I wrote a blog post recently on advertising/Internet marketing and my thoughts on how vulgar and useless some ads can be. Cheap, intrusive and sneaky ads that bring short term gain while screwing over people who visit your blog are not good for anyone.
I’d like to think that one future of blog advertising is where ads actually make the blog better so that the reader and the owner/writer gets something back. Your readers get new valuable information while you get some money.
I’m still playing around with Gastronom.ie and have a few UI changes and backend additions before I seek out sponsors/advertisers. For that site, the main section is the aggregator that aggregates Irish Food Blogs and on the right is a section where a sponsor will write a blog post giving away valuable information that will make the site even more valuable to the readers but I also make money. I was thinking it would be a good space for Wine companies to talk about what wine goes best with what meal and then listing some wine that fits that from their range or maybe a restaurant talking about how to prepare one of the items on their menu or a food company talking about putting together a festive meal and including some of their products. That’s how I’d like to see advertising on blogs. Professional ones. I still won’t have ads on this blog.
If you were a company though and wanted to get word around on loads of blogs I’d go along the same lines and follow one of the online reviews/carnival thingies. There’s this thing called the Blawg review where each week a law blogger will give a summary of what the law blogs are talking about. Other law bloggers point to this blog or find you via the main blog, so it means a massive traffic surge when you are the the chosen blogger that week. I’m not sure would it scale in Ireland but having a rotating blog post each week with valuable advice from a sponsoring company would be great for the company and the blogger in question. Having your own blog would make it easier to coordinate all this too.
Beats a banner ad.
