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Archive for the ‘Online Media’ Category

Promoting Your Blog

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

By Adam Ward

Today I saw a forum thread where a blogger said he learned how to put posts on his blog the first year, monetize his blog the second year, and market it in the third year. At first it seemed flippant, but I realized he was being truthful. The more I thought about it, the more it struck a chord with me. I imagine this is a common path for most bloggers, at least those that are blogging for business reasons.

Starting a blog couldn’t be easier. There are many tools out there people can use to start blogging in minutes. When I started, I recall seeing a “What should I blog about?” question with the advice to just start writing about something. Once you start, you can then catch your stride, as well as take some time to add plugins and other design elements to your blog. I think that’s good advice.

Monetizing a blog is also pretty easy to do once you’ve made a few posts. It costs nothing for a blogger to sign up for an account on one of the many affiliate networks, such as Share a Sale, grab the code for an advertiser’s offer, and put it on the blog. Now, monetizing a site and making money are two completely different things. If nobody reads your blog, nobody will click through your ads, and you won’t make a dime.

That’s where marketing the blog comes in. I realize not every blogger is trying to make money, but those who do it as affiliate marketers do (I saw a forum post once that said, “Why bother blogging if you don’t expect to make any money?”), and business bloggers (myself included) have kind of a dual purpose in wanting to disseminate useful information that others can use, but also do it in the hopes that readers will become familiar with their business or product, have a greater amount of trust in them because of the comfort level built through reading the blog, and possibly become a customer. But even people who blog for fun and don’t ever expect to make a dime want to know that at least someone out there is reading their blogs.

I started this blog about seven months ago. I got busy with our eSilverBullet development for a few months, so didn’t have a chance to blog. But now that I’m back at it I realize I’m at the stage of needing to promote it. I’m not looking to monetize it by putting ads on it, so I can skip that step, but up until now the blog has been mostly hidden, with no readers whatsoever. Since I’ve been cobbling together advice from the far corners of the Internet on how, exactly, I should market this blog, I thought I’d share what I’ve encountered here. If you’re reading this post someday, that means I was at least nominally successful.

Linking to Other Blogs

One way to possibly get noticed, starting from day one of your blog, is to link to someone else’s blog. This doesn’t automatically create a quid pro quo (i.e. they feel obligated to link to your blog), or improve your page rank in the search engines, but it might get that blogger to look at your blog, and possibly leave a comment. If you use WordPress, linking to another WordPress blog in the body of your post will automatically ping the blog you linked out to. That means 1) they’ll be aware you linked to them and 2) a snippet of your blog post right around the link may show up in the comments area of their blog, without you even having to visit their site.

If a blogger allows trackbacks, you can copy the URL of their post (clicking the trackbacks link will show you the correct URL you should copy in your browser’s address field) and paste it in the Trackbacks field just under your content when you are creating a new post. That is similar to linking to another WordPress blog in your post. It essentially alerts the blogger that you’ve written a post and have referenced their post. If the blogger approves it, that snippet will show up along with all the other comments for their post.

Commenting on Other Blogs

Anytime you leave a comment on someone else’s blog post, you have the option of entering the URL to your blog. If your comment gets approved, people reading your comment can choose to see where you’re coming from. It doesn’t guarantee they’ll come to your site, but it is always a possibility. Although you’ll want to put some thought into the comment you leave, you’ll still be able to leave comments faster than writing new blog posts and referencing that blog using a trackback.

Those Pesky No Follow Backlinks

I’m sure you’re aware that the more links pointing to your site (referred to as backlinks), the higher esteem search engines place on you, right? But before you start spreading comments on every blog you see, be aware that just because a reader may see the backlink, a search engine may not. By default, WordPress sticks a piece of code called No Follow on the URL of each comment left. If you look at the page source (Ctrl+U for Firefox on a PC), if you see a rel=”nofollow” code listed, that means search engines won’t count that as a link, ergo they won’t effect a site’s page ranking.

If you think you’ll be checking source codes often to see whether a site does No Follow or not, you may want to download the NoDoFollow add-on for Firefox, which will color code No Follow links and links that aren’t No Follow (called Do Follow).

To test this out, go to Yahoo’s Site Explorer and type in the URL for your blog. You’ll see which backlinks Yahoo attributes to your site. If you’ve made a comment to a blog and its backlink URL was assigned No Follow, that blog’s site will not show up in the Yahoo search. However, if the blog doesn’t use No Follow, you will see the site show up.

To No Follow or Not to No Follow

If you use WordPress, comments to your blog posts will all include the No Follow attribute. That means nobody who adds a comment to your blog will get a backlink to their site, at least as far as search engines are concerned. If you would like to reward readers (and possibly given them an incentive even) for posting comments, you can choose to turn off the No Follow attribute. To do that, you have to install the WordPress plugin called Do Follow, since there is no WordPress setting that allows you to turn off the No Follow code. If you search plugins for “do follow” you’ll see this plugin at the top of the list. That plugin just removes all rel=”nofollow” code from your comments, rather than replacing those references with rel=”dofollow” code, (the plugin is called Do Follow, but there is actually no code called Do Follow).

If you turn off the No Follow attribute, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get more spam, or that comments will automatically be approved. You still have the discretion of approving all pending comments. I have not noticed an increase in spam since activating the Do Follow plugin, so I’m guessing either my Akismet plugin is catching any increases in spam, or I’m just not getting more.

Digg, Social Sites and Directory Listings

Although the best backlinks are created by other people (who essentially give a third-party endorsement to your blog), there are plenty of sites where you can link to your blog. If you have an account on Digg or Delicious, for example, you can mark blog posts you like, including your own. Before you link to your own blog on these sites, however, check to see whether they are No Follow sites. Digg is a No Follow site, so just because you link to all your blog posts from there doesn’t mean you’ll get credit for that from the search engines. So if you’re just looking for real eyeballs from those links, think about the pros and cons of possibly being the only person “digging” your own posts, from a public-perception standpoint.

There are some directories that list only Do Follow blogs. So if you have installed and enabled the Do Follow plugin, you might want to go to a site like dofollow.info and submit a link to your blog. You’ll have to verify that it is a Do Follow site. If you get listed on these directories, other bloggers looking to leave comments on Do Follow sites can find your site on these directories, and come to your site looking to leave comments.

Will This Work?

I know bloggers often act like the experts on everything. I’m not. Promoting this blog is new territory for me. My hope is that I’ve been able to consolidate some pertinent information on this subject here, which you can then try to utilize. I’m going to start using what I’ve learned right now, and we can both find out whether this works.

Tags: Backlinks, Blogs, Directories, Do Follow, Marketing, No Follow
Posted in Blogging, Online Media | 11 Comments »

Is Privacy Dead?

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

By Adam Ward

There is a blog post by Janet Meiners Thaeler called Google Suggest & Your Reputation that took me back to Journalism 101 in college. As budding reporters, we learned the difference between public figures (e.g. politicians) and private citizens. We learned that the press was almost always protected against writing something about public figures in the paper (even if it turned out to be false), but we had to be careful about what we said—and why—about private citizens (even if it was true). Writing a damaging story about a private person for no apparent reason was cause for a lawsuit. The underlying reason for all that was privacy, and the unspoken need to protect the reputation of the average person. If the mayor is having an affair, it is fair game to report it. But don’t you dare write about the Mr. Nobody down the street having an affair, unless he does something newsworthy and the affair is applicable to the story.

Thaeler writes that a colleague of hers was denied an interview after the interviewee did a Google search for her colleague. Right or wrong, accurate or correct, information picked up from the Internet is influencing our decisions. And we don’t always have control over it.

In the pre-Internet age, someone could choose to remain a private person. The reason why politicians weren’t protected as well against libel and slander is because they chose to put themselves into the limelight, where privacy doesn’t exist. Now it appears that privacy doesn’t exist for the average Joe, either. Thaeler quotes the inventor of the cell phone saying, “Sorry, privacy is a thing of the past.” I certainly hope not.

As far as reputation goes, I know I can’t control what others say about me online, just like I can’t control what people say about me offline. Unfortunately, online commentary stays there forever. All I can do is control what I do and say online, which is why I recently deactivated my Facebook account. I felt like I no longer had control.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responds to a question during a news conference at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto

That takes me back to college. With college students today caring less about the information they put online than previous generations, I wonder what professors in Journalism 101, or Media Ethics are teaching today, and whether it is falling on deaf ears.

Tags: Facebook, Google, Libel, Privacy
Posted in Online Media, Traditional Media | No Comments »

Google Sues Utah Company over Alleged Online Scams

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

By Adam Ward

One of the business sites of internet search engine Google Inc is shown on a computer screen in Encinitas

I’ve often wondered why nobody seems to do anything about online offers that are clearly scams. I picked apart one such scam in this post. But except for questioning the publishers’ decision to run such ads, I didn’t make a call to action. It looks like Google has taken action in a big way.

The Salt Lake Tribune today reported on Google suing Pacific Webworks of Salt Lake City for using Google’s name to sell fake products. I’m sure you’ve seen similar offers: “Download our toolkit for free to make tons of money from home using the Internet.”

I don’t know anything about Pacific Webworks, so I can’t comment on them specifically. But I can comment on these types of offers because they are, unfortunately, so prevalent online. The kicker for these types of offers is, often, 1) they don’t have a legitimate product, 2) unsuspecting consumers who download the product don’t realize it isn’t legitimate until after they’ve downloaded it, and 3) even though it was free to download, it comes with an ongoing monthly charge that hits the consumer’s credit card unless the consumer cancels it.

Google got involved in this one because it felt its name was being used to market products that it had no control over. Google has a right to protect its brand regardless. But when it comes to protecting its brand for products that are fraudulent, which carries a greater chance of tarnishing Google’s name, it makes sense that Google would aggressively target companies it feels are running such fraudulent offers.

I hope that this has a chilling effect on other bogus offers online, much the way CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 stemmed so much of the pernicious tide of email spam.

Tags: Fraud, Google, Scams
Posted in Online Media, Scams | No Comments »

Newspaper Ad-Tracking Systems vs. Online Ad-Tracking Systems

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

By Adam Ward

Man reading newspaper in armchair, portrait

Thanks to the Internet, differentiation between media companies is blurring. Newspaper photographers now shoot video for their websites. Broadcast companies offer classified ads on their sites. Bloggers report local news, and news reporters blog.

However, when it comes to advertising on these different media, the available technologies still cater specifically to a single medium. Newspaper software differs from television software which differs from radio software which differs from online software. Because I’m most familiar with newspaper software and online software, I’m going to focus on the difference between those two.

Newspaper business systems (e.g. AdPro, MediaSpan, SCS) refer to themselves as ad-tracking software. Although they are correct insofar as they keep track of the booking, pricing, sizing and billing of ads, they don’t track the effectiveness of the ads. That’s a major difference from online ad-tracking systems. Another major distinction is print publishers are the ones paying for and managing the newspaper software, whereas online publishers piggyback on someone else’s software, usually at no cost to them.

Although business software is the most complex software used by newspapers, here’s a simple example of how it works. Once a newspaper gets a system up and running (which takes a lot of customization, training and money, by the way), the system knows the rates and ad sizes for all publications offered by that newspaper. Someone at the newspaper then enters an insertion order into the system. For example, let’s assume the ad is a 4X5 ad (four columns by five inches tall) that costs $20 a column inch. The ad-entry person finds the advertiser in their system, enters a new 4X5 ad for them, the system prices it at $400 ($20 X 20 inches), and saves it. Unlike online ad-tracking systems used by publishers through affiliate networks, newspapers control what they charge for ads running through their system.

Because the business system contains an accounts-receivable system, it will either place the ad on hold if the advertiser doesn’t have enough credit, or approve it. The ad-entry person can also enter a payment for that advertiser and apply it to the ad. The system allows newspapers to send out a monthly bill to the advertiser showing all the ads that ran and the total due. Once the advertiser remits payment, an accounting person will enter that payment into the system and apply it to the appropriate ads or invoices.

Some business systems also have modules for managing the actual creatives (the ads themselves), as well as keeping track of the orders for online ads. But they usually don’t manage the uploading of those ads, or tracking the customer responses to those ads. That’s where online ad-tracking systems come in.

Online publishers who want to place ads on their sites often use affiliate networks to manage the ad tracking for them. Networks can either be open networks or exchanges (e.g. Commission Junction or ShareASale), where the publishers are responsible for choosing which advertising campaigns they want to run, or they can be closed networks (e.g. AvantLink or Affiliate Traction) where the networks manage the campaigns for the advertisers.

Whichever type of network the publishers join, they will use that network’s ad-tracking software. Each network uses either an ad-tracking system they built in-house, or a commercial tracking system (e.g. DirectTrack or LinkTrust). The networks allow publishers to log into their tracking system. If a publisher joins multiple networks, the publisher will have access to all the systems used by those networks.

Once logged in, publishers grab the HTML code for whatever ad campaigns they decide to run. When they paste that code into their websites, the code refers back to the tracking software to pull in the creative for the ad, direct users to the advertiser’s landing page when clicked, and track the impression, click and ultimate lead or sale.

The publishers are also able to see the stats from the campaigns they run so they can see the number of impressions, clicks, sales and—most important—the commission they expect to receive as a result of running that campaign. Unlike newspaper software where only the newspaper has access to the system, both publishers and advertisers have access to online tracking systems so they both know how successful the campaigns are. Online tracking systems also differ from newspaper systems in that the advertisers are the ones that dictate what the cost of the campaign will be, and the actual payout isn’t known until after the campaign has been running. With newspaper ads, an advertiser knows exactly what the ad will cost before the ad runs. With online tracking systems, although the advertiser and publisher have an idea of what the cost for each lead or sale might be, the total cost is dependent on how the ad actually performs. That’s why affiliate marketing is also referred to as performance marketing.

Online tracking systems do a pretty good job of tracking ad performance (unfortunately there are still ways to defraud the systems, but that’s another topic), and they can tell you what the payout should be. But that’s where they stop. Unlike newspaper business systems that have robust accounts-receivable features, online systems don’t handle billing, receivables, etc. They expect you to export that data (or enter it manually) into Quickbooks.

Maybe someday newspaper business systems will track effectiveness like online systems, and online systems will handle receivables as well as newspaper systems. But the more systemic differences between the systems, particularly which entities have access to the system and which entities dictate the costs of ads, suggest we won’t see the blurring of tracking systems like we’ve seen with the blurring of the media themselves.

Tags: Ad Campaigns, Ad Tracking, Affiliate Networks, Newspaper Software, Newspapers
Posted in Online Media, Traditional Media | 1 Comment »

An Advertiser’s Guide to Placing Ads in Traditional and Online Media

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

By Adam Ward

If you’ve never advertised your product, service or business before, you might find the world of advertising to be daunting. You have a variety of media to choose from, each with their own advertising products, prices and lingo that aren’t necessarily intuitive.

You’ll find some basic information here that will help you wade through these waters.

Television and Radio

Broadcast media have a finite space (i.e. just 24 hours a day). That space is divvied up among programming content, public service announcements and ads. The ads you’d be buying are called “spots” and you pay for a fixed amount of time (e.g. 30 seconds). Although you could buy a single spot, it is much cheaper for you (on a per-spot basis) to buy a bulk of spots. Especially with TV, where the cost of producing an ad is so expensive, it wouldn’t make sense for you to run the commercial just once.

The cost of a 30-second spot will vary greatly among stations (based on the number of listeners), and among the time of day. Drive time for radio and prime time for TV will cost you a premium over ads in the middle of the night, for instance. So when you buy a package of spots, you’ll probably get your ads spread out over the course of a day, with a spot or two during more desirable times (or programs), with the majority of your spots being at less-desirable times. Be aware that even though you think you’ve purchased spots for a specific time, if another advertiser comes in and is willing to pay more for those spots, they can bump your ad out of that time slot. Because of the finite space for ads in broadcast media, the law of supply and demand are in full swing.

Outdoor Advertising

Like broadcast media, outdoor advertising has limited real estate. They can’t easily add a new billboard if they are running at 100-percent capacity. However, with billboards you can lock in the duration of your ad, so you don’t have to worry about another advertiser with deeper pockets bumping you off halfway through the month.

Billboard rates are determined by the number of eyeballs they deliver. So a billboard on a busy freeway will cost a premium over a billboard on a less-busy street. You usually buy billboard space a month at a time, and you can also get discounts for committing to run longer.

Print Advertising

Magazine ads are pretty straight-forward. They typically have just a handful of sizes that you can choose from. So a full-page ad might cost $X, a half-page ad would cost a little more than half of $X, and a quarter-page ad would cost a little more than a quarter of $X. Magazine ads usually include color in their prices because color ads visually enhance the overall look of their magazine.

Newspaper advertising is probably the trickiest to understand because there are so many options. The ads you typically see scattered throughout news pages are called display ads, also known as run-of-press (ROP) ads. Newspapers typically charge per column inch for those ads. A column inch is one column wide by one inch tall. So an ad that spans six columns and is ten inches tall is called a 60-inch ad. If the newspaper charges $X per column inch, you’d be looking at paying $60X for that ad to run once. If you want the ad to be in color, you will probably have to pay extra, either as a flat color cost, or an extra color cost per column inch. You can get discounts if you agree to run a certain number of inches over a specific period, or if you agree to run an ad a certain number of times.

In addition to running display ads in newspapers, you can run classified line ads (paying per word, per line, etc.) or classified display ads, which price more like display ads but run in the classified section. You can also pay for advertorials that are written to look like news content (the front page of a real estate insert, for example) but are written by advertising people, not the editorial folks.

You can also put pre-printed inserts into the paper. Newspapers will charge you a fee per thousand inserts. So if you decide to have the newspaper put in 10,000 of your inserts, and the cost is $X per thousand, you will pay $10X. You will also have to pay to have the inserts created and delivered to the newspaper.

Online Ads in Traditional Media

As you know, newspapers and broadcast stations also have websites. They run the same types of ads as other online publishers (e.g. banner ads and text ads), but they don’t always price the ads the same. Since traditional media companies are used to telling their advertisers what to pay for ads, they’ve adopted the same approach for ads on their websites. They usually charge one of two ways: per a fixed period of time (e.g. a month) or per impressions served.

The nice thing about these pricing structures is you’ll know about how long your ad will be online. If you pay for a month, you’ll be up for a month. If you pay per impression, the media company should be able to tell you what their average impressions per day are. Chances are you’ll also be able to deal with the same sales person for online ads as for the other ads you purchase with them.

The downside to this is you aren’t paying based on the effectiveness of the ad. Like running a radio spot or a print ad, you expect the ad to ultimately generate sales for you, and with online ads you have a better ability to track that your website visitors clicked through a particular ad, but if your ad doesn’t get enough people to your site to buy your product, you may pay for a lot of eyeballs that don’t do anything for you.

Online Ads in the Performance Marketing Space

Before traditional media companies even had their own websites, Internet publishers were hosting advertising banners placed through affiliate networks. The publishers (anyone with a website that wants to advertise someone’s product on their site would be considered a publisher), to a certain extent, were happy to take whatever money the advertisers were willing to push their way. And the advertisers, thanks to the electronic nature of the Web’s marketplace, wanted to pay for actions, not just eyeballs.

Today there are hundreds of these affiliate networks that help pair online advertisers with online publishers. To advertise on these networks, you need to simply join the network. Most networks are free to join and you’ll have a network manager assigned to you. Others are more like exchanges where you pay to join, then post your campaigns on the exchange hoping to get picked up by the many online publishers in that network. You will have direct access to the publishers in an exchange, but probably not have any access to publishers in a managed network.

Affiliate networks are using the term “performance marketing” to highlight the fact that you’ll pay for actions, not just eyeballs. What you pay depends on what you are selling and the type of campaign you run.

If you are a bricks-and-mortar retailer, you will probably run a cost-per-sale (CPS) campaign. This simply means you pay a publisher only if a visitor on the publisher’s site clicks through your ad, lands on your site, and buys your product. When you start the campaign, you’ll tell the publisher what the percentage of each sale you will pay. So if you figure you can afford to pay 10-percent commission on all sales coming from a publisher’s site and still be profitable, your campaign will have a 10-percent payout. Publishers decide whether to run your ads based on 1) the payout and 2) how well the advertised product fits with the publisher’s site content.

If you aren’t selling a physical product, you may want to do a cost-per-lead (CPL) campaign. For example, if you are just trying to build up your email list, you might want to put an ad on a publisher’s site that entices a user to fill out a form with their email address. Once the form gets submitted, that lead gets tracked in a tracking system, you get the email address you’re looking for, and you then pay the publisher whatever amount you previously decided for that lead.

If you run performance campaigns through networks, you actually won’t pay the publishers directly. You will actually pay the network, which will then pay the publishers. The network will also have the tracking software that tracks your sales and leads. The network will provide you with a login to their tracking software so you can monitor your campaign’s activity and results.

As you can see, there is a lot to learn for advertisers in the traditional and online arenas. I hope this information has given you a good starting point for learning more.

Tags: Affiliate Networks, Banner Ads, Billboards, Cost Per Lead, Cost Per Sale, Magazines, Newspapers, Radio, TV
Posted in For Advertisers, Online Media, Traditional Media | 2 Comments »

Using New Technology, but Making Money the Old-Fashioned Way

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

By Adam Ward

Out with the old media. In with the new. Traditional media companies are struggling to stay afloat because everybody and everything is online now. All you need to do is generate some online content (like a blog) and join an affiliate network. You grab advertising banners from the network, and the readers who find your site (because of your riveting, fresh content) click the ads, buy the goods, and you make loads of money. Sound familiar?

That’s the hype at least. The reality is quite different. Daniel Lyons, a Newsweek columnist who spent two years pretending to be Steve Jobs on his wildly popular blog, couldn’t do it, so what makes you think you can?

I don’t mean to take the wind out of your sails. It’s true that there is a lot of money swishing around the Internet, with more advertising dollars making their way to the Web all the time. (According to the census bureau at the Dept. of Commerce, eCommerce is expected to reach $300 billion in 2012.) I just want you to have realistic expectations if you decide you want to be a Web publisher.

It’s true that the barriers to entry are low enough that anyone can do it. It costs next to nothing to set up a blog, forum or website these days. And it’s true that there are hundreds of affiliate networks you can join where you can grab banners from online advertisers. But the ease of entry makes it that much harder for you to succeed. (How many musicians do you know who have their music on Facebook and MySpace, etc. but have never made a dime?)

So I apologize if I tricked you into reading this post thinking you’d get rich quick. After all, that’s what all the other blogs seem to suggest, so that’s probably what you were expecting, right? Rather, I want to give you some things to consider before you jump in. That way you’ll jump in with your eyes open. And you just might want to take some lessons from traditional media companies (yes, I know they are struggling too) if and when you do.

First, remember that content is king. I should qualify that to read “good” content. Look at newspapers. Even though newspapers have been losing readers, there is still a good reason why they can sell advertising space. Their readers are picking up the paper because of its news content. I believe that newspapers are the best organizations for generating news, and will be for many years to come.

One advantage of being an online publisher is your ability to generate news or other content at a hyper-local level. Although newspapers can report news on a local level, they will still cover general news at that level. Web publishers can provide information for small niches, but if the readers who are interested in those niches don’t find the site’s information to be valuable, they won’t be back. And with no readers, you won’t be generating any ad revenues. Just because you can place ads on your site from an affiliate network, if nobody is on your site to click through those banners, you won’t be getting any commissions from those ads. So your silver bullet would be to 1) have a site that covers a specific topic so well that it is a must-read site for people interested in that topic, 2) have ads on your site that tie closely to your content so that your readers have a greater proclivity for clicking them. Sure, newspapers will have mattress ads and plumber ads and personals because they have a general readership. You probably won’t (and probably shouldn’t) have a general readership, so don’t accept general ads.

Second, don’t rely solely on affiliate networks for your advertising revenue. Networks are great resources. They are a great way of getting relevant ads on your site by outsourcing that duty to someone else. And they should pay more than Google AdSense. But there is a personal element to selling. Advertisers like to know who they are dealing with. This is why local newspapers have such a great connection with their business communities. They have sales people interacting with local business owners constantly, and the business owners place ads in the paper.

If you have no interaction with your advertisers (and most affiliate networks won’t allow you access to those advertisers), you don’t have a lot of control over the ads on your site. You may get great commissions from an advertiser on your site only to find the advertiser is no longer associated with your affiliate network because the network rep who had the relationship with that advertiser left for another network.

To counteract this, you need to sell your site to advertisers directly. Yes, this is outside sales. Yes, you probably aren’t a sales person. And yes, it takes work. But business owners (or in your case, website publishers) are often the best sales people because 1) they understand their products better than anyone else, and 2) they are passionate about their business. They believe in it. And advertisers appreciate being associated with a business or website that the owner believes in and will be constantly improving.

That brings us to the third point: put in the work. Some people think that the rules of the real world don’t apply to the Internet. They’re wrong. Whether your business is bricks and mortar or virtual, it is still a business. And running a business takes work.

Tags: Affiliate Networks, Blogs, Newspapers, Newsweek
Posted in Online Media | No Comments »

A "do follow" blog about traditional and online advertising, CRM, affiliate marketing and best business practices.

Archive for the ‘Online Media’ Category

Promoting Your Blog

Is Privacy Dead?

Google Sues Utah Company over Alleged Online Scams

Newspaper Ad-Tracking Systems vs. Online Ad-Tracking Systems

An Advertiser’s Guide to Placing Ads in Traditional and Online Media

Using New Technology, but Making Money the Old-Fashioned Way

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