Posted by kexbrown on December 7, 2008
Do you have a great landing page for your blog? Or, do you drop everybody at the home page and hope they click with something on the page? Professional organizations and big corporations don’t leave the landing page to accidental interaction. They plan the landing page with purpose and foresight making it an interactive tool to keep visitors and make new customers.
Is that what you do with your blog? Why do you want visitors? Do you want them to read your blog? Do you have a visitor goal in mind when you advertise? Are you trying to get new subscribers or people that might click an Adsense Ad?
The first thing you want is to have a goal in mind. If you are selling bicycles then make sure your ad mentions bicycles. Then make the landing page have the same look and feel as the ad that drew the visitor to your site in the first place. Have similar colors, font types, and offers. The worst thing you can do is entice someone to your blog and then have they think, “How did I get here and what did I click? I thought this was a site about bicycles.”
Do you drop everybody at the home page and hope they click with something on the page? Many bloggers do this so you are not alone. I would like to recommend you find a great article you have written. Maybe it’s a how to article or an especially moving personal situation. An article that was popular and you received Diggs or Stumbles or many comments.
Why Showcase Your Best Articles?
Why would you showcase your best articles? Because this article is indicative of your best writing. You draw the readers in and then you find they begin to look around at the other articles you have written. They will read one, two or more articles. They will eventually find your home page, but it doesn’t have to be immediately. If you are on vacation and you have the standard “I am on vacation, will be back soon.” article then those people that landed on your home page will never come back.
What if they are drawn into a deeply personal emotional experience that shows the real you? They will want more. They will look for similar articles on your site. They will click to find more background to that first article they read. These readers will want to find out more about this problem you wrote about and are more likely to subscribe in some fashion.
Here is a sample of an ad designed to bring bloggers into an article. There are many articles on blogging success on this site. But, the home page tends to be scattered with articles that may tend to not attract everyone. But, this compelling ad leads the reader into the article. If they like this article then you can bet they will want more.
If you are selling something then you must have a strong landing page. Detail your offer but keep the page clean and friendly. Don’t throw everything you sell at them all on one page. When you go to Amazon do they list the 400,000 products they offer all on their home page? No, they have separate landing pages for specific offers or products.
You should follow their lead. Create a page that makes your likely buyers want to learn more about your offer or product. A great sales page can be simple bullet points to attract interest to dig deeper into your product offering or a long sales letter that is personal and highlights all the important points that makes this the most important product in the person’s life.
I am not going to recommend a long sales letter or a short letter. I am just going to recommend you have a landing page that does what you need it to do. You qualify your customer; do they need your product? You gain additional interest and then you close the sale.
Today, is a great day to evaluate your advertising and your landing page. Are you getting the results you desire? Have you tested different landing pages for your ads? Any good advertiser worth their weight in gold will tell you that testing makes the difference.
Posted by kexbrown on November 23, 2008
Yes, that’s right. I am holding a contest to guess when we will reach 700,000 AD Views as measured by the counter in the upper right. Here is a chance for you to see the power and reach that an Ad on the Adgitize network of publishers can pull for you and your blog.
Can you imagine the interest and attention your blog will get if your blog ad is part of 700,000 ad views in a month? Don’t you think you will get more traffic being part of an advertising network with 700,000 ad views every 30 days? What are you willing to do to have your blog ad be a part of a network with 700,000 ad views?
Why choose Adgitize to grow your blog and get more traffic? Do you like the healthy mix of different bloggers in the Adgitize ad network that will encourage new readers to enjoy your words? Are you looking for writers and bloggers with similar interest and goals to interact with and maybe partner with some day?
It doesn’t matter if you started your blog to teach, complain, spout off, practice your writing or to sell someone something; the Adgitize network is a great place to start to grow your blog. It is like planting flowers in the spring time. You begin your blogging discourse and then you desire others to read your work or view your art or see photos of your children, pets or vacations. You want traffic and ads on Adgitize can bring you more traffic.
Now back to the contest. The contest is for current members or new members. The only goal is to guess when our little counter in the right hand corner say’s, “Total Ad Views Shown Last 30 Days 700,000.” It took us about 20 days to reach 350,000. Will it be faster or slower till we double that number? What do you think?
Here is how to enter.
- You must be a publisher in our network. (ie. you must be displaying an Adgitize Ad Group)
- Your guess must occur at least five days before we actually reach 700,000 ad views.
- You must place your guess in our forum and it must contain a date and a time on it for Chicago Time. I will be evaluating all guesses based on the World Clock. EXAMPLE I guess Adgitize will surpass 700,000 ad views on December 24th at 3:07PM. Minutes is the lowest time we will accept.
- The winning guess must be before the time it happens. (ie, if we pass 700,000 at 1pm and your guess is at 1:05pm then you will not win. )
- Each participant can guess 3 times as new information comes in each day.
Prizes
Pretty easy right? The winner is the blogger who get’s closest without going over. I will also take anyone who tries to guess and pick one random winner. We will give away two FREE ads on the Adgitize Network.
So click the FORUM link on this article and give me your best guess. Become part of a community of bloggers interested in forming a better blog environment for all. Good luck.
Posted by kexbrown on November 16, 2008
I was thinking about CPM and web ad measurement the other day. Is CPM a proper measurement when talking about advertising on the web?
The term CPM or cost per thousand impressions originated back in the old days of newspapers and magazines. It was a way to measure the effectiveness of your advertising dollars. It meant that when you placed an ad in a magazine such as Time magazine you knew how many copies were to be sold or delivered. In those days you could tell what kind of readership a magazine received by how many copies of their magazine were in circulation.
If the magazine or newspaper had a circulation of 100,000 copies you could kind of guesstimate the readership of the periodical. Not all the weekly publications would get delivered or sold. Some would end up being destroyed because the week passed, a new issue was published and the old issues lost their effectiveness.
But, if you were comparing Newsweek to Time magazine you could look at their publication figures and get a sense of the true reach of your advertisement. Then it was a matter of taking the magazine’s circulation figures and determining the cost per thousand of the ad.
It is important to note that for large and successful publications there is an auditing process that occurs to verify that these numbers are legitimate. These magazines are sent through the mail and the US Postal Service offers a discount to large magazine publishers. But, to get the discount the Postal Service requires the publishers to perform a circulation audit. Postal inspectors get to look at the publication numbers and how many don’t get delivered or purchased. If the magazine refuses to this audit then they don’t get the discount. If they lie about the audit then it is a felony and they go to jail.
But, I maintain that the CPM figure for web measurement is corrupt, defective and inadequate for today’s bloggers. Why you ask? Because there is no auditing taking place. Today’s blog publisher could state that they have 100,000 page views and you have to take their word for it. Then the blog publisher could sit at their desk each day and hit the refresh button 100,000 times.
Was it 100,000 readers or one reader 100,000 times? Is it the same reader over and over or 100,000 unique visitors? In the old newspaper days, the circulation number was the number of published copies or subscribed copies. The actual readership could have been twice the actual number of published copies. Let’s say Bill subscribes to Time magazine. He reads the copy when he arrives home from work. Then his wife takes a moment the next day to peruse some articles. Finally, the children are doing a report for school and open it up for some facts and quotes for their report.
As bloggers, don’t we count that same person over and over as our circulation number? We never quote a circulation of 1,000 a day. No, we state the figure as a circulation of 30,000 per month. It sounds more impressive.
If 30,000 separate people were represented in that number then it could be more impressive. But, if it is really 800 of the same people reading your blog day after day with a couple of hundred looky Lous filling out the rest of the numbers, then your circulation is really 1,000. Your readership might be higher as articles are sent to friends and such.
So, as an advertiser wondering what your cost per thousand is, do you measure it to the 30,000 monthly figure or the more accurate 1,000 daily number? I say the 1,000 number is more accurate and then each month you could increase that to reflect the one time daily visitors.
You might think you are getting a real deal at a CPM of $2, but in reality you are paying 30 times more than you should for your ad views. I think Google Analytics will help in the long term to audit blog numbers, but it will take time. You can measure unique visitors with Google Analytics and you can feel confident that those numbers are relatively accurate. But, for the average blog trying hard to win your ad dollars, be careful of the real numbers. Ask for audited figures and see what they send you.
With all this preaching about audited numbers you are probably saying Adgitize must have a wonderful auditing system in place. But, the truth is we don’t have an audited system right now. We have the monthly ad views number in the upper right and that is not an audited number. It is an accurate representation of the number of times our ads have been shown on our Member’s blogs.
I do think we have an excellent reporting system for advertisers in our network. We show two sets of numbers. One is gross numbers of each of your ads and the number of times they were viewed and how many clicks they received. The second set is the name of each blog your ad was shown and how many times it was shown and how many clicks you received from that blog.
If you see a blog that has performed well, then you can get further audited verifications of those numbers from Compete, Alexa and Google Analytics. But, that is also why we don’t really sell hard on CPM for our blog member ads. We have one simple low price of $14 a month. You can determine the real value of that price to you. I will say, that your brand will get a lot of views over the course of a month. If your ad is effective you will get many new visitors to your blog.
Try it for a month and see for yourself if you are getting value out of the Adgitize Network of blog publishers. I think if you advertise once you will continue!
Posted by kexbrown on November 13, 2008
I was surfing the internet today and I looked at some of the ads and ad services that are out there. Then I compared the cost of advertising at some sites with advertising on the Adgitize network. Here is what I found.
According to Turnip of Power, see his article Changing Marketing Forever, the cost for 500 page views on Entrecard is $12. For that same page on CMF ADS you will pay $2.50 per thousand page views.
I am currently running an ad on AdToll and it has cost me $29 so far for 6 days worth of Page views and clicks.
That same ad is running on Adgitize right now for 47 cents a day or $14 a month. The cost per thousand page views is currently running about $1.16 per thousand. But, as you can see by the graphic in the upper right, our page views per day are increasing steadily and the cost per thousand on an ad will decrease.
So, where can the best advertising value be found? I recommend Adgitize for your Ad dollars. You will get some great ad views and new customers that you haven’t reached before. Plus, as we continually get new publishers joining everyday your market reach will continue to increase. Try it today!