With what appears to be a coming recession, no matter how small or short it might be, the first thing to be cut by companies is usually the advertising budgets. You can’t get rid of the guy making the “blue widget”, but you can cut advertising costs, especially those where you aren’t guaranteed any real return on investment.

CPM advertising is cost per mille. Mille is french for thousand, so CPM advertising is cost per thousand impressions.

Advertisers buy CPM advertisements because it can help increase their brand awareness, spread their messages, and hopefully increase their sales. This type of advertisement doesn’t guarantee any sales though. It doesn’t even guarantee any clicks to the advertisers website. All it provides is impressions.

The types of advertising that companies will want to switch to during any sort of belt tightening is both CPC and CPA. These stand for cost per click and cost per action. With cost per click, the advertiser only pays when someone clicks through to their site, and with cost per action, the advertiser only pays when the visitor has clicked through and completed the action that the advertiser wants. It could be as simple as filling out a survey, or as complex as purchasing a certain product.

These types of advertising reduce the apparent risk that advertisers have when spending money online, and will increasingly be the advertisement of choice.

As a publisher, you have to decide what will be of the best benefit to you and your readers. Do you accept the dropping CPM rates, or take what could be more or less lucrative with CPC or CPA advertisements?

It can be difficult to make the right choice, and as with everything related to publishing online, I recommend testing a variety of different methods going forward. Just be prepared for lower rates than my might have otherwise liked.

Source: GigaOM

Originally posted on January 28, 2008 @ 4:30 pm

So, I still haven’t made enough to get my first payment from ScratchBack, but I have seen other bloggers mention that they have, and for me this means that it is worth continuing to use. Thus far, I have made $20.59, and need $25 even to be paid by them.

What is ScratchBack?

Selling text links has been seen as a bad thing in Google’s eyes, and since Google is the search engine that drives most of the traffic online, many people were looking for a new way to sell text links, while making Google happy. ScratchBack came along with their JavaScripted, no-followed text widget that has slowly continued to gain more and more attention.

Currently, during Beta, which has been going on for some time now, you can earn 90% of the revenue generated by people purchasing links, and what’s even more interesting is that you set the rates.

Who has advertised here?

I added ScratchBack around the end of November and you can read my post about adding ScratchBack for more details. Since then, I have had five advertisers, each one filling one of the five spots on my widget.

I have the widget set up to only remove a link if it is bumped off the list. So if another advertiser stops by, and purchases a link, the bottom person will be dropped off the list. The great thing for advertisers is that I only get one new advertiser every two or three weeks. And so those that have advertised have had their link up for over a month and a half for only five dollars.

I wanted to issue a big thanks to each one of my advertisers thus far, by including a mention to them in a blog post so all of my readers can see their link, and the great support they have been to this blog.

Advertisers thus far include:
Blogging Cents
Post on Fire
HD BizBlog
LocLookup
Hosting Diary

Recent News from ScratchBack

People are doing some interesting things with ScratchBack, and I wanted to highlight some of that here.

The first thing of note is Zac Johnson, who has used getting a t-shirt as a value added way of getting people to add their link to his ScratchBack widget. While sending a t-shirt to those that advertise might add up to a fair bit of money, but you can be assured that he will end up ahead. The cost to be listed on his blog, and qualify for the t-shirt is $25, and your link stays up for one week.

The second interesting usage of ScratchBack is from the owner himself, Jim Kukral. He has created a widget for his video podcasts that allow people to sponsor his shows. It is $10 for a week, but if he does a video nearly every day, that works out to be less than $1.50 per video to have your link next to the content he creates.

If you have come up with an interesting and exciting way to add ScratchBack to your blog, site, service, or whatever, I’d love to hear about it. I am very happy with the way things are going with ScratchBack, and I wish them nothing but continued success.

Originally posted on January 17, 2008 @ 7:17 pm

David Beaton from Custometrics presented at nextMEDIA in Toronto while I was there, and it was interesting to see him talk about the value of content. Looking from an advertisers point of view, it can be difficult to deliver a good return on investment, especially from advertising online.

As a long time blogger, I can totally understand this. I have advertised on blogs and ended up paying around a dollar per visitor. Not a dollar per conversion or anything great, but rather one dollar per unique visitor, and in my mind that is hugely expensive.

He also mentioned how advertising budgets are usually the first to go, leaving the advertising team with little staff to find the right choices in very short schedules. He did leave some tips for advertisers that websites and blogs could do.

Here is David’s wish list for Advertisers:

• ROI
• Volume
• Price
• Risk
• Sustainability
• Segmentation
• Targeting
• Simplification
• Balance
• Optimization

If bloggers, and website owners could provide potential advertisers this type of information, it would make their job easier, and depending on the information, advertisers would be more likely to choose your site over a site that isn’t as forthcoming with information.

David also mentioned that we should all be publishing verifiable data on our user base, and traffic sources.

The biggest takeaway from his session was that the lowest price is not always the best buy, nor is the highest the worst. It is the performance that decides the true value.

Originally posted on December 5, 2007 @ 10:55 pm