AdesBlog.com

This is a guest-post by Rajaie AlKorani of www.rajaietalks.com. In this post Rajaie discusses how to get private advertisements to your newly launched blog.

Unless your blog brings in thousands of visitors its first day of launching, you’re going to have a pretty tough time attracting new advertisers and filling all those ad spots on your blog. And having eight of them (i.e 125×125 buttons) with “Advertise Here” in bold definitely will not make your life any easier.

To start pumping in the money, you need to provide your sponsors with reasons as to why they should pick your blog from the millions of others. No, they don’t care about your mission or about helping pay your bills. The only thing on their mind is getting the best bang for their buck, and if you can’t help with that, than you’re out of luck.

What if your blog has been bringing in some impressive results for a while which happen to be sky high, and yet the image ads are still empty?

That’s it! When advertisers see all those empty spots, their brains will automatically tell them that - something is wrong with your site! What can you do to get out of this everlasting cycle?

1 - Testimonials
Ask your existing customers for a testimonial. To make your testimonials more credible; include person’s name, the name of the company he/she works for, and the position he/she holds at the company. Also provide a link to their company website and if possible get a picture of them. I’d say that this is the best way to boost your chance of selling anything since it’s real proof given by other people.

2 - Hold A Contest
Everybody likes free stuff, so hold a contest where readers can win free ad spots, this will help fill up the empty spaces. And hopefully they will turn into regular advertisers.

3 - Do A Banner Exchange
Do a banner exchange with someone in your niche, you link to their blog and they link to yours. It is a win-win situation if both of you have empty slots available.

4 - Become An Affiliate
Most websites that sell products have an affiliate program where you earn a percentage of every sale you make. Usually they will provide you with the banners so you’ll have nothing to worry about. So instead of having 8 buttons with “advertise here” word on them, display affiliate banners and make some money at the same time.

5 - Start Exploring
If you have the idea that your sponsors are going to search for you, then think again. It’s your job to hunt down potential sponsors, not theirs. Special promotions and discounts are always welcome ;-)

6 - Be A Nice Guy
Why not just email a friend telling him that you’ve added his site to your “blogroll” or that you’ve given him a free ad spot for the month. This usually pays off in the long run where it helps develop a relationship between you and him.

7 - Don’t Be Irrational
If you just started your blog a couple of days ago, then asking for $500 a paid review isn’t very reasonable. If you want to be taken seriously, then present yourself seriously!

I believe that those are the best ways to start selling private advertisements on your blog. What are some ways you used to sell private advertisements when you first started your blog?

Guys at MarketLeverage.com are quite creative. They have found a novel way to get mentioned on top blogs like problogger (46K+ readers) and shoemoney (16K+ readers) with a small investment that the team themselves will enjoy wearing. They purchased these two blogs’ t-shirts and wore them and sent a picture of the whole team wearing the t-shirts. Guess what? They got dedicated post on both blogs. That’s what we call a win-win situation. MarketLeverage (win), two blogs (win).

Shoemoney t-shirts are just $5.00 each for both men and women, and problogger t-shirts are $17.99 for women and $23.99 for men. So, LeverageMarket spent about $50 on shoemoney and $132 on problogger (unless they bought double logo t-shirts, which are more expensive). It’s a fraction of what you would actually spend to get publicity on these high-traffic blogs, if you were to go through normal conventional way of advertising.

Moral of the post: Be creative!

I am sure many of you know Scribd right? Scribe in their own words: “Scribd is a Silicon Valley startup creating technology that makes it easy to share documents online. You can think of Scribd as a big online library where everyone can publish original content, including you!”

Basically, you can upload your documents and it will be available to other members of scribd, as well as to anybody who searches for them online.

Scribd as a promotion tool

One thing you can use srcibd is - as a promotion tool. In fact, it can be a great promotion tool if you write great, useful articles. Before I wanted to post about this, I gave it a try and uploaded 14 documents of mine to scribd. Eleven of them were photoshop related tutorials and 3 were blog articles. Documents were uploaded on 10th and 11th of February, so has been roughly one month.

As you can see, so far they have been viewed 2053 times. That translates to average 146 views per document. Most viewed article was 356 times, and the least viewed was 27 times. You can view list of all articles here.

Ways to promote your blog on scribd

• First of all, if you write good articles people will click on the author link on that particular article and view your profile. Therefore, you must have a proper profile page. What I mean is, try to put some info about yourself, your picture, and most importantly your blog URL. Start building your brand from your profile page.
• Secondly, end the articles that you published with your blog URL. You can have a one line sentence like “for more articles go to yoursite dot com“.



• Thirdly, try to join groups and communities that are relevant to your niche. If there is no group available in your topic, you can create yourself one.

But most importantly do not spam! Just share your best articles with other scribers and start building your repuation in scribd. start here scribd.com.

I hope you found this article useful. Subscribe to RSS to read upcoming useful articles. click here.

Don’t want to spend money on ReviewMe and similar networks purchasing paid reviews? How about exchanging free reviews with other fellow bloggers then?

Well, ReviewBack does exactly that. You browse among 1,659 blogs in the ReviewBack network, choose a blog that you want your review to appear on, send the owner of the blog a request and if he/she accepts, you write a review about that particular blog on your blog, and he will write a review of your blog on his. Sounds good? Check it out www.reviewback.com

It’s been 12 days since I have joined Entrecard. Within this period, Entrecard brough 162 visitors, that’s about 13 visitors per day. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. I also noticed that people are not really clicking on the banners. I have purchased 2 ads so far (2 more in queue), from these two ads, one was from a high traffic blog that has 13K+ readers (not JohnChow dot com, I don’t want to mention the URL because people might avoid advertising on that blog). Clicks from these two ads were only 7 clicks, that’s about 1 click in every 8 hours.

Due to long waiting period and limited credits, I was not able test my ad performances that well.

I also have to note that, the poor click-through-rates might be due to my button design. I am sure design of the button affects the CTR (click-through-rate) a lot. Therefore, I will need to test it with different button designs after this.

Entrecard Improvements

Since Entrecard is still new (launched 8th Nov), it’s improving almost daily. Recently they have introduced an Entrecard shop where you can purchase “Featured Status”, “Fast Pass” and “Entrecard Stickers”. Featured status costs you 200 credits, and will make your button stand out from the crowd, with gold borders (see screenshot).

Fast pass costs you 300 credits, and it allows you to jump the queue. Fast pass can only be used once. The question is in a life-time? or in a year, month, week?

Entrecard is also in discussion with its members on how to monetize it without annoying them. I think they are taking a very good approach, consulting with its members. So far they have suggested 3 possibilities:

• Option 1: Upgrade to “pro” account
• Option 2: Sitewide advertising via “Sponsored Inbox”
• Option 3: Take a slice of the impressions

I had proposed making money through selling credits (to its members) instead, but let’s see what they will decide as the final monetization option.

Conclusion

In summary, Entrecard is doing quite good. I would say it’s a must tool for new blogs. Because unlike other services (like BlogRush) it does work, and it does bring traffic every day. Even if it is not much, but there is a constant traffic flow to your blog from Entrecard.

I will still be using it for the next few weeks and then decide if I want to continue. Have you joined Entrecard yet? If yes, how is it performing? How is your ad’s click-through-rates?

I decided to test Entrecard. I have integrated the button beside the Top Commentators section at the sidebar.

If you do not know what Entrecard is, it’s simply a banner exchange program. You display others’ banners on your blog and in return you get to advertise on others’ blogs. Everytime someone advertises on your blog, you earn credits. These credits later can be used to buy advertisements from other blogs. Actually the system is more complex than that (you can earn credits in many ways), but in simple terms it’s a banner exchange program. You can read more on how it works here.

After I signed up and put up the code on my blog, the advertisers started to flood in. After 20 minutes all 10 spots (for 10 days) were full (sold out). You know why people flood the new blogs? Because in the beginning it is very cheap (only 1 credit) to advertise on the new blogs. Later, the system will start to adjust the price depending on the demand and the number of people drop their cards on your blog. As you can see below, the price has changed to 3 credits (it’s just changed to 5 credits).

Does it bring any traffic?

It’s too early to tell, but if I were to state the stats only, then so far within half an hour it brought 19 clicks. I will have to see at least few days before I can say anything on the performance. Also as you can see these clicks are from entrecard and not from other blogs.

As you can see below 19 clicks, I have not bought any advertisements from other blogs. So, actually the performance of the system would also be based on the blogs that you are advertising. Some blogs bring tons of clicks, and some not. So you have to know where to advertise. In the beginning you don’t have credits, so you won’t be able to buy any advertisements until you have accumulated some credits.

Even after you have accumulated tens of credits, you will need hundreds of credits more if you want to advertise on popular blogs like JohnChow.com. So it might take you some time, before you get your banner on those popular blogs.

My Recommendations to Entrecard

Based on my limited usage, I would like to suggest few features to Entrecard.

• Introduce “buy credits” feature - this would allow new members to buy credits if they want. Otherwise it might take few days to weeks for someone to accumulate 200+ credits.
• Allow members to convert their credits into $$ - if user has too much credits, he/she might simply remove the code from his blog (i.e stop using the buttons). After all, he/she will have enough credits to spend on buying ads from other blogs. But if the user have the option to make money, he/she will want to use it even more effectively. Because the more you use it, the more money you will make.
• When the spot is full, allow people to advertise anyway - currently if the spot is full, you cannot advertise on that particular blog. You can only check back the next day, most probably to find that the spot has been filled again. I think it’s better to let people at least to get in the queue. So if the spot is full (all 10 of them), let the interested person to queue and be the 11th. This way, next day, he can automatically become the 10th. Why loose advertisers when it’s difficult to get them in the first place?
• Rotate multiple ads in one day - this would allow to clear the bottleneck that the system is having at the moment. Also, I think having 2-3 buttons rotating in one day will be more interesting to the blog visitors.
• Introduce referral system - this would encourage members to promote entrecard, as a result entrecard’s number of users would increase. More users means, more banner exchange, and that is good for everybody.

I will update you guys again on its performance after 1-2 weeks. Till then you can join Entrecard and advertise your blog on AdesBlog (while it’s still cheap, only 5 credits). You can also read Entrecard blog here - entrecard.com/blog