5 Mistakes Advertisers Make Marketing Through Your Blog

Now, this post may appear to attack certain groups of people — anyone who has ever advertised on another sit, but can also serve as a warning if you do choose to advertise on another blog.  Each time you visit a blog, you are bound to see advertising of one sort or another, but how do you optimize this to get the best results?  In this post, five of the most common ways advertisers make mistakes are revealed.

1. The cheapest advertising space is often sought after first.  However, this spot is often not the most desirable, especially if the advertiser has purchased a long-term ad.  Just because a high-trafficked blog appears to get a lot of homepage vies, that doesn’t mean there are many “eyes” viewing those banners below the fold, or the area that the eye cannot see without scrolling.  Only a fraction of readers might actually view this area like the top 25-50% of the page.
2. Don’t let the price influence your decision.  When you do this, you often settle for text links, or smaller banners, that, like the first ‘no-no’ will produce results that can’t constitute the price you paid for the advertisement.
3. Be sure you know all the details up-front.  If not, you may be getting ripped off.  As a potential customer and client of the website, you are responsible for gathering information from the website owner, whether it is provided directly on the “Advertise” page or must be requested through a third-party vendor or email.  Whether or not the website owner(s) disclose every detail about their visitors, it is good, at least on your part, to make sure that you get the demographics, or general details about where their visitors are coming from.
4. Don’t just advertise to advertise.  You want to leave a positive experience for both the site you are advertising on, the people who routinely visit your site, as well as those that will be visiting your site/blog through the ad.  If not, you won’t achieve much from the ad other than exchanging cash between you and the other blog—not good when you are trying to promote and expand your brand.
5. Finally, another common mistake that advertisers make (that you shouldn’t) is requesting the advertisement incorrectly.  Either party should work together for pricing.  Even though you have a “fixed” price model, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be flexible with your potential advertisers.  Would you rather lose ten advertisers because you won’t adjust your rate or have two that have a reduced price?  In this case, you would want to be rather lenient in how you run your advertising (privately) on your blog.

While these were some general mistakes that people make when going through the transaction on your blog (including you if you choose to advertise on another blog), I’d like to hear from you what you think about the general advertising process on blogs.

Advertising should be simple, but isn’t.  There is often a period of time that goes by when you don’t see a reply, and sometimes your requests are denied because your “brand” won’t appeal to their visitors.  Like many other blogging tasks, it can be a difficult balance to achieve to attain the best results.