Online Advertising

Online Adver­tis­ing on Google Top 10 posi­tions on rel­e­vant key­words is an impor­tant pre­req­ui­site to mon­e­tize your web­site, namely if you mar­ket mainly to search engines.

We have been talk­ing about the issue ear­lier where we defined some sim­ple rules which help to opti­mize the chances to rank high on Google search returns.

Con­sid­er­ing the dif­fer­ent ele­ments of a web pres­ence we per­ma­nently test the effi­ciency of online adver­tis­ing on our test sites.

Our pre­ferred web sites (from Semi­oman­tics) con­sist of three dis­tinct elements:

1. The Soft­ware which runs the show.

2. The vis­i­ble Frame of the site con­sist­ing of sta­ble sta­tic ele­ments, such as design ele­ments (where applic­a­ble), side­bars, foot­ers, head­ers, defined fields in the lay­out designed to hold sta­tic or pre­de­fined content.

3. The Con­tent which can be dynamic (such as blog posts) or sta­tic (such as sta­tic pages).

The boarder between sta­tic and dynamic con­tent is not based an exact sci­ence, the more that recent devel­op­ments allow for dynamic con­tent on tra­di­tion­ally sta­tic ele­ments and sta­tic fea­tures on dynamic elements.

In the past, web sites con­sisted of sta­tic pages with sta­tic con­tent and more or less pre-defined areas where ads were posted.

With the devel­op­ment of blogs Google seemed to start to priv­i­lege dynamic con­tent, assur­ing that search returns rep­re­sent amongst oth­ers fresh con­tent and the lat­est posts on a topic.

Blog sites are tra­di­tion­ally well divided into two parts:

1. The dynamic content

2. The sta­tic frame

Online Adver­tis­ing was added to the sta­tic side­bars, head­ers and footers.

Con­tex­tual Adver­tis­ing with Google Ads (AdSense) is an auto­mated process by which con­tex­tual ads are asso­ci­ated with con­tent whereas the ad served is func­tion of the con­tent (topic, key­words, tags). A bril­liant idea, con­sid­er­ing the time saved and the enhanced targeting.

Today, there is no limit for adver­tis­ing; ads can be con­tex­tual in respect to a post con­tent or in respect to the main pur­pose of the site as such. Ads can be embed­ded in sta­tic and dynamic parts of the web site and they can have most any form and shape, from text to media.

Ads can be served with high pre­ci­sion, not only on a web site but also beyond: while the reader of your blog may read a ‘clean’ post and see ads only in the side bar for exam­ple, the read­ers of your feeds may receive the same post con­tent asso­ci­ated with ads, for exam­ple the ads you have served to your live reader in the sidebar.

If your con­tent is sub­ject to syn­di­ca­tion, your feed can include any kind of adver­tis­ing, even media.

As the owner of a web site you are a Pub­lisher. Your ambi­tion is to get great inter­est­ing con­tent to gain vis­i­bil­ity and loyal read­er­ship and to finance the oper­a­tion by asso­ci­at­ing ads to that content.

Our site is a plat­form where authors and adver­tis­ers meed and where you (as the pub­lisher) bal­ance the dif­fer­ent inter­ests to opti­mize your impact and earnings.

Also as a pub­lisher, your focus reaches beyond the vis­i­ble part of your site; you also keep an eye and man­age your feeds and as the case may be other prod­ucts linked to your pub­li­ca­tion, such as media, free give aways and downloads.

Behav­ioral Mar­ket­ing and Adver­tis­ing have been an ambi­tion for quite some time. While Google and Social Net­works build data bases com­pil­ing behav­ioral data, the imple­men­ta­tion of behav­ioral strate­gies may be jeop­ar­dized by legal restric­tions, namely in terms of pri­vacy rules and ethics. Also it seems that pure behav­ioral strate­gies remain less effi­cient than the tra­di­tional word to mouth strategies.

Seman­tics are impor­tant in any tar­geted mar­ket­ing con­cept; how­ever, as per now, devel­op­ers con­tinue to strug­gle and no auto­mated gen­er­ally use­ful for­mula has been found yet. If and when search engines such as Google are capa­ble to apply advanced seman­tics to the search engine tech­nol­ogy, things may change, but yet we are miles away from a seman­tic Google engine.

To keep things sim­ple for aver­age users, devel­op­ers have invented Niche Mar­ket­ing. Niche Mar­ket­ing is a bril­liant con­cept for most any web mas­ter, since it elim­i­nates many prob­lems the non pro­fes­sional may encounter when pub­lish­ing online.

By focus­ing on a par­tic­u­lar topic, cat­e­gory or niche, the scope of the site is lim­ited and tar­get­ing is eas­ier as it’s rel­a­tively con­ve­nient to choose prod­ucts and ser­vices to asso­ciate to a niche keyword.

Sure, the big adver­tis­ing pro­grams or big mer­chants have a solu­tion for all and every­body mak­ing it easy to add ads to any site, namely if the site is clearly focused on a niche. And yet, many pub­lish­ers, blog mas­ters and new­bie web­mas­ters strug­gle to place the ads in a mean­ing­ful way on their sites.

Google Gurus, rich of advise, have a tip and an answer to all the prob­lems we may encounter, how­ever the Guru Approach seems more often than not to be focused on the inter­ests of Google rather than the indi­vid­ual publisher.

Accord­ing to widely pub­lished Google Gurus, to reach Google Top 10 you need good (orig­i­nal) con­tent, and loads of it. Look­ing at search returns, this is obvi­ously not true, and Google is obvi­ously not in a posi­tion to mea­sure qual­ity and to dis­tin­guish good from bad, orig­i­nal from copy and true from fake. It’s wish­ful think­ing to imag­ine that Google search results will get sub­stan­tially bet­ter by just tweak­ing the algo­rithm a bit here and a tick there.

Another Guru Approach is to make us believe that we have to clearly tag, mark or dis­tin­guish ads from other con­tent. There is noth­ing wrong with that per se; but as a web mas­ter, it is not my job to work for Google and to make the dis­tinc­tions READABLE by Google.

Exam­ple: to com­ply with legal rules (Con­sumer Pro­tec­tion) one could load a title “Adver­tise­ment” in form of an image or a flash tag which Google can­not read. We com­ply with the rules, how­ever Google is not capa­ble of read­ing it. Google Gurus want to make us believe that we have to be more catholic than the pope and edit for Google. The Guru Approach often is an approach with tends to pro­tect the Guru Sta­tus and if you want to be a Google Guru, just repeat stu­pidly what Google writes smartly on their sites and blogs.

The good news is that Google Blogs are ana­lyzed by many Gurus like Alan Greenspan’s state­ments a few years back. The Gurus then feed their stuff to main stream and they luck­ily are fol­lowed by the masses of devel­op­ers and blog mas­ters. This is the good news as it indi­cates clearly where not to head to.

Online Adver­tis­ing Secrets, Google Secrets and such like do exist; the day they are revealed, they are no secrets any­more. By def­i­n­i­tion there is no such thing as a shared secret and a secret is usu­ally revealed when it does not profit the holder of a secret anymore.

The only real Adver­tis­ing secrets I can think of con­cern tar­get key­words and the way to reach out for the tar­geted buy­ing pub­lic. No one will ever share with you a money mak­ing key­word, namely in an AdSense envi­ron­ment, and no one will ever share with you the under­ly­ing strat­egy used to pub­lish in a highly (Google) effi­cient way.

And yet there is a solu­tion to the prob­lem: you can learn to cre­ate your own pro­fes­sional secrets. You can learn how to ana­lyze key­words and how to test and opti­mize your key­word tar­get­ing. And you can learn how to pub­lish and how to adver­tise on your pub­li­ca­tion. You draw the con­clu­sions from var­i­ous pub­lish­ing strate­gies, apply them to your busi­ness and secret key­words, test and opti­mize and there will be noth­ing in the way for you to become a Guru, your own Guru. But don’t tell any­one else.

Online Adver­tis­ing and Pub­lish­ing is a per­ma­nently evolv­ing topic and the learn­ing process is never fin­ished. Whether you are build­ing a home busi­ness or just sell­ing some prod­ucts as an affil­i­ate, whether you are a net­worker or pro­duc­ing your own prod­ucts, there is always a for­mula ready for you. The impor­tant part is first of all to become aware of the var­i­ous tech­niques and to mas­ter them. The suc­cess­ful appli­ca­tion of any tech­nique is sub­ject to unlim­ited vir­tu­os­ity and cre­ativ­ity and that is where the job as a pub­lisher becomes interesting.

Ycad­emy Online Sem­i­nars and Ycad­emy Pro Calls deal with the evolv­ing envi­ron­ment and are designed to make the best and most recent strate­gies and tech­niques avail­able to par­tic­i­pants. There is no secret to it, and there is no secret to the suc­cess of those who actively apply and imple­ment in a selec­tive and focused way the seeds of Ycad­emy. What grows from there is the indi­vid­ual Pro­fes­sional Secret of Success.

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