Just like professional sports teams allow corporate sponsorships of their stadiums and various elements of the stadium, Lowell.com will have many sections that can be sponsored by businesses in Lowell. By allowing local businesses to sponsor areas of Lowell.com, we are building great unique content while giving added value to visitors of the website.
There are many different areas that can be sponsored. By tailoring this to local business niches, we can generate revenue for Lowell.com while<!–more–> offering valuable brand marketing for the local businesses. These sponsors will be viewed as experts in the area they sponsor, which will help them attract visitors and hopefully convert them to paying customers.
There is more to read about this on the Lowell.com blog, and I hope you will check it out when you get an opportunity.
Any thoughts…guidelines about pricing for these sponsorship spots?
***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
Really depends on the traffic to your site. For me, it will probably be under $200/month. I may also try to do some cross-marketing with this. Perhaps exchanging counter space at a local shop or something like that. Mutually beneficial deals can be cost effective.
We charge 300% more for a category (restaurants, shops, etc) sponsorship. For example, a restaurant pays $150 a month to advertise on PalmSprings.com. The restaurant category sponsor pays $450. However, we do not allow sponsorships for certain categories such as the hotel and real estate sections because we charge so much to be in those categories to begin with.
***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
I will be doing something similar to this, but I will be creating features that are atypical for a geo site. These won’t exactly be “categories” businesses will be sponsoring – more like features.
In that case, you’ll need to show huge traffic stats. It’s much, much easier to sell a Restaurant Section sponsorship to a restaurant because they like seeing their business at the top of a page listing their competitiors.