Advertising with Small Town Living
Many of you have asked about opportunities to advertise with us. So I thought I would take a moment to answer some of the more common questions.
Presently there are three ways you can promote your business, event, website or product through Small Town Living.
Front Page Side Bar Ads: These spaces are high visibility spots seen by each visitor on the main page of the site. The ad size is 125×125 and are linked to the web address of your choice. The cost for a spot is $35.00 per month. There is a multi-month discount of 20% if you book 2 months or more for your ad. When you are ready to place an ad we’ll need a 125×125 jpg image which you can email to us at either pauldavidwilson@gmail.com or gardengoose@gmail.com once the ad has been approved we’ll invoice you via Paypal and let you know the date the ad will begin to run. If you would like an ad to start on a particular day let us know and we’ll let you know if a spot is available in the time frame you need.
Give-Aways: If you have a product or service you would like to give-away to site visitors we will run the giveaway for you. This would involve us creating the give-away post, explaining the qualifications and drawing a random winner at the completion of the giveaway.
Some advice on how to run a successful give-away. We would recommend the minimum value of the item or service being given away be $30. Below a certain value unless an item is high sought after or unique most people won’t take the time to enter. It’s important too to run the give-away long enough for word of it to disseminate through the blogosphere. In other words it takes time for word to get around about it so a minimum of two weeks is suggested. A month long give-away is ideal.
Finally, when running a giveaway its important that you require your entrants to at least take the time to post a comment about your products, their “wish list” of what you have or past experiences with them. You want positive expressions to generate buzz and interest in what you are doing and the value of customer or potential customer raves can not be underestimated.
The cost to run a give-away is $20. This covers our time to monitor comments, remove spam comments, negative or derogatory statements about your items and select and contact the winner.
Blog Roll Inclusion: Many sites include other websites in their blog rolls to drive traffic to them and to create an interconnected network. Part of our concern as we grow Small Town Living is that we maintain a good balance between advertising which we need to support the site and content which viewers will appreciate and find value in. I’m sure you’ve seen many sites which seem to be all one big billboard with Google Ad Words, Banner Ads, Amazon Associate Links and more. To be honest we cringe when we see this and usually feel like we’re just reading an ad paper rather than a site dedicated to an interest. One of the easiest things to do for bloggers is to accept requests to be included in Blog Rolls and while they are not that flashy or obtrusive we have seen blog rolls that went on for “miles”. We are constantly being asked to included other sites on our blog roll right from the start of the site, we’re very honored that so many people like what we’re doing and want to link in but we simply can’t accept all these requests or we’ll end up with an extremely cluttered side-bar. To that end we’ve talked about what would work and the current solution we’ve come up with is this option. Our blog roll is going to be limited to 20 spaces. Three or four of these spots will be linked to the Small Town Community sites like the magazine site and the Ning network we run. Ten spots are available to blogs but will only be provided to blogs with an excess of 300 members. Once these spots are filled as new requests come in to be included we’ll add you to a list which will rotate out monthly. The remaining five spots may be purchased for $10 a month. This will give smaller blogs an affordable way to link into the Small Town community and benefit from our traffic and readership.
Questions? We’re still growing and changing, our content is gradually being converted from our back issues of the magazine and being added to by our authors and contributors. In time we may change our approach on advertising but we’ve set up a system we can manage while remaining fair to readers and potential advertisers. If you have any questions about advertising you can contact Paul and he’ll be happy to help (pauldavidwilson@gmail.com) or Tina (gardengoose@gmail.com).
