You’ve been hard at work, plugging away at your latest blog article on managing IT projects and talking about best practices in IT portfolio management. It’s been a great week.
Before you know it, you start getting emails from a couple of big-name companies who want you to let them advertise their latest software packages on your blog. It never occurred to you that major companies might hunt you down to ask you to promote their products on your blog site. Is it really happening?
The new advertising model
While the rest of the media was struggling with old paradigms, bloggers pumped out hundreds of thousands of new blogs and posts that cover an enormous range of topics. In not a few cases, popular blogs enjoy a wider readership than many printed magazines and newspapers.
This has forced a shift in how companies think about advertising. Before the average writer could hop online and post an article in the blogosphere, companies relied on traditional and expensive print ads as a means to reach customers.
More recently, advertising models have shifted to reaching people through social networking sites, which takes advantage of wide exposure and the ability to infiltrate even the consumer’s friends list with ads. The current explosion in blogging is encouraging companies to recognize that if they want to reach a huge audience, they can put their ads on popular blogging sites that receive tons of traffic.
The traffic factor
Traffic is what paves the side streets of the information superhighway with pure gold. Whoever gets big traffic is halfway into the consumer’s wallet already.
Even if bloggers don’t fully recognize the potential for profits, advertisers understand the situation. And they want as much access to your traffic as they can get.
The blog owner stands between the advertiser and the blog’s traffic. Consequently, advertisers hope the typical blogger will allow them to have access to this traffic for pennies on the dollar.
With mainstream print media dying, however, the standards that once governed advertising and advertising negotiations are on shifting ground. Some media die-hards argue print will survive the intrusion of the blogosphere, but even major print media sources keep asking whether their industry has done itself in.
The blog owner’s dilemma
When you have gold to sell, this is the right kind of problem to have. But how do you decide how much to charge potential advertisers, and how much of your limited can you cede to them?
Blog owners rarely think this far ahead when they launch their blog. Most of us assumed we would write a few useful articles, appeal to a specific crowd, and maybe plaster the sidebar with some affiliate ads to generate some pocket change each month.
Who was going to take us all that seriously? But then the traffic poured in, and advertisers are battering down your door to seize more market share for their products and services.
In the beginning of the blog revolution, we had to be conservative with our pricing and fairly liberal about how much space we turned over to advertisers. But today, with more consumers turning to blogs over mainstream print media for news and advice, the balance of power has shifted in favor of the blog owner.
Some of us can charge far more for less space . . . a trend that’s being fueled by more blogs with high traffic taking readers away from traditional print media providers.b
