Blog Advertising: How Do You Know If You’ve Done Too Much and Gone Too Far?

Blog Advertising: How Do You Know If You’ve Done Too
Much and Gone Too Far?

Advertising is 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.

Managing your advertising 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.

Blog Advertising: The Pros and Cons You Should Know

Blog Advertising: The Pros and Cons You Should Know

When it’s done right, blog advertising can be very
profitable. It will not only pay for the maintenance
of your blog but it will also a source of some nice
extra income. In fact, a good percentage of bloggers
take this route to monetize their blog. However, with
every good thing come a few disadvantages. If you’re
thinking of using advertising for your blog, here are
some pros and cons you need to know:

Pros of blog advertising There are several advantages
to using advertising for blogs, which make it an
attractive option for your website. These are:

Your blog earns. The revenue generated by advertising
allows you to perform improvements on your blog. You
can spend for maintenance, pay for better website
design, buy a bigger storage space, pay for faster
bandwidth, etc. This allows you to grow your blog and
attract better traffic.

Advertising gives your blog credibility. Visitors see
your blog as something reliable since you have
advertisers sponsoring you. Most professional bloggers
have advertisers, which means you will also be seen as
an authority in the field of your choice. The
partnership with a known company will indicate that
you offer quality content.

Advertising offers visitors access to relevant
products and services. Since ads will appear on the
same web pages as related content, your blog’s
visitors will be able to view any product, service or
information from your advertisers that they may
actually be interested in.

You’ll be inspired to maintain a quality blog. Only
strong blogs attract advertisers. As a result, you
will have all the reasons in the world to make sure
that your blog offers quality, useful content. You
will be more careful with your choice of topics and
subjects. As a result, your writing is much more
improved and your blog will become a reliable source
of information. The result: increased traffic, a more
targeted audience and more advertisers.

Cons of blog advertising Blog advertising can affect
certain aspects of your blog in a negative way. Some
of its disadvantages are:

It dictates the type of content you will publish. Once
you have advertising on your web pages, you’ll have to
work extra to make sure those ads are noticed and are
considered relevant by visitors. This forces you to
modify your content just to adapt it to what will
attract your readers and entice them to click on your
ads. Sometimes, you’ll find that you will have to
sacrifice meaty content just to write posts that will
promote your ads.

It takes up space on your web pages. You’ll notice
this after a while, when you have multiple sponsors
and running several ads in one web page. As sponsors
buy more ad space, that will take away from the
available space usually reserved for meaningful
content. As a result, you’ll have to control your
content more just to give more room to your ads.

Maintaining advertising on blogs is time consuming.
Having enough ads on your blog should allow your site
to pay for itself. However, it won’t run all on its
own. Now that you have advertisers and sponsors
depending on you, you will have to make sure that your
blog is worth it.

This means you will have to spend enough time in
optimizing your blog so the ads get the audience they
need. You will also have to constantly be on the
lookout for other advertisers and be ready to
negotiate. Other than that, you will have to manage
payments and monitor the necessary statistics to make
sure that your blog remains competitive. Blog
advertising may pay for your blog but it doesn’t take
the work away from you.

Blogger Forums - A Great Place To Advertise Your Blog

Blogger Forums - A Great Place To Advertise Your Blog

No matter what type of blog that you have, one of the
best places that you can advertise your blog is to
join a blogger forum. After all, everyone who posts
there has a blog and thats the main subject.

It’s a great place to meet other bloggers and to
advertise your blog.

There are quite a few blogger forums that you can sign
up for on the Internet. One is known as Bloggeries,
where you can show off your blog, get your blog
reviewed or review other blogs, and find lots of tools
that you can use for your own blog.

Another good place to go is to Blog Forum.

Blog Forum, like Bloggeries, has spots for you to
market and show off your blog,

Blogger forums are a great place to advertise because
everyone in them are of the same mind and want to make
certain that their blogs get noticed and read.

If you use your blog to advertise something that you
are selling, or you want to get a lot of traffic to
your blog in order to make money, you want to go
someplace where it can get exposure.

When you advertise on a blog forum, you know that you
are placing your advertisement in a place where
blogging is something that people enjoy.

Just remember when you are posting to a forum to read
the rules and abide by them. That way you’ll get your
blog noticed and you will know that you are doing the
right thing.

Blogging Directories - Great Advertising Venues

If you want to have more people visit your blog, there
are plenty of blog directories on the Internet that
you can submit your blog to so that people will come
and visit it. Most blog directories are listed by the
topics that the blogs that are submited cover.

Blog Catalog is a free blog directory that offers
categories such as career and jobs, writing, Iraq, and
many others. It has features such as featured blogs
and other things to offer those who submit their blogs
there.

Another great place to add your blog is
blog-drectory.org. Not only do they have an an
extensive list of categories with sub categories, you
can get your blog reviewed. For the most popular
blogs, it shows the amount of hits that blogs have and
if they have any reviews. As well as listing by
category, the blogs are also listed by location.

There are other blog directories on the Internet -
these are only a ouple of them. But blog directories
are a great place to advertise your blog and to make
new friends. You never know what you will find when
you browsing through the directory, and you may just
find out information that you never knew. Some of the
blog directories offer chat features as well, so that
you can meet other people easily.

As you can see, blog directories are a great place to
get your blog noticed and bring people to read your
blog and look at your pictures.

Blogging Traffic - Give And Take

Blogging traffic is a give and take relationship.
Sometimes one of the best ways to get traffic to your
blog is by visiting someone else ’s blog.

Go to their blog and read one of their entries, or
read a few of them. Chances are that you are going to
find something that you have in common.

When you find something that you find truly
interesting on a blog, leave a comment so that they
know that you were there.

One of the best known blogs available is LiveJournal.
A great feature of LiveJournal is that you can search
for interests on their site and it will come up with
results of those who have that interest.

Are you interested in horseback riding? You can see
what other bloggers are interested in horseback riding
as well.

When you are commenting on someone’s post, you want to
make sure that you don’t leave generic comment. If you
like the post, say something about what you read in
the post.

After you have commented on the person’s post, then
you can say something like, ‘I really like horseback
riding too. I had a similar experience to yours.’ and
then use it to link back to your journal.

But be sure that you sound sincere when you are
commenting, and don’t make them feel like you’re just
fishing for traffic.

If someone thinks that you are using their blog to get
more traffic to yours, they won’t visit your site and
your efforts will be wasted.

Choosing The Right Tools

In blogging, using the correct blog software tools can
help you manage the goings-on of your blog. When it
comes to publishing your blog content, there are two
kinds of blog software tools that you can use, such
as: the server-based tools and the client-based tools.
Both of them have their own advantages and
disadvantages and it is up to you to choose the one
that is right for your blog.

The Client-based Tools

One of the two blog software tools that you can choose
from is the client-based tools. These tools’ purpose
is to aid you with publishing your blog and they are
normally installed on your computer and also run from
there. Additionally, client-based tools are also
categorized as small blogs that are able to run from
your hard drive.

Client-based tools also have text editors that allow
you to perform word processing applications from your
own computer. Thus, a text blog editor enables you to
create and publish your own content at the comfort of
your own desktop.

Obviously, the first advantage of using client-based
tools, like the text editor, is convenience. Most
bloggers choose to publish their work with a desktop
tool rather than a Web browser, which entails logging
into the blog software’s control panel and accessing
the Web-based text editor.

Additionally, client-based tools can be managed either
locally or remotely. Such tools can allow you to
manage and edit your posts remotely. More so, the
content of your blog can also be managed locally by
saving drafts to a local computer. These can be very
beneficial to those with limited Internet connection
since accessing and managing the content of your blog
remotely and locally can be done without the need of
being connected to the Internet.

Lastly, you can manage multiple blogs through the use
of client-based tools. If by any chance you are
publishing more than one blog, it might be easier if
you consider using a blog editor. The blog editor can
be easily configured to manage all your blogs. You
only have to enter the same information that you use
to log in into your server tool combined with the
particular kind of server software you are using and
the blog editor can save that information in its
configuration.

The Server-based Tools

Another kind of blog software tool that you can choose
from is the server-based tools. There are two
varieties of such tools: blog hosting service provider
tools and server-based publishing tools.

The first variety is automatically provided by your
blog hosting service provider. Hosted blog software
tools are very easy to use and you do not have to
install any software or manage any configuration too
difficult to comprehend. These kinds of tools can help
you focus on publishing your content.

With the use of hosted software tools, you are also
provided with an assortment of design templates. These
can help you in choosing the desired layout that suits
your blog. More so, the layouts can be easily
customized, including the fonts, columns, colors, etc.

On the other hand, publishing tools you install on the
server has the advantage of giving you the level of
customization and control you need over the
configuration settings. Through the use of these kinds
of server-based tools, you can decide how much storage
space you allocate, extend the features of your blog
through plug-ins or add-ins and make custom layouts
and pages.

How Much Would It Cost You to Advertise on Blogs?

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.