From nowhere to 50,000 unique visits a month, an engaged readership on social media and a handful of supportive advertisers has been quite a journey for EastGrinsteadOnline.com in the seven months of our existence.

To misquote Kevin Costner, ‘If you build it, they might come’ is a good philosophy for a community newspaper. If you can write interesting, topical stories with an overwhelmingly local focus, then people should flock to your website. If you can back this up with a strong presence on social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook, then your traffic should grow quickly too. As with any enterprise which takes up a lot of time, eventually the question of financial reward is going to come up. Realistically, it can’t be ignored, because even with the best altruistic will in the world, running a community news site is actually going to cost you money on top of hours of your time it involves every week.

Those costs will include web hosting, maybe some stationery, a little travel – all of this does add up, so it is wise to have some kind of monetisation strategy in mind from the start. To take the Google approach, I think it is wise to build your product, make it popular and nurture it, before you think about advertising or other forms of revenue. Most people will find a new site that they have never see before quite off-putting if it is plastered with ads from the start, and they may feel that your primary motivation is commercial rather than community-minded. This in turn might also discourage volunteers from helping you  to write and get submissions for the site content, so it will be generally counter-productive.

My approach was always to build a great newspaper online first that served the community and provided something that perhaps the local incumbents were failing to do as well as they did in the past with bigger budgets. I had the strong belief that the site would grow and businesses would recognise this, and we would get requests to advertise. This proved to be entirely accurate and after building up a great audience and a few months of strong local reporting, businesses in East Grinstead did start to approach us spontaneously and ask to advertise. Fortunately, coming from an online advertising background, I was more than ready to take their ads and had the experience to know how to cost them and how to execute the campaigns technically on the site.

I appreciate that most people don’t have this background, so I would make a few suggestions.

Make sure your site is advert-ready

Be prepared for people wanting to advertise and don’t be afraid to charge for what your site is worth. From a technical perspective, you will need to be using WordPress.org rather than WordPress.com, if you want to be able to take ads easily, so I would advise choosing this option from the start, even though the costs are slightly higher. This will give you the flexibility to take ads on your site as and when you choose.

Try Adsense

First stop has got to be AdSense. Dip your toe in the water by signing up to Google’s AdSense programmes. You can install a bit of code in a few boxes down the side of your site and there will automatically appear a number of ads served from Google’s large range of advertising clients. AdSense will never make you a fortune, unless you have very large audiences, but it could, over the course of the year, realistically cover a lot of your operating expenses for very little effort.

Make sure your contact details are visible

Once this is in place, it has a dual function, it gives you a little revenue, but it also shows that your site is a serious operation and it does take advertising. This will help to alert local businesses that advertising is a possibility. Once you are comfortable with this, it may be a good idea to update your ‘About Us’ section and include an email address for enquiries for advertising. No need to list rates or other stats, but you need to open up the channel of communication.

From site sponsorship to advertorial – explore advertising models

Negotiation with advertisers is the next hurdle, which many people may not be comfortable with. My advice here would be to set up a few simple ad formats on your site and then charge by the week or perhaps offer a site sponsorship. We have adopted this approach offering a rate for sponsoring the whole site for a month and also a rate for a display ad by week. The site sponsorship consists of a large ad on the front page, which stays for the whole month and also an advertorial feature on the business in question, which can be promoted via social media too. These formats are easy to put on your site and it is the advertiser’s responsibility to provide the necessary artwork for the ad. All invoices should be collected up front before publication.

Give good customer service and a realistic price

The other side of taking ads is customer satisfaction. Once you are taking people’s money you need to be professional in approach and accountable for a good service. It is important to be on top of your site statistics, so you can talk to people upfront about what kind of traffic your site receives, so they have realistic expectations. Doing some research on what other, competing local sites or newspapers charge will give you an idea of how to set your own rates. As a starter business yourself, I would advise being cost-effective, without giving away your advertising, as it is hard to raise your rates significantly if you start too low – be confident that you are offering a quality product, which people should be happy to pay for.

Find the right advertisers

In terms of finding advertisers, then you should have a good awareness of local businesses and business owners from running the news site, so use these connections for your commercial offering. Also, pay attention to who advertises in the local newspapers and magazines, so you know what the market is like and if you have the resources, you can pro-actively approach people.

Bringing in some revenue is a key part of running your website, but it is unlikely, that in the short term at least, you will be able to make enough money to make it a career option. However, you should be able to more than cover costs and perhaps with a professional approach and a really engaged audience, you can build towards making a decent monthly return for all the effort it takes to pull together a good community newspaper.

Barney Durrant runs community news website East Grinstead Online and digital marketing agency, Bluebell Digital.