Performancing has spent the first half of 2008 building strong relationships with advertisers across a variety of niches. We are now in a position to offer certain blogs and other websites direct ad sales representation.

Requirements

• Topics: Tech, Entertainment, Auto, Business/Finance, Sports
• Traffic: Minimum of 100,000 pageviews per month

What we offer

• We go direct to the advertiser and you get more money
• High quality, big brand advertisers
• We optimize the ads you run to get you more money from your traffic
• Non-exclusive: you are free to run ads from any network you'd like

Interested?

If you have a website that meets the requirements listed above and are interested in having Performancing sell ads for your site, please contact Ryan Caldwell to get the ball rolling - ryan@performancing.com

I've been sitting here thinking about the state of online advertising right now and I am pretty much confused. Here's why.

Television commercials have succeeded at advertising because they are broadcasted to a large audience. So large in fact, it doesn't take that many people to make a purchase for the ad to be considered a success. Because television ads are viewed by such a large audience, the ad doesn't have to take into account personal information to make the ad more relevant. This is not confusing.

Now, let's take a look at online advertising which I find to be confusing.

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WhyNotAd.com is an online advertising service which allows user's to register with the site and place their own ads for free. You can upload practically anything you want such as ads, advertising, classifieds, news, brands, sell stuff, buy stuff, personals, press releases, events, functions, and photos. According to the developers of WhyNotAd, they have created the site in such a way that ads placed on the site are programmed to be direct hits with major search engines.

After registering an account with the site, you'll be presented with the option to invite friends. This seems to be the typical sign up form for most websites these days. If you don't have any friends or do not wish to invite them during the registration process, WhyNotAd does provides a method of skipping that action. Once you've made your way through the sign up form, you'll be greeted with a different form in which you will need to fill out to add your advertisement to the site.

Here is what the basic outline of the form looks like.

• Classification: You can choose either Business, Personal or Both.
• Ad Title - no website names or symbols allowed
• Business Category
• Personal Category
• Business And Personal
• Upload an image - You can upload only .jpg, .jpeg, .png or .gif files.
• Add an image via a URL
• Body Description - This is where you would place the text related you the add. You would also place contact information within this spot as well.

After you have configured your ad, click on the Add Advert button. This will create and then add your advertisement to the website. If you would like to see the example I created for this post, you can check out my Jeffro2pt0 Ad. This will give you a sense in how your ad will look within the site. User's of WhyNotAd can then rank your ad on a scale of 1-10, they can share the ad with friends, bookmark the ad or flag it as inappropriate.

Unfortunately, I did not find a way to go back and edit your ad if you end up discovering a mistake. In fact, after you publish your ad, there is not much else you can do with it. It would of been nice if WhyNotAd gave you the ability to edit ads after the fact or at least provided a certain amount of time for editing to take place. I would of also like to have seen an option to delete the ad.

All in all, I'm not sure how well this will work for you in terms of receiving search engine traffic or organic traffic, but it does provide another easy way to advertise your site and since you have full control over the ad, you can add your link or links to the post which is one more unique link back to your blog.

There are means to getting your work out on the web and increasing your visibility doing so but I would not be over zealous in writing for a few pennies a day especially if you know that you might as well compile all the information and put into into Adobe files and either publish it yourself or go to a publishing company that has an already established publishing network. Keep away from writing anything lengthy on sites that pretend to offer you more through advertising your articles on related sites and forums. This will only bring in a few extra pennies a day at most. That has been my experience. Those sites may also offer you the change of being visibly exposed as a writer but few people care about that too it seems; there are hundreds of writers doing the same thing.
The turning point in my career has been after have written hundreds of small blogs on a site and then at a distance of half a year, I am making less than half of what I would on a daily basis and am no longer seen as a "hot" writer. That is because I have not been advertising my work properly, I was told. But that is too time consuming for the extra few pennies you might be making.
One always has to come up with something original and cutting-edge to break into the market. It may as well be a book dealing with an uncommon topic or using you writing abilities to back your creativity in other fields.

I was quite surprised when I visited Daily Kos, a very popular political blog, and I was prompted with a message that, essentially, stated I was being less than polite for using AdBlock Plus to avoid advertising. I was then informed that I could remove the message that was annoying the hell out of me for a simple subscription fee. The cost was $4 per month, $40 per year, or $100 per unlimited subscription. The interesting thing is the fact that this blog asks for $15,000 per week for a single advertising spot—amazing.

The question of ethics by people using software like AdBlock Plus to avoid advertising comes into play, but I also believe that annoying the readership with messages that tell them they are wrong is not the way to go about doing it. I feel that this is potentially a serious threat to those people who enjoy reading blogs. The authors will still make money, but the readers are the ones that will be robbed in the end.

The Price

The price is the first major concern. Is a subscription really worth the price of advertisement-free content? Some people might be inclined to pay for quality content, but when I look at the amount of content that is available on the blogosphere, it almost feels like I would be paying for something I could have for free elsewhere. I do understand the concept of supporting a blogger you really like, but is it worth creating a divide between the readership—those that pay and those that do not. I do not even want to picture what might happen when my top 10 favorite blogs want to charge $4 a month for subscriptions—over $400 a year just to read a few blogs? Are you kidding me?

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Did you prepare your blog for the holiday season?

People want to buy now!

Summer is over and readers are using the Internet like crazy. With the upcoming Christmas season the motivation to look for interesting items, ideas and gadgets is getting stronger every day!

• The strongest buying season of the year is happening the next 30 days. It's Christmas time and jingle bells are all around.
• People are hurrying to get nice Christmas gifts for family, friends and co-workers.

Christmas time is definitely one of the most important repeating events!

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Why am I so against Adsense? There are a few reasons, I risk getting into a rant if I list them all!

My main reason for disliking Adsense is that it changes people. There are strong publishers who resist the siren call, but in most cases there are two outcomes with Adsense monetization:

1. Defeat - The publisher feels a failure because of the measly Adsense payment, if they even get any at all
2. Submission - The publisher changes their whole approach to serve the needs of the Adsense block rather than their readers

Often in a last ditch attempt the blogger or webmaster will go from (1) to (2).

What do I mean by "submission"? Well have you noticed the hoops you have to jump through to get good Adsense earnings are mostly not reader-friendly?

• Cloaking ads so they look like navigation
• Blending colors and fonts so they don't look like ads
• Tuning content so better, higher earning ads display
• Tweaking presentation to increase click-throughs
• Attracting a higher percentage of first time visitors who are more likely to click
• Using misleading headlines to generate search traffic that leaves via ads
• etc etc

By all means make money with Adsense, just please do not get caught into the trap of subjigating your strategy to it or feeling like you are a failure if your blog does not earn the big bucks.

Personally, I go for loyal audience over adsense clicks any day :)

I found these interesting pictures on Neil Patel's blog. Neil Patel is a personal branding expert and personal branding is definitely something bloggers should be focusing on. Check out the pictures and see why branding and public relations (PR) is more effective than marketing and advertising.

As you can see, the message in marketing and advertising originates from you. However, the PR message comes from a third party. And PR leads to branding. In branding, the prospective customer/visitor is interested in you because of what someone else said.

Neil ties everything together by saying:

If you want to brand yourself you need to understand that it is much more effective when other people talk about you in a positive fashion compared to self-promotion.

So, how can you get other people to talk positively about you?

Network. Webmasters are much more likely to promote you if they know you. Get out there, knock on some doors, make some contacts, and build friendships especially with people in your niche.

Blog for the long haul. The longer you blog, the more people will notice you. As time goes by, you'll be considered a fixture in your niche. This leads to links and traffic.

Do something unique. Webmasters are much more likely to talk about you and link to you if you do something different from the rest. This means you need to know your niche well. Find out which topics in your niche are not getting enough coverage. Then, write quality content about those topics. For example, in my market research, I found that many of us bloggers were juggling too many blogs to our detriment. But not many people were writing about this phenomenon. So, I wrote this post, which attracted a couple links and went viral on StumbleUpon.

What other things can you do to get others to promote your blog?

pMetrics looks like it has been assigned a strong PR 6 in the August 2007 toolbar rollout. That means that the early-bird advertising rates have now expired.

But don't fret. You can still get great deals on both text links and graphic ads on a subdomain that has over 885,060 backlinks. Leverage our 4,000+ pMetrics users and massive backlink strength to jumpstart your business quickly and efficiently.

Pro and Blogger pMetrics members can pick up a link for $45/month. Non-paying pMetrics users get a link for $59/month. Everyone else can get a link for $79/month.

Just get in touch with me at ryan@performancing.com to get your ad campaign started today.

Save yourself time searching for ways to monetize and promote your site. TextAdSearch blog's about the text advertising industry and explains about the latest trends in text advertising.