazy. But I’m not. Here’s how it happened.
Like millions of other pet lovers, I bought plenty of pet toys. We all want to be able to interact with our pets, yet still have them not be bored when we’re away.
My cat went through the usual toy assortment: feathers, balls with bells in them, foam balls, catnip, string, and an assortment of stuffed rodents. Because we all want the best for our furry friends, I bought the biggest stuffed rat I could find. It received an occasional sniff but was mostly ignored.
The medium-sized stuffed mice received more attention, but only if I moved the mouse or threw it for the cat. He wouldn’t play with it on his own.
Then my cat was given a pair of tiny stuffed mice. I thought they were too small and would be ignored just as the giant rat was.
Boy was I wrong!
Like a lion on a gazelle, my cat pounced on the tiny mouse and gave it a beating it would never forget. He played mouse hockey through the house, scoring goals under the refrigerator and under the stove. He played baseball, tossing the mouse high into the air and catching it again, or hitting a home run on the way down. He played jungle lion, proudly carrying his prey back to his waiting pride (me!).
So what does all this warm fuzzy cat stuff have to do with online sales?
It’s a metaphor for niche marketing. The cat is the consumer. The cat toys are your products. The ultimate goal is to match the former with the latter.
Your first product, the giant rat, was of vague interest to the consumer (the cat). The consumer sniffed at your ad or sales page, but did not like what he smelled, and moved on. No sales.
Your second product, the medium-sized mice, were more interesting to the potential buyer. He would take action, but only after intensive prompting on your part. You would probably have to spend a lot on pay per click ads or gave away lots of bonuses to get his business. A few sales might be made, but it would be expensive to get those sales.
But your third product, the mini-mouse, was pure magic! Your cat consumer took one look, something in his brain clicked, and a sale was made. It was as if your product was a key that unlocked the part of the customer’s brain that triggered the buying impulse. Jackpot!
That’s what my cat taught me about niche marketing. You must find a product that somebody desperately wants (preferably a large group of somebodies). That product must be exactly what they were looking for, even if they didn’t know they wanted it! It must be so tantalizing that your customer is more concerned about playing with his new toy than he or she is about paying for it.
You see, I made a classic info-product mistake with my cat. I gave him what I thought he would like. I wasted money promoting large stuffed rodents and heaps of other toys to him. What I didn’t do is ask him what he needed and give him that!
Don’t make the same mistake! Figure out what your customers want FIRST, and give them that. Then watch them pounce on it so fast that the payment process is almost an afterthought for them.
I have since learned that the mini-mice are about the same size as real mice. No wonder the cat was sold on them immediately! He had never seen a real mouse, but there was a mini-mouse sized niche in his brain that was instantly gratified by the smallest mouse toy.
Don’t give your customers what you think they need. Ask them what they want, and give them that. Then you will have truly created a better mousetrap, and they will beat a path to your door (and your bank account)!
Learn more about making more money from niche marketing with the resources below.

The first rule of being a successful affiliate marketer is to pick a profitable niche market to spend time and effort in promoting. If you neglect this important step, you will not make any money using article marketing. From this base you will start to build a large selection of articles, all from a giant list of low competition keywords, to reach a more general audience within your chosen niche. Each keyword will represent one article. Writing your articles this way, you will be targeting a specific audience, but you will find a carry over within the niche to other people using other keywords. In addition, on your site, you will have multiple webpages, each targeting specific angles on your niche, to attract the attention of those looking into your niche subject for their answers. They will be interested in many of your pages, and be satisfied with what they find. This will translate into repeat visits, which will turn into higher chances of converting visitors into buying customers. You can find keywords for your niche market the hard way, or you can do it the easy way. The easy way being by using a keyword software program, where you type in a broad keyword term, usually a single word like “dieting”, and the software will dig in and locate many keyword variations on that single word that people are using to find your niche market. Along with the words in the list, the software will show you how many searches are being made for each word or phrase, and the better keyword software terms will even go so far as to tell you how much competition is already playing the game you want to get into. This data — keywords, number of searches, and number of competing sites — will give you enough information to decide where your time and effort will be best spent. You want keywords and niche markets where there are numerous searches but not enough sites competing for those terms. This is what is meant as low competition keyword terms. Sure, individually you will not get much traffic, but the traffic you do get will be highly targeted, which is the best kind of traffic. The more words you find that are low competition keywords, the more highly targeted traffic you will have. That increases your chances of getting sales, and that is the real name of the game. A big benefit of using low-competition keyword phrases is that you can easily find yourself in the top ranks of the searches for that keyword phrase very quickly, by writing articles optimized with your newly found low competition keyword phrases. If you find several niche topics that meet your interest, then you should focus on no more than three to begin with, and go with the easiest ones first. Build your site or blog around those three sets, write your articles around them, then after you build up your income from these sets, you can start on the next set, with another site or blog, and repeat this process. By developing the skill of identifying profitable keyword phrases with optimized article writing, you will find it getting easier and easier to profit from low competition keywords and niche marketing. To learn more about how you can find success in internet marketing please visit http://www.squidoo.com/articles-by-dennis