Advertising On Blogs

Published under Advertiorial Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

All blog owners are content publishers. Some blog owners display advertising to help pay the cost of publishing content. So, before describing ways to get a regular income from advertising on blogs, let’s start with some background.

Blog content can be generally described as relevant to a market, a niche or a product. The more specific a topic is, the more relevant it becomes to a particular product or service. Advertising on blogs is about context or how meaning is related to content and relevance. For example, advertising men’s shoes to women will not be as effective as ads for women’s shoes.

Keywords are used to describe the relevance of content. So contextual advertising is about making subtle distinctions. Search advertising is a starting point. Keywords in your blog are used to attract search traffic. Keywords in ads are used to convert that traffic into a click. Measuring the click through rate (CTR) of advertising on blogs is important to blog owner and advertiser for different reasons.

Every click on an ad is a desired action. Advertisers measure ad clicks to determine the cost per action or CPA. Advertisers pay for advertising in a variety of ways. The most popular is pay per click even though PPC is not always the most effective way for an advertiser or publisher to earn money. For PPC advertising on blogs to be effective, other forms of CPA advertising must also be used.

Publishers can use CTR to determine keywords that convert. While PPC attracts visitors, the CTR indicates ad relevance. When you know the types of products your visitors are interested in, then you can insert higher paying CPA ads. There is a big difference between PPC that pays pennies per click and CPA revenue that pay dollars for actions from advertising.

Another option for income from advertising on blogs is from direct ad space sales. Although direct sales to advertisers can earn high revenues, they also require significant effort to arrange. Advertisers need metrics like CPM, CPC and CPA to calculate earnings or eCPA. High traffic sites are effective pricing models for such measures because of traffic volume.

Another ad pricing model is called tenancy. The payment is based on displaying ads for a specified period of time. For example if you are not getting 1000 visitors a month, then billing on cost per thousand or CPM basis would mean the ad would run longer than a month. So to get a regular monthly income from advertising on blogs, tenancy may be a better pricing strategy.

There are two important software tools for managing your advertising. The first is an ad server that is used to manage the insertion and tracking of advertiser and publisher inventory. The other tool I use is for multi variable testing. Both types of software track clicks to the keyword level. The server is used to manage delivery and testing is used to refine content and placement relevance.

The purpose of advertising on blogs is to earn a regular income. The start up effort to install and use an ad server will position you to sell ad space on your blog. As your traffic increases, and measurement data starts to indicate trends, you can refine your blog content and ad content for more relevance and income. When you think of ads as relevant content also, then using multivariate testing will increase the value of your campaigns.

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