The SNO Report: Selling Ads This Spring

Since setting up advertising services like SNO Ads as a free, optional extra for our customers, we’ve noticed an annual trend: springtime spending sprees.

We always see an uptick in advertising this time of year. Prom dress sales, tuxedo rentals, beauty salons, summer camps, college recruiters, driving schools — these kinds of companies want your business. And even though this school year is different in almost every way, we’re seeing this same pattern start again.

You can take advantage of this yourself by selling and publishing local advertisements on your SNO site without needing any help from us. Or, you can try to have us broker some of this business for you with a program like SNO Ads. Especially when you’re doing it yourself, here are a few helpful tips for making it count:

  1. Make it someone’s job. Call this person your Business Manager. Or if you’d rather make it more of a group effort, that’s fine, too.

  2. Pick prices and create a rate card. You’ll also have the freedom to set your own prices using SNO Ads. Either way, it’s important to know what’s reasonable. Maybe it’s $25 per month. Maybe it’s $100. Maybe it varies based on where the ad is going to go on your website. It’ll help expedite the sales process if you have pricing ready to go.

  3. Approach the right people at the right time. See all of those examples in Paragraph 2.

  4. Offer deals and perks. Perhaps your price should change if a local business is signing up for an extended period of time. Offer them a deal. Also, be ready with some perks. These could be things like offering to design an ad for them or publicizing their ad via your publication’s social media accounts.

  5. Show them your value. Between your site’s analytics, like daily and weekly visitors, and the general design appeal and publishing consistency of your site, show your local business owner that their ad is going up on a reputable website.

Or, opt to use the SNO Ads platform.

SNO Ads is essentially an advertising brokerage designed to help you make a little money from advertising when you don’t have the time or resources to do it yourself. We setup the platform on which advertisers can find your website, execute the sale, place the ad and drop 70 percent of the profit into your account — 30 percent stays with us, to keep the free platform running.