Advertising or sponsorship? Advice pls!

For specific questions about sponsorship you should contact that site directly. We've got a similar program here (see advertising link at the bottom), but that site might be getting more traffic than us and would therefore be charging more.

I think that selling advertising yoruself is the best option IF you have the demand to support it. We've got a good SE ranking and a decent amount of traffic, plus a high demand for webmaster-related products and services. So we can sell our own advertising knowing that we will be able to find advertisers without too much of a problem. This also means that we keep 100% of the profits and don't have to give a chunk to whatever service we're using.

I've heard of smaller niche sites directly contacting companies that would be relevant to their audience and asking if they wanted to advertise. You'd make a pitch directly to that company about why they would benefit from advertising on your site.

What you would charge really depends on your target market and how much traffic you're getting. Our rates seem to be working well for us right now. We go through dry spells sometimes but right now we happen to be almost full. If we were consistently filling our spots we might up the prices a bit (although we'd prefer to have no advertising at all!).

Unfortunately, if you've got a brand new site with little traffic it's going to be hard to sell advertising. Advertisers aren't going to want to pay for advertising on a site with very little traffic. Most services won't accept sites below a certain traffic threshold (and I don't know much more than that becuase most of them don't accept forums so I never really looked into it).

That leaves adsense, unfortunately. I know how you feel about that

adsense is good in that it gets adverts related toy uor website on your website.

I'd use it but also have a page offering individuals to buy their own ads off of you. they'd have the plus of getting a PR link as well.

An important factor that many people over-look is how much time you are going to spend selling/administering advertising. Selling your own adspace directly usually makes more money (as Megan says - no middle man to pay). It does however take more time.

Adsense pays you only a share of the revenue, but you will not have empty slots and will not spend time trying to fill those slots and administering accounts. For many people that means that it ends up more profitable.

I think that all depends on your situation. For us, it isn't too much of a problem to administer the ads. The money we make from that isn't even close to what we could do with adsense even when we've got empty spaces. We tried adsense for a bit and didn't do too well. I've also heard that to really make the most with adsense you have to do a lot of experimentation with placement and working on the text around it to get it to target properly. That's too much faffing around for me And I don't think adsense was right for our target audience anyway (a little more knoweldgeable about these things than the average visitor).

The big qualifier here is that we are a well established, fairly active site with a good SE ranking and a large audience of potential advertisers. We haven't even had to go looking for advertisers yet - they come to us. Most sites don't have that luxury but again, I've heard of people go after really well targetted business and done really well with that.

You could also try an Amazon affiliate account - they have lots options available. There's also a product showcase called chickita (or chikita, not sure about the spelling). I dont' think either of those are too fussy about who they admit.