Any suggestions on banner advertising rates?

[Menard]

My Free Backlink site has been increasing in traffic; of course, I have been promoting it lately as well. At present it is flirting with 300,000 on Alexa. Although only a few dollars a month, it is my top producer for Google Adsense.

Beig that I have quite a few banner spaces on the site as it is, I am looking to sell those spots on a monthly basis; it could well be premature right now, but as pages and traffic increase, I am thinking that banner space may be a more viable income generator than Adsense, though I will still have Adsense ads on the site.

I have made up a preliminary page advertising rates for the banner spots: Banner Rates (this page is linked from the front page with banners advertising "Put Your Banner Here")

I will look around and see what information I can find on banner rates, but was wondering if anyone has any input on rates?

[Andy]

You can insert Google Adsense banners and find out what rate you get from them.

My guess is that it would be very low for a site that is difficult to match to merchant offers to generate much banner click revenue. Maybe you could charge $1 per 10,000 impressions?

By measuring results, you could tune your pricing.

[Menard]

You can insert Google Adsense banners and find out what rate you get from them.

My guess is that it would be very low for a site that is difficult to match to merchant offers to generate much banner click revenue. Maybe you could charge $1 per 10,000 impressions?

By measuring results, you could tune your pricing.

Right now the site, (i.e. the index page) is earning (for December) $3.20 per 10,000 impressions off of adsense (the reports are showing the earnings off of contextual ads only, but not too many banner ads show through adsense).

I could try to set some of the adsense ads for image only ads and see what kind of affect that has on earnings.

It is a very narrow advertising niche, IMO, as I believe the only ads which are going to work are going to be for website submission/promotion services and money making opportunities coming in second.

By eliminating some types of ads from adsense, I have been able to increase the revenue a bit. Google was killing any earnings by running pharmacy ads on the site, but I found out how to knock those out.

I'm slowly increasing traffic; right now the front page gets 30-50 unique visitors a day (this is not counting the hundreds of spambot hits daily). I have been promoting the site recently and the nature of the site, offering a quick and cheap form of site promotion, is actually working to get backlinks to the site from others posting links to a ranked FFA page; it's a nasty circle that as I promote it more others will promote it telling others where to spam their links.

One of the things I'm going to do to add to the site is take my traffic sites and merge them into this site; taking the content from those sites and putting them on this one, then letting those domains drop. I'm trying to narrow down both my work load on sites and my expense on them.

I'm also going to be adding a forum and blog to this site. Both will be simple; nothing more than easy ways to add content to the site, plus each will provide additional ad space.

Being that I am of the opinion that web submission and money making opportunities will do best on this site, I could test that by putting affiliate banners for such services in the banner spots and see how they do. I have a dollar hosting affiliate ad in one of the spots, and have had other web hosting ads, and it doesn't produce anything for this site; so, it is my presumption that web hosting services are not going to work on this site.