SeaWaves Blog

The holy grail of advertising and marketing these days is to utilize the influence of the blogosphere. One method is to use social media to gain influence on key distribution points.

But if social media isn’t conducive to the message that you are trying to market, you may need to turn to more traditional advertising. So how do you advertise on blogs without wasting money?

At the end of the day, the key is to identify your goals and then do a careful cost/benefit analysis.

If your goal is to brand a new product or service, then you should use a popular blog advertising service like BlogAds sidebar ads or PerformancingAds 125×125 blog ads. There are three things you need to consider when purchasing an ad on one of these sites:

1. Location of the ad on the site

It does you very little good to have an ad that’s hidden, out of view, at the bottom of the blog. You want the ad to be front and center, as much as possible. For sidebar ads, this means the ad should be visible when first loading the site.

2. Influence of the blog

You want to target blogs that have a high daily readership of devoted fans. Look for sites that have a lot of traffic and seem to be fairly well known in their topic. You can use directories like EatonWeb to find the best ranked blogs in any particular category.

3. Cost

Sometimes you can get more bang for your buck by targeting a large number of B-list and C-list blogs rather than the A-listers. If the A-listers are demanding too much for their premium spots, then you can go straight to your target audience by spending your ad budget on the B-list and C-list blogs.

The important thing about branding is that you want to reach critical mass. You want everyone who reads about your topic to be familiar with your brand.