Get Your Name Out There! Advertising

Blog readership spiked 300% from 2004-2008*

In the olden days (hmmm 10 years ago) the only methods of advertising were television commercials, radio, billboards, newspaper or magazine ads or direct mail. The expense not only included the ad, but also the creative. So, you could expect to pay thousands of dollars just to get your name out there. Not to mention, the cost of direct mail included postage and purchasing a good mailing list. Then you waited for tear sheets or a monthly report of your "spot" rotation...hoping that your commercial found it's way into the day-part that was deemed your target.

The entire world of advertising has been turned on its head with the advent of the computer, blogs, twitter, and websites. Now when we think of advertising we think in terms of banner ads, 125x125, rotating, skyscraper and blinking ads or tweets. We search for blogs that target our market, or reach outside of it to gather customers that may have not noticed us in the past.

How do you choose what type of ad or what blog to place your advertising on? You should first take into account how well maintained the blog is. By maintained, does the blog owner update posts often? Is it visually appealing, or is it difficult to read? If it's hard to read people are not going to remain very long and will probably miss your ad. Does it attract a regular readership, or engage its readers? Are they commenting? The blog owner should be able to provide you with its statistics. Their page rank, total, returning, pageviews and unique traffic. How many people are subscribed to their blog, or receive their RSS feed.

Then the question becomes how do you measure the success of the ads you place on all of these blogs and websites? Now that's where you come in. In the past, advertising might be measured by the number of calls you received after your advertising ran. Or, if you saw a blip in sales just after a direct mail piece was mailed. These same methods will hold true, but if you are selling online, you will also want to connect to google analytics or some other tool to measure your site traffic. You need to keep track of where your ads are and when they run and then compare that to the referring sites and the number of people visiting you from that site.

Keep in mind that sometimes the quantity of people visiting you from the referring site, while important, isn't the only reason to have your ads out there. You are also aiming for name recognition. Consumers need to see you in many different places and many times to feel comfortable with your brand. Once they are comfortable they are more inclined to look further at your product and then make the decision to purchase. Brand recognition also provides you with a valuable tool, people look to you to set the standard for that genre of product.

I know that this can all be very overwhelming and I hope to share more information with you about advertising and how you choose and measure it. I wrote an article a while ago about the Cumulative Effect of Advertising that you may also be interested in.

I would love to know what your thoughts are about advertising on blogs, or your questions. Just comment and I will discuss in an upcoming blog post.

* Jupiter Research Corporation