e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Follow-Up: Best Practices for Blog Advertising

September 22nd, 2006

Following up on Wednesday’s post on blogger relations and blog advertising, Justin Abbott from Blogads itself has written in with more about designing effective blog advertising campaigns.

One of our advertisers, Brian Clark, wrote an awesome (illustrated!) article with a lot of best/worst practices: How to Write a Killer BlogAd

He pretty much nailed it on the head. For success in the blogosphere, you need to engage with your readers, not shout at them. Great ads pull people in with a clear, funky image, and text that is intriguing and includes lots of links. More links = more opportunity to click. A political candidate should be searching her name on Technorati.com and using the ad to link to posts that talk about her and her issues. A cause should find like-minded bloggers and pull them into the conversation by linking to them. It adds a lot of credibility amongst blog readers. And most importantly, EXPERIMENT! You can login and change your ad 24/7, so use it to respond to breaking news or revise your image to keep the ad looking fresh.

My nightmare is an advertiser who chooses one blog for three months, puts up one image sans text, and then leaves it there for three months. They may as well be buying a billboard on the highway to nowhere.

We feature a lot of the best & worst ads that we see on our examples page, which is a good place for new advertisers to go when they’re trying to get some visual stimulation and see what these ads are all about, and what they should and shouldn’t do.

After spending the last hour looking through the majority of the progressive/lefty political sites in the blogads network, I was surprised at how few different issue and campaign advertisements I saw. Even on state-specific political blogs, which were usually quite cheap and obviously well targeted at politically minded folks in their area, there were very few local/state candidate ads. Many of the larger national sites had a Phil Angelides ad and one from Tammy Duckworth, but that was generally it. I also saw a few advocacy campaigns, but not as many different ones as I remember seeing a year ago. Have blog ads not panned out for political operations, are they missing an opportunity, is my memory faulty, or did I pick an off week for campaign advertising?

– cpd

Robot-Selected "Related" Articles:

• Iowa’s Budding Political Blogosphere
• More on Spreading Ideas Through Blogs
• More Strategery: Use Search Advertising, Engage the Blogs
• Quick Hits — Mega Holiday Catch-Up Edition
• November 6th Discussion: Best Practices in Online Communications
• Beltway Blogger Boot Camp