Blog Advertising works best, according to BlogAds‘ CEO and founder Henry Copeland, are blogs that can keep the ads separate from comments, which tend to make marketers uneasy with their unpredictability.   I focused on Blog Advertising today after reading an interview in paidcontent.org by David kaplan titled: Henry Copeland, CEO, Founder of BlogAds: To Make Money At Blogging, Rein In Comments

Hollis Thomases, who I met at a Search Engine Strategies show last year, has a writeup in ClickZ titled Blog Advertising: Right for You? suggests blog advertising works best for brand newer, more progressive brands:

"..advertising isn't for just any kind of advertiser. Typically, blog advertising won't work for old-line, entrenched brands. Their ads generally aren't interesting, thought-provoking, or human enough. Blog ads that work are as edgy and rich as blog content itself."

Huh!  Did I just catch something here?   I think I did.   What you need to with blog advertising is:

1. Pick blogs that seem right for the message
2. Pick particular bloggers who style you like and seems right for the ad
3. Write the Ad around the blog, particular posts of the blogger and the blogs it appears in.

I wrote, recently, that more than half of my Webmetricsguru.com traffic can be traced back to a couple of posts - probably less than 10, out of over 2400 that I've written so far.    I probably get more traffic than any Web Analytics blog, probably even more than Avinash  Kaushik's blog - and yet, in my case, and  I think it's true of many blogs, the vast majority of my traffic is coming from the short head of the long tail.

Which means this …. you target blog advertising to the specific blog posts of a specific blogger based on their proven  web analytics stats.

I think Blog Advertising world work much better if it actually was written in response of, or support of, or opposition of a specific, popular post of a specific popular blogger.

I think the way blog advertising is run now accounts for why the click through is so low (though the price is low too, in most cases, which makes it a good deal for brand marketers if they can figure out the right blog/blogger/message combination).

Almost two years ago, I had a client who had just published a book and his publisher ran blogads over several political blogs - it turned out that the ad for my clients book was clicked on only once in every 1500 impressions.    Sure, the ad was see a whole lot, but just about no one clicked on the ad…and the ad was very political.

But it would have worked much better, I feel, had the ads been targeted to specific posts and have appeared only when that post appeared, perhaps adjacent to the main paragraph of the post.

Oh, well…I meant to just write a little bit on Blog Advertising - and ended up with a rant on it.  Time to end this post.