Advertise Space - Blog Avertising » Online Advertising

Step I: All Advertising networks have an unbridled desire to be able to claim the biggest reach and most unique visitors of any network in the world.  20 million, 50 million, 100 million, ONE BILLION!

Step II:  They continue to pony for top spot and allow publisher after publisher to join their network, with very little emphasis on quality.

Step III: Too many publishers competing for selling their ad space dilutes the market within that ad network.

Step IV:  Advertisers have so many options to choose from they end up basing a lot of their decisions based on price and buy the lowest CPM’s.

Step V: Therefore… YOUR CPM’s totally SUCK!

• my free advice to ad networks:

A) Limit the publishers and choose based on quality instead of just traffic.

B)  Sell out your existing inventory 100%

~Chad

Below are some questions you should ask yourself before you start shopping around for advertisers. (We’re talking monthly flat fees of $500, $1000 or even $5000 here.)

- Does my blog have a niche focus? A focus is very important. Take a look at your current blog and the tags or categories you are blogging about. If you are all over the map, you don’t have a clear enough focus.

- What type of companies would want to advertise in this space? This is a question that you need to be really honest with yourself and think, why would any company want to advertise on this blog? If you are blogging about ‘making money in your spare time as a prostitute’ or ‘Angry work commute’ you need to think, “Who would really want to advertise there?”

Are there other blogs in this space with current paid advertisers? Check out your competitors? Do they have paid placements? If so, then you too can get them to advertise on your site.

- Do I blog about any products or services? If your blog focuses on products and services, then your readers are more likely to make purchase decisions than reading news stories which is much more attractive for potential advertisers.

- Do I have any real traffic? If you want to start selling ads on your site you should have around 250,000 page views a month. Minimum range would be about 100,000 page views a month, anything less than that it will be pretty hard to deliver results to an advertiser.

- Do I have an audience? Personally I think should have about 5000 feed readers before you really consider that you have an audience worth someone paying to get in front of. 1000 with a super niche might be possible, but still a stretch.

~Chad

It seems that most marketers agree that keyword targeting is a great way to get the right message in front of the correct targeted audience.   Unfortunately sometimes keywords can be their own worst enemy.   Like the classic example of airline ads showing up on news sites that have a breaking story about a plane crash.

My favourites include:

- A Crime blog with a keyword targeted ad on “how to be a true GUN Pro”

- Philippine travel blog with ads for landing Filipino wives

- A blog about the perils of having cancer with a Bikini girl screen saver ad

The truly most tasteless targeted ad I’ve seen:

- Macro Cats site, with a targeted Google ad for a ‘Dying cat’ ring tone.

What about you, have you seen any poorly placed advertisements?

Chad

Yup, Google makes billions of dollars off search advertising and there stock price is pretty solid, so why do I think search marketing/advertising is on its way out?  And to clarify, this is for advertising on the search engine itself, not through the millions of publisher sites.

Well, super savvy early adopters don’t use search engines to find great sites and products.   When was the last time that you went to a search engine and looked for a great site or a specific product?  If you answer is, “all the time”, then you don’t fall into the super early adopters category.  

These elites are using their power circles as reference tools, asking friends and their ‘online semi-acquaintances’ for suggestions and referrals and also giving out unsolicited advice in a constant never ending stream.   Just like the best jobs are not listed on job boards or super exclusive restaurants and nightclubs don’t need to advertise or sometimes even have a external facing street sign, power marketing won’t include a search engine component.   The best blogs are not found Googling, they are usually found from referral links or other blogs talking about a great post, and sometimes you just stumble upon them, literally.   Social circles are becoming the new holy grail for advertisers to get in front of.   Personal recommendations from friends and colleagues.   

Gone will be the days of going to Google or Yahoo and typing in ‘graphic designer’, ‘plumber’, ‘compact digital camera’, or Hawaii vacation’.   The savvy are already twittering, twirling, and plurking these questions from their power circle.   And so will you…if you have any friends.

OK the long overdue follow up post to my last year’s shit storm post on why I hate Google AdSense: 

- The Rich get Richer. Well it’s a joke really that the only ones making any money are the owners of Google. If you are the one actually producing any of the content that they get rich off of, most likely you are still a broke ass. It is the sheer gap of wealth from the amount of money being printed to the actual publishers that makes me the most angry. With a 200 billion market cap, they could pay their top ONE MILLION publishers $100,000 and still have 100 billion left over. No but Google Officers like Doerr are cashing in 43,475 shares for a cool $30,000,000. He must need a new set of rims for his hummer?

- The Poor get Poorer. Yes, you guessed it. If you have been using AdSense as your only source of blog income you now know that AdSense blindness is setting in on your readers and they are clicking less and even if they do click, CPC’s are down. The money you used to buy your daily coffee with is now only paying for the soy milk upgrade.

- Lack of customization. Color palette change, rounded edges. Wow. Some customization. In the gaming world it’s common place to be able to customize your character to look almost identical to you or anyone you like, and this coming from much smaller development companies, let alone a billion dollar behemoth. Too busy counting their money I guess. I mean when the geek sitting in the cube next to you is worth 4 million on paper, why work? He is too busy twittering and checking out his net worth.

- Loyal promoter? We don’t need you. OK so you’ve been doing a money making blog for years and sending tonnes of fish over to the big shark as an affiliate referral. They pay you a bounty and then suck millions out of your referrals, but now depending on where you live, they might not want your krill. edit  - (OK they fixed this since I wrote this post a while ago, but now they still don’t accept certain countries.)

- Still only a CPC model.  Wherever there is someone paying for a certain call to action there is a way to game the system.   Yes, click fraud is alive and well and Google really doesn’t care that much about it, especially since the buzz about it has died off over the years.  Why not let the publisher decide what format to charge?  CPM, flat rate?  Adify.com allows these options for publishers. I’ve always preferred flat rate, and you can’t game a fixed price.

- Follow our rules or else. Want to sell your own text links on YOUR own site. Forget it. Cutt’s will even get you to sell out your own mother down the river for making money on the side. Big G will come down on your ass like a Columbian Coke lord on a cocaine farmer for chewing on leaves…

(And kill it at the same time…)

1. Use a services like PayPerPost or sponsored reviews and pay someone to blog positively about your product but don’t worry if the blog is completely off topic to your market.
2. Sign up a bunch of fake alias in multiple forums, answer a few questions, and then start flogging your product to yourself.
3. Create a few splogs loaded with scrapped content and loaded with relevant keywords and then blog about your own product.
4. Spam all of your friends and ask them to Digg and stumble your blog posts daily until you have no friends.
5. Create a FaceBook fan club for your product and invite everyone you know and do weekly updates to everyone even if they didn’t join the group.
6. Offer your product for ‘free’ to prominent bloggers only if they write something nice about you
7. Buy a whole bunch of fake traffic and then put your site up for sale on SitePoint telling everyone how much major traffic you have, then cancel the auction and tell everyone, that you site is way too valuable to sell.

Got any more fun ones?   Add them in the comment field.

Newspaper advertising is in big trouble and  and in its current form it will die in the next 10-15 years.  The newspapers need to step up to consumer demands and adapt quicker.

“According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.”

Some of my suggestions to adapt:

- Come up with 2 different formats - A home version and a ‘travel version’.  Have you ever tried reading the New York Times on the subway?  UK newspapers are starting to get smaller and some major North American publishers have cut the size slightly to make it more manageable, but to truly get portable, have a power summary edition in a magazine size.  Smaller will be key especially with everyone going green and with the paper wastage.

Start Selling your product - Newspapers have just gotten lazy over the years, and think that people ‘need’ their product and that people will just buy it.  Start pitching it again.  Remember the paper boys that used to be on the street corners selling newspapers or the kid who used to come to your house once a week and collect the ‘paper money’?  How could you cancel your subscription from a pimply 12 year old trying to earn a buck.    Or even the homeless guys selling them at major red light intersections.  I used to buy one from them even if I didn’t really want one. 

- Give it away FREE - Create a free version that is super small and handed out at major hubs and subway stops.  Most major cities already have several small free entertainment or news type mini papers that are giving out free, the major players shouldn’t be giving away the market share to these small players.

- Customized newspapers - OK, we’re still away’s off with this one, but users should be able to fully customize the paper they receive.  Until the fully customization options are scalable, users should be able to at least pick and choose which sections or the current paper they receive.   My Dad only reads the sports section or the paper, I only read entertainment and business.  Why do we need 20 sections if we only read 2-3? 

Time is running out big boys, adapt or die slowly and painfully.