This post will take most people out of their comfort zones for a second, but hear me out. Let’s say you own a blog. I know, it’s crazy. And let’s say you advertise on that blog. Like I said, we’re going way outside the box here. What do you use to determine how much you charge for advertising? RSS subscribers? Aelxa rank? Google green bars of deception Pagerank? If you’re not sure, ask yourself this: Do you have regular advertisers that, if you doubled your price tomorrow, they’d still book your adspace for the next 6 months? No? The problem lies not in your traffic then, but in your outlook of your blog and advertisers.
The only thing that will keep advertisers on your site is sales. Nothing more, nothing less. If you produce sales for an advertiser, they will continue advertising on your site, and pay as much as they need to in order to keep making sales from their advertising on your site. Smart advertisers (and most of them are) learn quickly that they need to track their ad impressions, clickthroughs, and sales from every ad. They know how much of your traffic is junk, transient traffic, and how much are great, happy readers.
Why are consistent advertisers a good thing? As a direct marketer, I can tell you that the absolute best tool I have is competitive intelligence. AKA where are my competitors advertising, and even better, where are they consistently advertising? If you’re making money for Brand X, Brand Y will quickly find out because Brand X will be there day in and day out.
So how do you get people to click on your ads and buy? That’s the million dollar question. Let’s put it this way: a 125 x 125 banner in the sidebar isn’t going to cut it. Here are 3 quick tips:
- Throw an endorsement in with every banner advertisement. Do a quick blog post about how you had this problem last year and their product solved it. I’m not saying lie, because you shouldn’t, but definitely let your readership know that this product has really helped you out. If you have loyal readers, they’ll listen.
- Cut your advertising in half. This may be contrary to what you think, but by actually giving your readers more focus, you will be able to show more results for your advertisers. You’ll sacrifice short term profits, but you’ll gain some dedicated advertisers that will consistently advertise on your blog. As I said before,
dedicated advertisers = more advertisers.
Sacrifice short term profits for long term gains.
- Help your advertisers. Chances are, you are only one place of hundreds that your advertiser is advertising on. They can’t dedicate even a fraction of their resources making sure everything is going OK. Help them out by sending them an email every once in awhile saying "this week, I noticed a drop in CTR for your ad. I’m going to bump you up to a higher spot and I won’t charge you for this week. We’ll try to figure out what’s going on." Or if you think you can help them increase conversions on their site with a better design, better copy, better banners, etc, let them know. Use Google as a good example: they have Analytics and Adwords Conversion tracking for their advertisers. Without those two tools, they wouldn’t be the huge giant they are now. (Even though Google slaps me around every once in awhile, we have a relationship like a battered wife does with her husband. i just can’t let her go. She provides for me and I still love her.)
So in short, my advice is this: start putting your advertisers on the same level of importance as your readers. Trust me, as an advertiser, I thank you.
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Thursday, 24 Apr 2008 Filed under: Blogging by Bryan
Hey Bryan,
Interesting post. One thing that you forgot to mention is that not all advertisers are looking for sales. There are clients who are looking to increase exposure and branding as well.
AdvertiseSpace’s last blog post..Why I hate Google AdSense Part II
Thanks, Chad,
Good point, I didn’t touch on that. But I would think what keeps advertisers coming back would at least be a good CTR.
The point I wanted to get across in the post was that bloggers should look more closely at catering to their advertisers, because that would mean repeat advertisers. I would even go as far as saying that bloggers should create a media kit, no matter how small they are.
You probably have more experience than I with dealing with advertisers on a larger scale, but I personally only start a business with direct marketing and then eventually move into the branding aspect of it. So I guess I’m saying that not many advertisers should be worried about branding, especially if they’re looking to advertise on smaller blogs.
A business with no cash flow isn’t a business for very long, and if you buy up a whole bunch of advertising without testing the response first could sink a business quick. I’m a direct response advertiser by nature, so I guess I’m skewed in that direction.