1. Try not to choke your blog with affiliates, contextual ads and banners. Spring clean all those elements that don’t see the light of day or are rarely used. A lean, clean blog is an attractive blog to advertisers.
2. Place a prominent “advertise with us” link on your blog. I like to then offer a fairly comprehensive form asking for the advertiser’s requirements.
3. If you have no example banners on your blog, keep some samples to show your advertiser what can be achieved.
4. Make your site stats readily available.
5. Highlight special offer ad placements.
6. Know your audience demographic and make appropriate data readily available.
7. Give some background about you and your blog.
8. Make sure your spelling and grammar are up to scratch. I know someone who was refused a lucrative deal on the basis that his blog was riddled with poor grammar.
9. Ensure that your blogs functionality is up to scratch. Are there links that don’t work, or text over spilling the site boundaries.
10. Keep your blog focused. Being all things to all men may just preclude you from the more lucrative ad deals.
There are some key principles to follow if you want to attract direct advertisers.
Here are my key suggestions:
Read more...
A few bloggers have noted some experimental AdSense units appearing.
This one was recently mentioned on Problogger.
There’s nothing really significant about this other than to say that they look like a cross between a link unit and a normal ad unit. My gut feeling is that this development isn’t going to rock contextual advertising, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Posted by Peter Brady on Fri 20th July 2007 at 06:00 AM, Filed in Key Articles
In light of moves towards Ajax and streaming, Nielsen//NetRatings have conceded that their rating service is to lose page view metrics rankings for a move towards total number of minutes spent on site.
I have to admit a little bafflement at this move. Of course there are plenty of other important metrics to monitor, but why not just maintain them all instead of dropping one in favour of another?
I’m convinced advertisers would like to see a variety of data when making their inventory decisions - that includes dwell time, uniques, page views, RSS subs etc.
Nielsen say:
“Based on everything that’s going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total minutes is the best gauge for site traffic,” said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen. “We’re changing our stance on how the data should be” used.
As mentioned over on Blogspotting all this confusion is likely to benefit those who sell ads based on clicks although Google is obviously retaining an interest in metrics based inventory with it’s purchase of banner advertiser DoubleClick.
If you’re going to win the hearts and mind of advertisers it helps to have the right blog design. Here are some ideas and thoughts to cogitate on:
1. Credit where credit is due. Darren Rowse the Problogger.net genius has hit on an excellent layout with his 3 blocks of key posts and categories at the top of his blog. It works for him and I think it works here.
Read more...
