Selling Ads on Your Blog: Perception is Value

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One of my favourite stories to tell people looking to make money from selling ads on their website is an experience I had in doing the same. It was in the middle of my professional blogging career when I was tasked to help sell some advertising inventory on some sites.

Their traffic was good, and they were well recognized in their niche and so I assumed it would be an easy sell. I worked with someone on creating a marketing package to promote the inventory, and started contacting various businesses. I can’t remember the exact pricing we pushed forward, but it was something like $100 for the month. We contacted dozens of companies and got little response back.

I was scratching my head pretty hard after that. I assumed that having such a low price for our advertising space would have had people lined up to take their piece and promote their brand.

A little over two months later, traffic was the same, but we needed an injection of revenue. We adjusted all of our prices and contacted many of the same companies. This time, we requested something to the tune of $500 for a month of banner advertising space. To our surprise, we were able to sign up over half a dozen companies to promote their product.

What had changed? It wasn’t the blogs we had available. It wasn’t the advertising rules or size. The biggest change had been in our pricing. At the time, we didn’t realize it, but our initial request was set-up in such a way that we weren’t showing value, but instead cheapness. The people we approached must have initially thought that there was something inherintly wrong with our sites if we were selling such low cost ad placements.

Coming back, we started valuing our blogs and what we were offering, and in turn, so did our potential advertisers.

Advertising space is one of those odd things that have no real value except what you and the market place on it. It is a game of supply and demand as well as perceived value. If you can make something without any real value into something valuable enough to support your income goals, then you have an important, marketable skill.

Casale Media: Advertising Network Review

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l Casale Media: Advertising Network ReviewOpening its doors in 2003, Casale Media is one of a large number of companies managing the advertising inventory for a wide number of websites. Casale works with popular sites like eBay Canada to fill their open advertising spots. Casale works with a network of 3,000 sites, and is able to target advertising based on a number of factors including geography, demographic and topic.

Before Working With Casale

For years now, I’ve been seeing Casale tables and booths at many industry events. I’ve been interested in their offerings, but never took the leap to actually work with them. I assumed they were like every other advertising network: high price, bad results.

One of the responsibilities I used to have was to sell advertising space, and after some sour experiences with other agencies, I gave up on trying to use an advertising network to sell space on blogs. They always took too large of a share, and gave very little in return. Also, quality control on advertising seemed to be low in importance.

Despite running into some nice people from Casale, I never had a huge need for their services.

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Focus on the Meaning Not the Spelling

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While I’ll admit that I’ve become a bit strict when it comes to my younger cousins and their ability to spell, I still believe that there is too much focus and attention directed towards proper spelling and grammar online. Yes, it would be ideal if everything was perfect and correct, but it is increasingly rare to read a blog and not have some mistake stick out like a sore thumb.

I am the first to admit that I find it amusing that I failed high school English, and went on to become a full time writer. Thankfully, in my career, there were more supporters than detractors. People seemed to enjoy my opinions and were willing to overlook many of my spelling and grammar mistakes.

For those out there hunting down mistakes, instead of commenting on the specific post, and making your “superiority” a public event, why not contact the blog author through their comment form and let them know. There is a difference between helping and showboating, and rubbing people’s noses in their mistakes only causes friction.

Besides, at the end of the day, it is about the sharing of ideas. Focus on the meaning of an article, and work towards real communication and the web will be a better place.

Note: That doesn’t mean that bloggers should get lazy about their spelling. with spell checking added to most modern browsers and office software, it doesn’t hurt to check your work. There is little excuse for five and less character words being misspelled.

Cool WordPress Links – Feb 8, 2012

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I am a huge WordPress fan, and as I browse the web, I’m constantly seeing cool things, and I hope to share those with you as I come across them. Though these posts are just as much about letting me have an archive of potentially useful links.

Advanced Tutorial – Creating a Filterable Portfolio with WordPress and jQuery – This is a fairly advanced tutorial with a great deal of code, but the result is stunning. If you are looking for a way to create a visually interesting portfolio with filtering, you’ll want to check out this huge tutorial.

Intermediate Tutorial – Quick Tip: Display Excerpts of Child Pages with a Shortcode – A relatively easy tutorial, this makes it easy for you to show off some text on your sub-pages in a parent page. This would have been very useful back when I was using WordPress as a content management system with thousands of pages.

Advanced Tutorial – How To Use Custom Post Types To Organize Online Marketing Campaigns – A great tutorial with a great deal of code, Smashing Magazine shows how to extend WordPress into a marketing management system.

Podcast – WP Late Night 002: The Usual Suspects – Listen to Brad Williams, Dre Armeda, and Ryan Imel discuss the latest WordPress news in their second episode of what I hope will be a long running series of podcast discussions from some WordPress heavy hitters.

WordPress History – A History of Default WordPress Themes – While I didn’t get to use the very first WordPress theme, I have used each one since then, with the 2011 theme being one of my favourite WordPress themes. This post is a great look at how far we’ve come in default theme designs.

WordPress.com – New Themes: Splendio and Suburbia – I used to work closely with Elena of Design Disease, and I’m always happy to see her work. If you are a WordPress.com user, you’ll want to take a look at these new themes.

Why Wasn’t I More Succcessful as a Problogger?

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Recently, I put up a post entitled, My Time Line – Rise and Fall of a Problogger, where I discussed year by year how my career progressed. What I didn’t really remark on was why I wasn’t more successful?

Focused on Money

When I first started blogging as a career, I was young and I hadn’t really spent much time in the work world. I didn’t have much debt, but what I did have was a relationship with a woman that had some pretty lofty life and career goals. I sacrificed elements of my long term career for short term monetary gains that allowed us to buy a house, and for her to go back to school.

This focus on earning more money lead to some mistakes in my blogging career that took me out of the community, and soured my emotional state when it came to blogging.

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Developing a New Site – Planning is Key

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At work, I’m currently part of a project team that is getting ready to develop a new service based website. While I would love to discuss the specifics of my project at work, I’m not going to for fear of coming into conflict of the NDA that I have signed. Previously, when I’ve been tasked with such things, I pick out a few pieces that are standard, such as a user management system, and begin development while the final feature set is being fleshed out. With the complexity of the project we’ve been working on, there has been a great deal of planning undertaken and consideration given before a single line of code has been written.

It all started with a simple idea. From there, we had many brainstorming sessions based around the idea from the point of view of the business objectives. Expanding upon that, we dove into what we would need to provide users and how they would approach and use the site. Then we changed both of these lists into a basic set of features which were expanded upon a few different times. We started determining which features were absolutely needed for the first version of the site, and which ones should and could be added later.

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The Most Important Skill: Marketing

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For the last ten years, I’ve been realizing more and more that the most important skill that anyone can work to acquire is an understanding of marketing. While I don’t consider myself a sales person, I have a much better understanding today regarding the motivations behind buying something, and that has lead me to many amazing opporuntities.

A while back, I was asked to host a simple photography event. I was to help a group of people better understand landscape photography, something I was not an expert in. I did some research, and with my passion in photography, and some quick trials before the event, I was able to share some tips and tricks, while providing the group with the confidence they needed to take some amazing shots.

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