Home About Contact Disclaimer Privacy Policy Sitemap Terms & Use
Twitter
RSS
Facebook
ClickBank1

How do you know if you have done Too Much and gone Too Far with Your Blog Advertising?

By Werner Michael Heus on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 | No Comments

Advertising is really good.

It offers information, gives you access to a product or service you otherwise won’t know about, it earns people money and fuels several different industries. But you know how anything excessive breeds discontent and greed and neither one is pretty.

The wrong use of advertising on your blog could send your traffic south – not exactly the
direction you want it to take.

So when is blog advertising bad and when is it just right?

Is your blog succeeding? The key indicator that you’re probably doing something right with your blog advertising is when you’re actually succeeding. You get the traffic you want, you earn for a few simple efforts you made and keep your advertisers happy.

But don’t get carried away by your success. You might think that placing many ads on your blog can help you earn exponentially. What it will do is earn you a spot on your advertiser’s black list. Advertisers have guidelines about how many ads you can place on one web page. Generally, this can range from 3 to 5, depending on the sponsor.

If you don’t want to break the good will that exists between you and your affiliate or advertising program, learn what the policies are and respect them.

Is that a blog or a splog?

One of the worst labels your blog can be slapped with is ‘splog’. That’s a blog that contains spam. If your blog is nothing more than just pages upon pages of advertising and little content, you’d probably be better off publishing a fashion magazine.

Too many ads on a blog can bury your content, distract your visitors and even frustrate them. Some, such as the very wary ones, will leave your blog in a hurry.

If your blog resembles an infomercial, forget it. It will look annoying and take away from the good reputation you’re trying to build.

Too many choices Another challenge you will be facing when it comes to blog advertising is persuading your visitors to pay attention to the ads long enough to actually do something with them. Otherwise, these ads will be useless.

The problem with a blog that has too many advertising units is that it can confuse the visitor. When they’re confused, they’re less likely to click on an ad, much less subscribe or buy anything. That leaves your advertisers – and you – empty-handed.

A blog page can easily handle an average of three ads, which is something most advertising and affiliate programs will allow. Placed strategically, these ads can easily catch the attention of your visitors. Since there are only a few ads to look at, your visitors can easily decide which one to click on.

Now imagine if there were 10 to 15 ads running on the same page at the same time. You’ve probably seen blogs like these before, with ads splattered all over, rivaling a NASCAR race car.

To use blog advertising correctly, first consider the type of programs you will be running. If you will be an affiliate to a brand or company, there are certain restrictions you have to work with. Some companies, for example, prefer not to have a competing brand’s ad placed in the same blog.

Second, placement and aesthetics matter. Consider some of the highest-rated blogs and study their ad placements. Where are these ads placed on a page, what are their sizes relative to one another and to the content box and what do these ads contain? If you’ve seen enough of these successful blogs, you’ll have picked up enough lessons to know how to use blog advertising to your advantage.



READY for a RESIDUAL INCOME ???
Claim Your FREE Membership @ Traffic Generation Club
Claim Your FREE Membership @ the Web Profits Club

Related Posts

Technorati Tags: ,

How You Can Take Advantage of a No-Cost Advertising Strategy

By Werner Michael Heus on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 | No Comments

Advertising Your Blog on Other Websites for Free !!!

There are several ways you can advertise your blog on other websites without paying a single cent. The trick is to find these channels and determine which ones will work for you.

Here just a few techniques you can use:

Advertise on other blogs.

You could build a reciprocal relationship with other bloggers, particularly those whose content are related (but not necessarily similar) to yours. If your blog is about mortgage and
financial news, for example, you could advertise it for free on another blog that offers mortgage reviews.

By becoming partners with a non-competitor, you take advantage of his market for the right type of exposure without alienating anyone. It’s fair, it works and it’s for free.

Use social media. (Social Networks)

Social media revolutionized many aspects of the Internet, particularly because it presents a new way of communicating and sharing information. It broke many barriers, allowing people
from across the globe to build and join networks, both for personal and business purposes.

Social media are sites that can be used to advertise your blogs for free. Nearly all types of businesses that exist on the Internet use social media for promotional activities. The demographics here are clearly defined, people can communicate in a more personal manner and since social media is an accepted platform for marketing, people who read your ads
regarding your blog are more likely to be receptive to it. Best of all, advertising your blog on these websites is free.

Use a network.

To build buzz and gain momentum in the blog universe, you need support from likeminded
individuals. Bloggers don’t really advertise themselves actively against other bloggers. Instead, they compete with one another by ensuring they have better content and easier to use sites.

Although simply maintaining a good blog will help attract other blogs wishing to link up with you, you might also want to actively pursue associations with other popular blogs. Many of the best bloggers around are generous enough to give you a bit of support and will gladly mention your blog in one of their posts.

Best of all, a network helps you increase your reach for the same amount of effort.

Use article databases.

Article databases are repositories of write-ups that bloggers and site owners use. If you choose this route, know that this is a rather indirect way of promoting your blog. It is quite effective nonetheless, particularly if you want to build buzz regarding your ability to provide useful
information. Try to search out a specific topic online and chances are, you will find an article written by blogger in an article database. Read this article. At the end, you will notice that the blogger had included his/her name, a short description of himself, what he does, the name of his company and a link back to his site.

Sometimes, a blogger might even include a few links to some of his write-ups within the text of the article. This is to entice the reader to click on the link and find related information on the writer’s blog. Using links in this manner allows you to advertise your blog for free on a separate website.

There’s no cost involved here, particularly if you wrote the article and performed the submission yourself. If you prefer to spend a little bit, you could also use copywriting and submission services for a reasonable cost. While this isn’t free advertising for your blog, you still get to expand your presence using another website.



READY for a RESIDUAL INCOME ???
Claim Your FREE Membership @ Traffic Generation Club
Claim Your FREE Membership @ the Web Profits Club

Related Posts

Technorati Tags: , ,

How Advertising Works On A Blog

By Werner Michael Heus on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 | No Comments

Web logs or blogs, began as someone’s online journal, a way to express opinions and thoughts and communicate with others on a more personal level. It became such a successful platform that it wasn’t long until marketers, online business owners and professionals took note of its potential.

These days, blogs are used for marketing, putting out news, sharing information, building a business network, teaching, etc. It also doesn’t hurt that once in a while, you get to use your
blog to make money as well through ad placements.

So how does advertising work on a blog?

Popularity means income! It’s a sad fact and rather prejudiced against blogs that are just starting out but to make advertising work on a blog, that blog has to have enough traffic. Without sufficient traffic, the ads found on that blog will just not find an audience and therefore will not earn.

Now to build traffic, your blog has to have a strong niche and targeted content. Finding a niche for your blog can be tricky, especially if the topic you’re offering is obscure and not that easily relatable in terms of advertising. Tricky, of course but not entirely impossible. You’d be surprised at the number of targeted ads some little known topics generate.

However, your best bet and the surest way to make advertising work on your blog is to promote a topic that is highly targeted or one that speaks to a niche audience. By building a following, your blog will gain enough popularity to be trusted by advertisers.

The way advertising works on a blog is simple:

advertisers want to promote their products and services, your blog provides the platform with which their ads can gain exposure, mainly by being the site where their target market frequents. If your blog is about shoes, the people who visit your blog are those who want to know more about shoes. From the shoe advertisers’ point of view, these people are a gold mine, more likely to buy their shoes based on the interest they have shown.

There are two ways you can make advertising work on your blog: by providing ad space on your own or by relying on an advertising server to do the work for you. Selling ad space on a blog is fairly common, particularly on blogs that target a niche market. You simply set the rates, actively contact advertisers and agree on the terms. Or, the advertisers can contact you, after seeing the potential of your blog.

How you get paid is simple enough: once the ad has been placed on your blog, your visitors will click on it. Depending on your agreement with the advertiser, you could earn either through the number of clicks the ad receives or the type of action solicited by the ad, such as a purchase or a subscription.

If you’re fairly new to the blog universe and would rather build your reputation slowly by providing quality content, you might find yourself too busy to actively negotiate and communicate with advertisers.

If this is the case you can choose to work with an advertising server. One such is Google’s Adsense, although there are others that work just as well. An ad server looks at your blog and determines the best ads that relate to your content. You simply take the code, put it on your blog and let it go to work. You simply have to collect your earnings using your account. This is a rather passive approach to letting advertising work on your blog but it can earn you a little. Of course, if you want higher earnings, you need to actively put in more effort and seek out higher paying ads with the right combination of keywords that work best for your blog.



READY for a RESIDUAL INCOME ???
Claim Your FREE Membership @ Traffic Generation Club
Claim Your FREE Membership @ the Web Profits Club

Related Posts

Technorati Tags: ,

Set Advertising Rates for Your Own Blog

By Werner Michael Heus on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 | No Comments

Sooner or later, you will be faced with the decision of whether to use advertising on your blog or not.

Advertising isn’t mandatory for keeping your blog interesting; in fact, it’s merely an optional tool you can use in case you want to take advantage of your blog’s popularity. But once you’ve decided on placing ads on your site, there’s one more issue you need to consider: setting your blog’s advertising rates.

So how much can you expect to charge or be charged?

With blog advertising, there are no set rates. It is up to the blogger to design the correct ad payment scheme that attracts advertisers and allow him to generate a reasonable income at the same time. To help you determine the right advertising rates for your blog, it’s important to consider doing some research first, particularly about similar blogs and to consider your traffic and perform some simple experimentation using your site.

Playing with figures if you think that setting your ad rates at low prices will attract more advertisers, you couldn’t be more mistaken. Your $300 a month rate may not stand against another blogger’s $600 a month rate if you only have 50,000 page views monthly and he enjoys 600,000 page views.

An advertiser will look at the ratio between the cost of advertising on your blog against the amount of traffic that your site generates, the same traffic that will potentially click on the ads.

A good ‘constant’ to consider when determining ad rates is the CPM or Cost-Per-Mille – mille being equivalent to 1,000. Let’s say a blog receives 150,000 page views monthly. For a 125×125 sidebar ad (usually the most common), the blog charges $250 monthly.

Divide $250 by 150 (that’s 150,000 divided by 1,000 to come up with the CPM) and you’ll get $1.66 CPM.

The same arithmetic is used by some of the most popular blogs, including JohnChow and Copyblogger. For your blog, you might want to consider how much traffic you generate and the number of genuine page views you get. These figures will help you evaluate your blog
and come up with the appropriate ad rate.

Since these blogs are well established, you could start at far lower rates if you’re still building
traffic. Consider a starting figure of about $0.5 CPM, which is friendly enough to your advertisers and good enough for you. Raise this rate gradually as your blog becomes more popular and as more advertisers and sponsors buy ad space from you.

Size and location Advertising rates also vary depending on the size of the ad and where it will
appear. Larger ads and those that will be placed in prime locations or ‘hotspots’ will cost more. Ads will also be more expensive if they will appear along with content or on your blog’s header. Cheaper locations will be those found on the page’s footer and the area located after the fold.

Factors that influence ad rates Not every blog can enjoy strong advertising support. That’s mainly because not every blog has the right amount of site traffic, the right visitors, market demographics or niche. These are just some of the factors that affect your eligibility for ad placement and the rate you can charge on your blog.

Blogs, by the way, do not pass through the same channels as traditional print media. The cost of providing information in blogs is low enough that bloggers can offer low advertising rates and still earn a profit.



READY for a RESIDUAL INCOME ???
Claim Your FREE Membership @ Traffic Generation Club
Claim Your FREE Membership @ the Web Profits Club

Related Posts

Technorati Tags: , ,

How Much Would It Cost You to Advertise on Blogs?

By Werner Michael Heus on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 | No Comments

Advertising costs money, even online where the cost of promoting a brand can set you back by a few hundred dollars to a few thousand.

John Chow’s blog, for example, one of the most popular blogs currently active, sells 125 x 125 sidebar ad spots at $500 a month. The same ad placement will cost around $1,500 with Copyblogger. If you’re wondering how much it would cost you to advertise on blogs, consider the following:

Traffic and popularity Blogs thrive on the number of traffic that visits their sites and on the subsequent popularity this generates. This is also a major consideration for advertisers. More traffic simply means better exposure. Targeted traffic means you’ll be selling to more people who are likely to buy.

Between a blog that has only 50,000 page views and another that has 100,000, who would you choose? The latter obviously offers a wider market and more potential buyers.

The mille matters. Traffic or the number of page views a blog page receives also determines the cost of advertising on a particular blog. If a blog generates about 100,000 page views monthly, for example and it’s fairly new, you might have to pay as little as $50 a month for a 125 x 125 sidebar ad.

To understand how the price of ad spots is computed, consider the mille. Bloggers will generally use the unit cost-per-mille or CPM. One mille is equivalent to 1,000, a unit you will be able to use later to compute for the cost of placing an ad based on the number of page views it generates.

Bloggers will consider the number of page views their blogs receive and use that as a basis for coming up with the cost of advertising. As a result, a blog with a higher amount of traffic will charge you a higher price than a blog with a lower number. That means placing your ad on blogs with sufficient traffic can range in cost from about $50 to a whopping $10,000 a
month. The bigger number, of course, means your ad will receive millions of page views.

In conclusion, remember that to determine whether a particular ad space is worth paying for, consider the cost of the space versus the traffic it will receive.

Size of the ad THE BIGGER the ad spot you require, the higher the cost of advertising on a blog. A 125 x 125 ad spot, for example, will be cheaper than a larger 300 x 250 ad. Placement will also affect the ad price.

Header ads, for example, will cost more than sidebar ads or footer ads. Below the fold ads will cost considerably less than those that will appear above the fold or integrated with the blog’s content.

Test periods you might want to consider saving a few bucks by asking the blog owner if he/she is offering a test period of ad runs. If your ad will be placed on test period, that means the blog will display it for a limited time but won’t charge you for it. After a specific period, you can then decide whether to continue with the placement (at which point you’ll have to start paying) or to pull your ad, depending on how well it performed in the blog. This usually works on blogs that are relatively new and are still building momentum.

Look for blogs that offer renewable ad placements you can pay for on a month-to-month basis. This will help you manage the cost of advertising on blogs and help your bottomline in the process.



READY for a RESIDUAL INCOME ???
Claim Your FREE Membership @ Traffic Generation Club
Claim Your FREE Membership @ the Web Profits Club

Related Posts

Technorati Tags: , ,

  •  

    September 2008
    M T W T F S S
    « Aug   Oct »
    1234567
    891011121314
    15161718192021
    22232425262728
    2930  

Powered by Yahoo! Answers