Blog Advertising Basics

Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 7:04 am

There are two basic ways to advertise on blogs, but first it’s necessary to realize that demographics and statistics are very different than traditional media and advertising. Even an extremely popular blog may have 50,000 readers which is quite small by many traditional advertising demographics. However blogs, and their audio equivalent, podcasts, are fantastic ways to reach very targeted audiences, i.e. niches.

Targeted niche blogs for blog advertising can be found via blog search engines such as Technorati.com or Google Blog Search.

Want to reach hard core bicycle racers, female marketing professionals, or French speakers interested in backpacking in Southeast Asia? These and just about every other niche are accessible via blogs. The audiences may be small by traditional media measures yet they are highly targeted AND passionate.

1) One tried and true method is to give bloggers free copies of whatever you’d like to promote and some of them will blog about it. Jim Curtin, CEO of software company Win4Lin.com couldn’t get the main stream media remotely interested in writing about his products, but bloggers in the appropriate technical niches are generally ecstatic to receive promo copes and usually blog quite favorably on them. It works for him and many others.
A few book publicists send me new books, and I often review them as all. And I’ve used the “free review copy” method successfully to get coverage (and increase sales) for my books as well.

2) Paid advertising, which falls into two categories:
a) Paid reviews. Some bloggers will review your product for a fee. In general you have little control of what they’ll say, but you can get reviews for perhaps $25 to $500 and up. Most bloggers believe they ethically much specify that the review is a “sponsored review.”

There are some sources for getting paid reviews, most notable PayPerPost.com. Another extremely effectively technique is to directly approach individual bloggers in the proper niches directly and offer them a few dollars for a review — a surprising number of bloggers are willing.

b) Traditional paid advertising, but on blogs. There are companies that can run advertisements on many different blogs for you, like CrispAds.com and b5media.com.
It’s also very possible to contact bloggers directly. I’m often approached by advertisers who want to advertise on my blogs.

Blog advertising is very much in its infancy. It’s starting to grow pretty quickly, although it’s hampered somewhat by a lack of understanding of how blog advertising does and doesn’t work, and often a focus on the wrong metrics. Mass media metrics do not apply to niche media, e.g blogs and podcasts.
We’ve got a long way to go, but blog advertising works. It works differently from traditional advertising, but it works!

By: Ted Demopoulos

Article Directory: www.secretsofsuccessfulblogging.com

By Ted Demopoulos, author of “Blogging for Business” and “What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting”

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