Traffic is booming at Yahoo!, and webvertising is the reason for the windfall season.

The popular search engine, which posted a fourth-quarter profit in 1996, carried banners from 550 advertisers and saw daily traffic swell to 20 million page views for that quarter.

It's easy to see why companies with deep pockets would seek out such a high-traffic site to spend their advertising dollars. But you don't have to be as popular as Yahoo! to reel in sponsors for your web pages.

"The smaller content site should look for advertisers who want to tightly target their message," says Jim Sterne, president of Target Marketing in Santa Barbara, Calif., and author of the book "World Wide Web Marketing."

Not all the advertising dollars are going to giants. A recent study by ActivMedia Inc. proves it: "Studies that claim 66 percent of web advertising revenues are captured by the Top Ten Sites are just plain wrong," states Harold Wolhandler, chief author of the report. The top ten sites account for closer to one third of ad sales, he says.

Sterne says, "If I sell products to dentists in Idaho, I don't want to pay for 1.5 million people seeing my ad." But he'd write you a check if your site attracted dentists from Idaho.

Further, if you classified your site visitors so an advertiser could show one banner to oral surgeons and another to family practitioners, you could command a higher fee. "It's the intimate knowledge of the site visitors that makes web advertising so attractive to advertisers," Sterne says.

Ad Types
As people queue up to buy and sell in cyberspace, there are almost as many advertising formulas as there are advertisers. Alternatives and embellishments to banner advertising crop up all the time.

Banner ads are the most popular form of webvertising. A typical banner contains the advertiser's name, product or service and is displayed on someone else's web site.

By clicking on the banner, a reader is transported to the advertising company's own web pages. Some sites charge flat rates for banner advertising. Others charge from $20 to $100 per thousand impressions (otherwise known as cost per thousand, or CPM). An impression is counted each time someone visits a page where an ad is on display.

At 2 cents an impression, banner advertising may not be worth the bother for a small-content site, warns Cliff Kurtzman, president and CEO of Tenagra Corporation, an Internet marketing agency in Houston, Texas. In fact, "Banner ads may pull people off your site and tend to make your site look unprofessional," he says.

A banner ad seller doesn't have to stick to one formula. Tale.com, for instance, doesn't charge one red cent for visitors to start reading a whodunit. But once they're hooked, they're expected to pay as they finish, by clicking on a banner and reading a sponsor's ad.

Another innovative advertising strategy is employed by Amazon.com, which promises commissions to any web site that advertises a book title and successfully steers a visitor to the Amazon site and to the purchase of that book.

Required Stats
But whether you operate a giant commercial web site or a small, narrowly targeted one, potential advertisers will want some facts and figures.

Ideally, you'll be able to tell someone looking to buy ad space on your site what kinds of Net surfers drop by, how many, where they come from, and what they're looking for. So, you might want to invest in some traffic monitoring software. Packages are available for as little as a few hundred dollars and as much as several thousand dollars.

It's also a good idea to let sponsors go to your site in real time and see how their ads are pulling. Webvertising, after all, "is the most measurable direct response medium in the history of marketing," says Larry Chase, president of New York-based Chase OnLine Marketing Strategies.

Finding Advertisers
Finding advertisers can be a do-it-yourself process, a matter of signing up with a broker or banner advertising network or some other third party, or a combination of the two.

Frank Maris, whose Teen-Net web site garners 40,000 daily hits, woos prospective advertisers via phone and email. He's wary of dealing with banner advertising networks and is holding off for now, "until I find a company I'm comfortable with. They handcuff you with all the requirements," he says. Maris, who presides over Internet Marketing and Research, Inc., frets over the lack of control at certain banner networks, which don't necessarily let you choose the advertisers you want. He also objects to signing an exclusive contract.

Teenage word-of-mouth has helped Maris build traffic, and recognition from CNET and Web Crawler has boosted the site's credibility. He also credits Internet Link Exchange for the site's success. The San Francisco-based banner ad network has a different twist. Most networks sign up a group of web sites, take on the responsibility of selling banner space, and collect royalties for the service.

Link Exchange, on the other hand, encourages ad swaps. Small-to-medium sites place one ad on the Link Exchange network for every two ads they agree to display on their site -- one from some other network member, and one that Link Exchange has sold to an outside or paying advertiser.

Although Maris and other network members do not earn revenue from Link Exchange ad sales, they benefit from increased traffic on their sites. This in turn can make them more attractive to paying sponsors.

Sometimes advertisers do the work for you. Mark J. Welch, an estate planning attorney in Pleasanton, Calif., had an annotated list of banner advertising networks and brokers on his site. He says a caller-ID company that wanted to advertise on his site approached him after reading his informational page targeted toward webmasters, advertisers and advertising sales professionals.

Watch Out For Strangers
In shopping for ad networks, brokers or outright advertisers, beware, Welch says. If the deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Some companies default on payment promises, while others impose new rules retroactively. Using email to find ad buyers is great -- but only up to a point. Watch out for strangers, Welch says, who don't bother listing a street address, phone number or principals' names on a site. Make sure the information people give you matches up with the information in their domain name registration.

Unless you physically visit a company, you're making a judgment call, and it could be dicey, says Paul Myers, who maintains VirtualBusiness.Net, a site targeted at micro businesses. If an advertiser is careless about record-keeping, "you don't get paid," he says.

Myers also worries about guilt by association. What if someone visits your site, orders from one of your sponsors, and doesn't receive good service? By peddling Amazon Books or some other credible business, "I at least know when someone orders they will get what they order," he says.

Another wrinkle is click-throughs. Some advertisers argue that impressions are worthless, and that unless the viewer actually clicks on the banner and travels to your page they shouldn't have to pay. Recent studies put the click-through rate for banner ads at roughly 2 percent.

"I wouldn't negotiate a deal with an advertiser based on click-throughs -- not when I can't control the offer or the design of the banner," says John Audette, president of Multimedia Marketing Group, Inc., an online public relations agency in Lake Oswego, Ore.

On the other hand, Audette is not averse to "bootstrapping your way up." When you send out an email looking for sponsors, don't be afraid to offer a free trial, he advises. It helps you establish an initial relationship, puts banners on your site, and gives you credibility.

Above all, stay flexible if you want to bring dollars to your site. Myers, who initially explored banner advertising, has moved away from the idea. Say you're getting between 1 and 10 cents a hit. "Why go with such tiny percentages," he wonders, "when you can turn around and sell your own product on your web site and still maintain control?"