I'm Just Sharing

Most blogs these days have ads, and unfortunately, most of us don’t take the time to look at anyone else’s ads because, well, we do have our own. However, I’m someone who does take a look at ads, because I want to see what other people might be marketing and how they might be doing it; learning how to be a good internet affiliate marketer is difficult work, after all.

It’s occurred to me that basically there are two types of ads; product ads and advertiser ads. Product ads are, well, marketing products. For instance, if you look at my blog, you see that along the left side there I’m marketing products, starting with mine, then a couple of books. Some of my blog posts will have specific product ads, such as my last post (and I’m buying those suckers one day soon). Sometimes the product ad looks like an advertiser ad, such as that Black Visa Card ad on the right side, but it’s a product.

When we get to specific product items, such as computers, jewelry, or items like that, only myself and Sire, of Wassup Blog, seem to have actual items that we market, though his are more consistent than mine, as I have mine rotate on the side via TTZ Media, and within specific posts I decide on a product through Commission Junction and post it here.

Advertiser ads are promoting advertisers, and I’ve noticed that a lot of blogs have those, including mine. For instance, over on the left again, you see advertisements for Buy.com, National Geographic Store, Lapworks, etc, and in some posts, like this one, you see I end the post with an advertiser ad. Those take you to a page where you can look around and buy something.

But those aren’t the only types of advertiser ads. Though I noticed that I don’t have any right now, there are advertiser ads that market the advertisers themselves. For instance, on Caleb’s blog, Market Secrets Blog, he has ads that market Adbrite and Pepperjam network, two that I haven’t tried out yet. On Sire’s blog, he has ads that market Onmarketer, Chitika, and ClixGalore. Yan’s blog Thou Shall Blog, he’s marketing Oiopublisher and Market Leverage. Even on Darren Rowse’s blog, Problogger, even though all of his ads are actually sponsors, he’s marketing Inlinks, LinkWorth, MLTV, and some others.

My question comes in wondering which types of ads for most people actually work for you. For the few of us who own up to our monthly blogging or online income, I don’t see all that many of these ads working all that much for anyone. It’s because of this that our friend John of 21st Century Affiliate Marketing has said that he’s beginning to remove almost all of these types of ads to try something new, which he hopes will help stimulate online sales. Indeed, though I like having lots of different types of ads and products on my site, and other sites, it seems that these items rarely get all that many clicks, let alone sales, and yet I’ve noticed that I have clicked on some of the items listed above as advertiser ads, mainly because I’m thinking about marketing by using them to see how they fare. So, my impetus is purely as a test market, and not necessarily because I’m hoping to buy anything. But I believe that, when I actually decide to sign up via one of these links, if I got there through someone’s site, they get some kind of monetary reimbursement from it.

Anyway, I’m wondering what y’all think of things like this? If our goal is really to make money with our blogs via affiliate marketing, it almost seems that the best way to do it is to write good content, try to jump up in some kind of rankings such as PR or Alexa, which seem to mean something to advertisers, and sell advertising on your site, ala Problogger. Visitors drive advertising, which is why I tried earlier this year to do my RSS subscriber contest, and goes back to a conversation I’ve had lately with our friend Mirjam of Me Myself And I Blog, as we’ve been talking about this issue of massive traffic that we both wrote about. Indeed, trying to obtain that kind of traffic just might be the only reason one may not care as much about targeted traffic.

So, share your thoughts and feelings on this topic, if you will. No, I didn’t get into the contextual ads specifically, but I consider those as product ads, even if the products aren’t always so clearly defined, because they’re not trying to get you to go back to the site itself to help market them.