Duncan over at Blog Herald has a good guide to Promoting your blog with advertising where he looks at Google’s Adwords, the BlogAds system, smaller advertising firms and direct advertising on other blogs.
I’ve used Adwords twice and like the idea of it but had pretty average results. Apart from that I’ve never advertised any of my blogs. Having said this I’m interested to hear others experiences. Do you advertise? When, how, what were the results?
Hi Darren. Yes, I tried out paid advertising on a few individual high traffic blogs for a new gadget site I just launched. So far, the traffic has been nice. A lot better than I expected at about 700 uniques a day and 1100 page views.
I did it mostly to give the site a shot in the arm right off the bat while building up the initial content and a respectable base of subscribers. As soon as I get the site moved to a dedicated server I plan on doing heavier promotion through paid ads, cross promotion, press releases, etc. and setting up a few incentives programs to attract a lot more inbound links.
I don’t expect the ad costs to pay off right away, but rather consider them a long term investment. All in all, things are working better than expected so far though, which is always a good thing ;-)
I advertise using Adsense text ads using the vertical banner option. I found that Adsense link units do not work too well since users have to click twice in order for you to generate revenue from them. I also have tried to explore other advertising options that include paid advertising but I have found that for blogs they are quite expensive and will not do much in return. Also blogs are harder to use as a medium of advertising because of their controversial topics to which advertisers are careful to subscribe to. If you generate lots of unique hits and have a site of sound integrity then maybe paid advertising and and direct advertising is probably for you.
since my audience is predominantly Indian, I have just last week started using Rediff Pay4Clicks.. far costlier than google adwords (Rs.15 min per click (approx 33 cents) plus Rs.3 ‘rent’ per day), but it gives me Indian audience.. cannot comment too much on performance and traffic quality since it’s been only a couple of days since I started it, also it’s for a niche website (actuarial)..
I am planning to use adwords for my stock related site http://www.stockpk.com – haven’t thought of using adwords for the blog yet.
Hello,
I have been looking into this since my site (http://botchlife.com) just started a couple of weeks ago. I just dont know wether to go with Adwords or Yahoo or a little bit of both. I will experiment with both and see if I get any good results.