Online Advertising

As a user, I can say that the web has thankfully developed to be a more sophisticated place than it was at the turn of the century and many of the more irritating forms of online advertising have been marginalised by firewalls and other security software. That's great for me but not too wonderful for the advertisers. Of course, the irritants are still around but increaingly not so. 

On the other hand, online advertising has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry with the advent, firstly, of pay-per-click advertising (see 4, below) and then Google's killer adaptation, contextual ads, better known as Google Adwords.

Contextual advertising has spearheaded a massive shift in advertising revenues as this video at Web PRO news points out, with the forecast that online advertising will exceed newspaper advertising by 2011 and be worth $68 billion.

With the internet taking up only 5% of the general public's media time and television & radio taking a combined 70%, those figures might not seem to be greatly important. However, my guess is that as media converges and television & radio "go online", online advertising will edge towards the $1 trillion mark by 2025. 

The ramifications are that if you are even remotely interested in advertising goods and services to the general public, online advertising is the university that you should be enrolling in, today!  

1   Banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, hover ads etc. are all forms of old-style online advertising that are hardly mentioned these days but certain respected marketers are saying that they're dirt cheap and can produce exceptional results when purchased by the million. 

Email Marketing

2   As far as I can tell, there are three types of Email Marketing.

2.1    SPAM. don't do it, it's downright illegal

2.1    Safelist Advertising. Before it became illegal, complaints about SPAM briefly created for a couple if years, a strange form of online advertising,  a concept known as safelists.

The idea was that marketers joined opt-in lists and emailed each other, with the emails going into special junk accounts and almost certainly remaining unread by their recipients. As you might imagine, this rather pointless activity died an unmourned death.

I believe that there are still firms that provide these services but I know of no-one using them profitably.     

2.3    Ezines are ostensibly e-magazines, conveying interesting information to an opt-in list. Since internet marketers have developed this form of communication the most, I've housed it in Internet Marketing, see: 

opt-in list

However, Internet Marketing advertising can frequently be crass and may not suit your business. My advice is to learn from the resources, they're what I believe to be the best online, but adapt them to your own circumstances. If used with subtlety, these cutting edge techniques can be very powerful

Traffic Exchanges

3   Traffic exchanges work on a simple system. Usually you view two sites for about 15 or 20 seconds and somebody will view one of yours. They've become pretty unfashionable lately because:

3.1   the quality of traffic is pretty low

3.2   you can easily end up on dangerous, virus-ridden sites &

3.3   If you have Adsense ads on your site, Google is pretty unimpressed by that quality of traffic and you could get your account suspended. Since I tend to have Adsense on my other sites these days, it's not a worthwhile risk for me 

However, if you have a junk computer, traffic exchanges are excellent to visit for about 10 minutes a day, as they keep you plugged into the grid of whatever niche you're interested in.

What I mean is that you see the newest competitors in your niche delivered to your desktop...and for that research, you get some hits to your site! Trust me, that research is invaluable, as you then have the capacity to really tweak your pages if you're prepared to learn from what you see.   

Traffic Swarm, the largest traffic exchange, still has an excellent reputation and there are numerous niches that you can advertise in and receive traffic for.

As with banners, I hope to be carrying out some Traffic exchange experiments in 2008. I'll post with results when I do.

Pay Per Click Advertising

4   Pay-per click Advertising and nowadays, since the advent of Google Adwords, Contextual Advertising, is presently the hottest form of advertising in the world. 

I believe that it's likely to become the biggest, by far, in the next few years and even if you don't use it, you should understand it conceptually if you're going to survive as a commercial entity on the web

Press Releases

5   Though greatle under-used, press releases can be a very cheap and effective long-term investment for online advertising...if you know how to use them!