Advertising again is all dependent on how much quality traffic you can build. How valuable is the niche you operate in? Do hard to get hold of people visit your site on a daily basis?
There are a few different types of advertising you can use in your business:
Email advertising
If you build a large (3,000+) email list who enjoy reading your emails and you have high open rates then you are more than qualified to start selling advertising space within your email.
With email advertising you can either sell a space in your email or you can sell a ‘solus’ email which means the company advertising will take control over what the email looks like.
Though these companies will often pay a lot more you have to bear that in mind that you may piss off your email subscribers so much that they either stop opening your emails or unsubscribe from you completely.
If the solus email is of good value to your readers rather than complete and utter spam then you’ll have more of a chance of keeping your readers.
As you’ll have noted it’s incredibly important to keep your readers happy and therefore you have to be very careful with email advertising. It’s better to be open and upfront by saying something like, ‘This is an advertorial feature, it helps us keep the site free. Thank you’. This is much better and honest than complete disregard for what you send to them. 
Banner Advertising (Google adsense or paid for)
Banner advertising isn’t as lucrative as it was 10 years or more ago or more but it still can be used to gain some revenue although it will require much more traffic.
You have two options: Sell advertising space direct to companies (those who enquire or you send a media pack) or embed some Google Adsense code into your site to show your banner.
It’s pretty simple and I don’t think requires more explanation than that – if you want to ask me then ask in our entrepreneurial forum.
On-site articles
Some big companies want to build their SEO strategies and that means getting links from other sites. It helps if you have good page rank then you will be able to charge more money.
They will typically give you the content and ask you submit to your site pretty quickly.
I have two WARNINGS though:
1. This can hurt your SEO if you don’t put a Google ‘no follow’ code
2. It can look like spam to your readers so don’t be afraid to ask to edit the article before it goes live
Again, pretty simple – ask if you have any questions. Post them in our student business forum.
Sponsorship
Now, this is for when you get some notoriety. Perhaps you’ve published a book or you’re really getting noticed in your sector. Sometimes you might be lucky enough that companies will come to you but the most likely thing is that you’ll have to come up with a joint venture proposal.
For example, for our site we are looking to work more closely with a national bank that can help students with their money and support them through university.
Getting hold of people at the banks is not so easy but with a little persistence you can get through. Persistence, passion and patience are required for negotiating sponsorship deals, do not expect to secure something overnight.
Here is a rough guide for getting a sponsorship deal.
1. Decide which companies would be great to sponsor you.
2. Find the key person to speak to within these companies.
3. Send them a proposal via email.
4. Expect no reply.
5. Send them the proposal again.
6. Call them.
7. Call them again.
8. Call them again, they may give you 5 minutes by now. Build a bit of interest about what you are doing. Try and arrange a meeting.
9. Discuss your plans at the meeting.
10. Wait 6 to 12 months before they make a decision.
11. Complete the deal.
Well, this is my experience anyway!
This is the kind of thing you’ll have to go through in order to get what you want and there are a lot more ups and downs along the way. Patience is the ultimate key and belief that you’ll get there in the end.
So much of business is about the mindset you use, anybody can do it IF they have the right mindset.