..assuming you want to do this from scratch

1. You must have a historic traffic report. This means you need to know how much traffic will flow through your site and be able to back up claims to advertisers. This will lead to the creation of your ‘rate card" – which is the amount each ad will cost and how much traffic people are buying.

2. You must specify the size/format of banners. I strongly recommend using standard sizes so that it’s easy on advertisers. Google adsense formats are the de-facto size standard. There is little reason to go off the standard.

3. You must set pricing based on your traffic levels, cost per click, or cost per action. To track this, you’ll need an ad rotation script with reports that let the advertiser log in and see their ad performance in a tansparent fashion. There are ad rotation scripts that lare less than $100 so don’t build it from scratch.

4. If you plan to just do period-of-time ads, you don’t need the script but you do need a lot of discipline in your process to be sure to put up and take down ads on schedule.

5. You need a way to accept payments. Ideally you have an auto-renew process that charges their credit cards on a schedule until they renew.

7. You need a legal agreement for advertising services.

.. ad networks make this all easy but take almost all of the profit out of it. with your own setup, you get all the profit for the ad-runs.

…the hard part is finding advertisers. Most will expect a lot of traffic and costs between $20 and $30 per thousand impressions.

….if you don’t see 1000+ unique visitors per day ads are a waste of time in my opinion. Fill the spaces with high quality, relevant, affiliate program marketing that’s far more profitable.

Scott Clark