Advertising Sales

Many people sell the ads directly to the advertisers. If the content is protected, the target audience is well known and you may be able to entice your advertisers to directly purchase the ad space.

Can you have a public interface, so that people can read about your company, and perhaps have ads there?

Also, you may want to find companies that will be interested in some of your target market, and approach them with numbers, as to how many unique visitors, how long they stay on individual pages, etc.

I'm assuming that your content is password protected because you charge for access to it? If that's the case you should consider having this content be ad-free. It takes a whole lot of traffic before advertising provides anyone (you and advertisers) any sort of value. Once you get a sufficiently large (paid) audience, it's likely that you'll find other revenue streams that will provide more value than ads.

Either way, it all depends on the audience makeup, too. If this is a "Myspace" crowd, then you'll need the traffic of MySpace to make it worth your while. If, on the other hand, your audience is Human Resoruces Professionals, then selling direct to companies who want to target that niche could be worth it.

You may want to ask another, more specific question or revise the details on this question. Right now, there's no way to give any more specific advice based on the information provided.

I would suggest you limit ads on password protected sites if you are charging for access to the site. Instead of Google Ad-sense you can use other ad networks (http://bit.ly/va2w5) which rotate ad display based on industry segment rather than your actual content.

I would highly recommend you build out a rate card which you can use when you approach advertisers for direct selling. A rate card can be a simple one page PDF that gives some background info on your site, the type of visitors, demographics, etc. And finally has rates for various types of ads.