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Posted: 13 Mar 2008 11:31 PM CDT

What topic do you blog on?

This is the topic of this week’s poll. I’ve chosen a handful of categories that I think most will fit into but if there’s another one that I didn’t include click ‘other’ and add your topic to comments below. Here’s the poll:

Looking forward to seeing the results of this one.

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AdSense Release Ad Manager

Posted: 13 Mar 2008 02:56 PM CDT

I’m about to fly out of Austin but thought I’d post a link to a story that broke this morning on the official AdSense blog - they’re releasing a free Ad Manager service.

I’ve been sitting on this story for a few weeks and even got a sneak peak at it and I think it’s going to fit with the needs of quite a few medium to larger bloggers who want more control over their ad serving. It’s able to be used with a variety of ad networks as well as your own direct sales of ads.

“If you operate a site with remnant ad inventory as well as reserved ad inventory that you sell directly to advertisers, then Ad Manager is for you. It can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure directly-sold and network-based inventory. Google Ad Manager offers a wealth of features, including an intuitive user interface, automated yield optimization, and proven Google speed and reliability.”

The service offers:

Inventory management
Yield optimization
Ad targeting
Trafficking, ad delivery, and order booking
Creatives and rich media management
Reporting
User interface navigation
Account administration

You can learn more about their Ad Manager and apply to be in the beta here.

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Advertise Your Blog: An Interview with a Mystery Blogger

Posted: 13 Mar 2008 02:52 PM CDT

Earlier today I posted about using paid advertising to Promote Your Blog. In the research of that post I interviewed a fellow blogger who I’ve seen use Advertising very effectively to launch numerous blogs. I asked if he’d be willing to speak publicly about his experience and he said he’d do so if he could remain anonymous. He blogs in a couple of quite competitive niches so wanted to keep his tactics under the radar for competitive reasons. I’ll call him ‘Bob’ below:

Darren: Why do you use Advertising on your blogs?

Bob: For me it’s purely as a kick start to a new blog. I find that the hardest thing about getting a blog going is finding the first readers. I’m confident with my ability to write engaging content that will grow the blog through word of mouth - but when you have no one reading your blog to start with it most difficult to start a word of mouth thing happening. Advertising brings in an influx of initial readers to kick start the blog.

Darren: What advertising methods do you use?

Bob: I used to exclusively use AdSense which enabled me to target specific search terms and other sites in my niche but have also started using both StumbleUpon (great for a quick influx of traffic to content that you feel is suited for social media sites) and most recently Facebook (good for targeting local traffic and interest groups).

Darren: What kind of budget would you put into an Advertising Campaign to promote a blog?

Bob: My campaigns have all been under $300 across all ad platforms.

Darren: Do you advertise your blogs beyond a launch period?

Bob: I have tried this but found that the most effective time to advertise was for the week or two around launch. After that I find that a more organic blog growth starts to kick in as your current readers start to pass on word of your blog to others. I do follow up the launch campaigns on occasions when I have a particularly good post for social media by running small StumbleUpon Campaigns but I would only really spend $20 or so on these. I do occasionally also target other blogs in my niche with AdSense which can help with brand awareness - but most of my efforts are around launch time of a new blog.

Darren: Do you have any tips on how to write effective ads?

Bob: Well with StumbleUpon the actual site you link the ad to is the ad itself - so make it great quality content. With Facebook and AdSense you need to target a key need or benefit that someone will be motivated by. Make your ads ‘active’ and where possible ‘personal’. Personal ads are particularly effective on AdSense where you can actually target the readers of particular sites with a message that will catch their attention and drive a response. Also you need to think about the landing page for the ad and how you’ll capture the visitor by getting them to subscribe to your blog.

Darren: What impact has advertising your blogs had in terms of traffic?

Bob: I would not launch a blog these days without some sort of advertising. As I mentioned above, the hardest part of establishing a readership is getting your first readers. By spending just a few hundred dollars on advertising I managed to get the readership of my last blog up to around 300 daily visitors and 500 RSS subscribers (this was the figure a few days after I stopped my campaign). This was partly as a result of one of my StumbleUpon campaigns ‘tipping’ into an organic rush of traffic (the real beauty of SU campaigns over others). Since that time the blog has continued to steadily grow (a few months later it’s now double those figures) and I’ve now broken even (and some) on the initial investment.

Darren: Any last tips?

Bob: Yes, one very important thing that I know you’ve mentioned in your own previous posts about advertising and that is to not spend your money all at once. You can blow money very quickly with advertising by setting up a campaign in any of the ad options I’ve mentioned and expecting it to work first time. They rarely do and you’ll burn through your money in an hour or so and not see any real benefits. Start with a $20 campaign, test how the ad performs, track how many people subscribe and then tweak your ad and the landing page. Run another small campaign and see if the results improve. Tweak it again and run another campaign. If something simply isn’t working - stop doing it. If something does work - keep tweaking til you perfect it and then do it some more.

PS: If you’ve got tips to share on how you’ve advertised your blog effectively feel free to add them in comments below. Also if you’re looking to advertise with StumbleUpon check out my tutorial - Run a StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign for Your Blog.

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Promote Your Blog by Advertising It

Posted: 13 Mar 2008 08:14 AM CDT

Blog-Promotion - Advertising Have you ever considered advertising your blog? Today I want to explore this idea as part of my series of posts on how I’d promote my blog if I was starting from scratch.

Most blog promotion tips that I see given are about growing your blog’s readership quite organically (something I firmly believe in) - however one strategy that I’ve seen more and more bloggers using is to pay for Advertising to give their blog a kick start (particularly in the early days of their blogs).

One of the wonderful things about the space we’re operating in at the moment is that you don’t need hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote your product or service (or blog) these days via advertising.

While I know that for some even a small amount will be out of the reach of some - if I were starting out today as a blogger and wanted to gather an initial audience (or was wanting to expand my audience) I’d consider experimenting with a number of different advertising campaigns.

I know that this goes against the grain for some blogging purists but my approach has always been to invest at least a portion of the money made on my blogs back into improving them - and one way to do this is to invest that money into advertising.

I’ve concentrated my own limited experimenting with advertising in three types of advertising:

StumbleUpon - I’ve written previously about using StumbleUpon Advertising so for an expanded post with tips I’d head there. But in short - the great thing about SU advertising it is that it can start an organic flow of StumbleUpon traffic also. The key is to get your landing page optimized so that StumbleUpon users who see it will vote it up! In this way you kick off the traffic with some cost but then scale it back as organic traffic begins.
AdWords - An oldie but a goodie. The reach of AdWords is enormous as it opens up places to advertise everywhere from Google results pages through to many many thousands of websites on any number of topics. Many bloggers have used this with great effect to launch their blog. Particularly useful is the ability to target specific sites that run AdSense and to develop ads that target those readers specifically. This enables you to target specific ads to specific sites (like John Chow did a year or so back when he advertised here on Problogger with personal messages to my readers).

Facebook Advertising - I experimented with this recently with some success. Facebook Ads allows you to run ads that target certain demographics and interest groups. Ads can either be bought on an impression basis or you can pay for them per click for as little as 0.01 cent per click. I tried both and found that paying per click was a much better way to go as at least that way you’re guaranteed some actual traffic.

Please note - there are many many other ways to advertise your blog if you have a budget. I’ve chosen these three because they allow you to have very small budgets and to target different groups of people by interest and/or demographics.There are of course many other options open to you as a blogger to pay for advertising of your blog. You could use a tool like BlogAds (something I did a few years back) or even buy ad space on another blog through a direct sponsorship deal.

Tips for Advertising Your Blog

There are many smarter people than me around that could give us all some tips on using advertising effectively (please give you tips below) but let me give a few quick tips that I’ve picked up along the way:

Landing Pages not Front Pages
I’ve found that instead of directing people clicking your ads to your blog’s front page that it’s much more effective to send them to a specifically designed landing page. The front page of your blog is a good page for regular readers to see what you’ve been writing lately - but for someone coming to your blog cold from an ad it can be a bit of a random destination. So design a page that is aimed at ‘converting’ these first time readers into regular readers. This page could highlight some of your best content, perhaps give some key selling points as to why they should subscribe and then have a call to action (a way to subscribe to your blog for example). This way you’ll not only get a new visitor to your blog - but you’ll have every chance of them coming back again and again.

Relevancy Relevancy Relevancy
I’m not just repeating myself for emphasis - but because I’ve found that three elements of your ad campaign need to have ‘relevancy’.

1. The Site Displaying Your Ad
2. Your Ad
3. Your Landing Page

The more aligned these three things are the more successful your ad will be. When people run ads that don’t relate to the sites they display on they rarely get clicked. When people click ads and then are led to a page that has little relevance to the ad they get angry and rarely take the action that you want.

Track Your Results
The last thing that I’ll say is that you can very easily spend a lot of money with little results in advertising. As a result it is essential that you know what you want to achieve from your advertising and that you have a way to measure it’s effectiveness. I also take the approach that it’s worth starting out slow with a small campaign to test the waters before pouring much cash into advertising. This enables you to optimize your results without spending much and then to ramp things up when you are confident that things will convert.

Bonus Interview Coming Soon

Later today I’ll be sharing a short interview with a blogger who I’ve seen using Advertising very effectively to launch numerous blogs. They’ll share more on how they use the above strategies to give their blogs a ‘kick start’.

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