Check out this video by Gary Vaynerchuck, covered on HN here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1467017
It's... impressive.
* I'm not a great sales guy, and the opportunity costs (consulting money) are not insignificant.
* I don't have a good idea of how much to sell space for.
* Other people have to have a better handle on this stuff than I do. If they can make me more money than I would alone, why not split it? Or at the very least, make me more money than AdSense and not make me waste my time trying to track down companies ("Hi, uh, IBM, want to buy some ads?")
The essential purpose of langpop.com is to establish which languages are most popular. Implicitly, most people coming to your site are trying to work out which language is 'best'. The obvious strategy is to work your website towards answering that question and in the process gaining more information about your visitors and their purchasing intent.
As it stands, the only thing we know about anyone on your site is that they have some vague interest in programming languages. The more concrete our picture of your visitors, the more precisely we can target advertising, the better it will convert and so the more you can charge for it. The Adsense algorithm tries to do this implicitly, but it does it relatively poorly.
For example, the "about the languages" section could be expanded massively, with a (keyword-dense) review of each language and (affiliate) links to books, tutorial material, IDEs, code review tools and so on. Adsense links on these pages should see better bids and better clickthrough, but that's entirely secondary.
They provide a list of affilaite linkbait for each technology you might be interested in. It's not that bad.
If the paid time that would be lost while selling ad space outweighs the cut Google takes, it might not make sense.
I suppose there's also the possibility of hiring a firm that deals with that kind of thing, but I don't know anything about that. It's probably not cost-efficient if your startup isn't big enough.
1. Have an outstanding product (i.e. audience) to sell.
2. Hire a dedicated sales person.
3. Provide a self service ad management system.
4. Show detailed traffic statistics.
5. Sell exclusivity.
6. Let the market determine the price via an auction.
7. Simplify the advertising process.
Ok, sounds fair. How do you go about doing that? I have a site, http://langpop.com that could use some better advertising than AdSense, but I don't have a very good idea about how to track someone down that would pay to advertise on it.
I have some other sites where there's a more direct connection that I could make between who might want to advertise, and thus chase those deals a little bit more easily, but with that, and others that I've done, selling ads just isn't in my repertoir of skills. You've convinced me that either it should be or I should find someone who is good at it... any ideas how? AdSense is very easy to get started with.