Hi all, I just ran across this site today and have been getting some great info and advice from your posts....

I have been designing web sites for a couple years now. A friend and I are kicking around the idea of starting up a web woodworking site. He's a woodworking guru and I will do the web design. I am wondering how much traffic one needs to generate in order to sell advertising?

Is there a rule of thumb as to what you can charge for banner ads based upon the traffic?

I noticed this board used vBulliten software, does any bbs work better with say phpadsnew, I was also looking at phpbb, or invision board?

any suggestions as to finding out more about how to build a site geared toward ads and what types of ads or revenue methods there are other than just banner ads?

Can you make a living off of ad revenue from a single web site?

Thanks much in advance for any advise.....Lynn

Lots of questions, so lots of answers...

Ask your friend how much he charges for woodworking and you will get the same sort of response this question brings here. Every site is different, every niche is different and all these differences equate to a whole lot of rate diversity. A site could make $0.20 CPM (per thousand banners) or it could make $20 CPM just because of who visits the site, how many people visit it and perhaps most importantly, who sells the advertising.

To sell advertising at all you need very little traffic; to justify and get good rates and make any money you need a decent amount of traffic. Specific niches like woodworking are much smaller than say computer games or cars so you may find that a "large" site in your niche gets only 50,000 page views a day. In general terms once you are getting over 1,000 unique visitors a day you can really sell your site, below that it is going to depend on how valuable the niche is to advertisers and how hard you work at it. Many sites do just fine selling 500 unique a day but there isn't a whole lot of money to be made with that and you generally just end up using network ads for quick cash.

phpadsnew is independent of forums and thus it really doesn't matter. I tend to like vbulletin (hence why I own 5 licenses) but phpbb and ib will both get the job done. It all comes down to the features you want and the price you are willing to pay. IMO vbulletin's flexibility (template conditions and addons) and support make it the winner hands down, but others will disagree.

Asking questions and reading is the first step. These forums, sitepoint.com (forums and articles) and many others provide some great insight into all sorts of ecommerce and ad issues from how to charge for ads to what legal implications to expect form your website. The more you educate yourself the better you can do.

With advertisng ... Can you? Sure. Is it common? Nope. Will it happen overnight or even over 6 months? Not likely. If you are selling something ind emand (i.e. wood products) you will probably have a much better shot at making a profit quickly (or at least bringing in gross revenue) because you would be running a site based on sales and leads, not eyeballs. Ad driven sites can do well but it's not a great model for the most part and it takes a lot of time to milk just to see a dime.

Kudos for the post Ted. But I agree - prices are completely entirely different in every industry. They differ based on where the ad is placed on the site, and what the clickthru rate is like. There are just so many factors ...