Charging for advertising on a website

[ThomserveBAS]

Hi

I've recently set up a community website which primarily promotes events in the village I live in - this costs nothing to the event organisers but I've been approached by a couple of local businesses about advertising on the site and I have absolutely no idea what to charge.

The site is very much in its infancy but we are pushing hard and have ties in with the parish council and other organisations around the village who have shown a lot of support for us so I expect to grow site traffic significantly over the coming months.

I'm running a Wordpress-based site with an advertising plugin which can serve up banners and advert blocks on the site, and we can also do features for advertisers to give them full-page exposure. All of our content is also syndicated across Facebook, Twitter and (don't laugh) Google+ so we will be reaching a lot of people very shortly.

I'm not in this to make money for me, but anything that comes in will be used to run the site and also to organise events within the village - I've looked at how we should handle taking money from a "business" perspective so I think I've got my head around that, but I wouldn't know where to start on charging for adverts.

Does anyone have any experience in this area, especially with local sites?

[northernladuk]

How many is 'a lot'?

[ThomserveBAS]

How many is 'a lot'?

Well, the village is fairly small; we wrote to and visited 15 businesses and 5 have shown an interest in advertising, one I spoke to yesterday said (and I quote) "tell me how much and how often" (as well as being a local business, this person is also affiliated with one of the largest event organisers in the village so he obviously has a vested interest in us being successful).

As I said, this is never going to be a big money spinner, but clearly businesses want to give us their money but I just don't know how to price us.