As an Internet marketer, I've never encountered anything more difficult than making a decent income from selling page views to local advertisers.

I mentioned earlier this month that I had made another push towards making my local blog profitable. I hired a sales person to sell ad space on my local website, "Menifee 24/7". It's been tough, but I'm sensing that we're close to turning a corner.

Thus far, we're getting positive feedback from local businesses here in Menifee about buying advertising space, but we haven't received any money in hand. We've gotten commitments, and we've had advertisers tell us what they want from us before pulling the trigger, which we've complied with. But again, still no money in hand...

There are perhaps as many as ten other local news websites in my general area that publish exclusively to the Internet. And these websites are not having any luck selling ads to the local community. Some of these websites command much more traffic than I, and enjoy greater name recognition. Yet the only ads that appear on their website are network ads like Google AdSense, Doubleclick, and ValueClick, as well as their own promotions like, "Advertise Here". It seems they aren't making much money either.

The thing is that I don't know if they have a dedicated salesperson or sales staff knocking on doors and placing phone calls the way my dedicated salesperson is doing. I don't know if they have already knocked on all the doors and placed all the phone calls, and I'm simply just late to lunch.

But again, I feel like we're about to turn a corner here, and things look optimistic right now.

Just yesterday, I talked with the general manager and assistant manager of a sports bar here in town, and they both sounded convinced they had to buy advertising from me. They just needed to get the OK from the ownership. Now, I don't know if they always have to get the OK from the ownership on every piece of advertising they do, or if they just need to get the OK to buy online advertising from my website. But still, I feel optimistic.

But just to temper things somewhat, I recently discovered that a newspaper here in town went out of business. Well, it was not actually a newspaper, it was a direct mailer disguised as a newspaper. Regardless, it went out of business. I presume it died because it couldn't sell enough advertising. In fact, newspaper advertising continues to trend downwards, while online advertising is trending upwards.

But then again, maybe I shouldn't talk until after I see cash in hand.  ✓