This is an answer to common question we have from clients. Here is a little of what we know about online advertising and how it can work for your parish.

There are two options that you can think about if this is a route that you want to go. You can set up affiliate/referral links on your site OR you can have local businesses or people in your parish pay a monthly or annual fee to have an advertisement on your site. This ad can be linked to their business web site as well. You can also do a combination of both.

We would set up as many ad spots as you would like and would work with the sponsors to get a great looking ad. You can set these ads to rotate each time a page is refreshed so you could have several sponsors in one ad spot. The number of different ads would probably depend on how you wanted to gain the sponsors.

Local Sponsors

There are many benefits to this, including supporting your local community and drawing more traffic to your site. How it works is you call businesses or send out a mailing requesting the sponsorships. Let them know they would be helping to pay for the parish web site. We recommend that you come up with a standard price (example: $10/month/ad) but if you have a bigger organization you could have sponsors bid on the spots.

Affiliate/Referral Links

This takes a bit more time, but if used wisely and timely, could bring greater profits. In most cases the organization is too small to really gain any money off it. How it works is you can set up ads for large businesses and you can gain a commission off of it. The large businesses have a way of tracking that people found their site through yours. I will not go in to details with this, but just wanted you to know it is an option.

How Much To Charge

This obviously depends on how much you want/need to make. If you are looking to use your web site to make money for your parish then we should discuss that when setting up your site. If you would like your web site to pay for itself then we would recommend setting up one 468px by 60px banner or some people put up 2-4 125px by125px banners. You could allow for people to buy ads for six months or a year. In most cases it should be easy to find 6-10 sponsors who write a check for $100 for advertising on your site for the whole year.

How It Works

The sponsors can send us images or text and we can create and ad for them or if they are able to create their own images, we can accomodate that as well. Any work that is done would be added to your time sheet so consider that when deciding how much to charge. In most cases it would not take more than a 1/2 hour to create a great ad. We will set up the rotation of ads and can set the ad spot anywhere you would like.

Who Pays Who?

You can handle the money yourself and just work it that way, or if you want Parish Web Assistant to work on getting the sponsors we have someone is willing to do that as well. We can actually set this up for you where you never receive a bill from us again!  Parish Web Assistant is capable of finding the sponsors for you and creating a situation where the site is up, you can email us updates, and you never see a bill! Ask us about it. In a nutshell it requires you to give us a list of several possible sponsors, we call them, you get your site paid for! There is an additional fee for this service, but it is paid for by the sponsors. Try it out!

You could just set up a couple of blank ad spots on the page that say “sponsor this page” and wait for sponsors to call you!  When their time runs out, the ad automatically reverts back to the blank ad.