Marketing your blog is very important if you wish to grow your blog. Unless you come with with super duper great articles, you would probably have to do a lot of work on getting the word out. One thing that I see a lot of new bloggers do is advertise on other websites or blogs. Usually advertising costs money and it really ranges depending on what you want in return. There are two very great free advertising opportunities through Spottt or Entrecard and that may be something a blogger could look at for marketing. Even though I don’t condone the use of the free advertising services, they do provide clicks, but sometimes it varies and may give you more blog traffic than if you were to pay.
Advertising is usually a great way to gain a lot of attention to your blog because the specific advertisement placed would attract clicks from random strangers. I would say that that these strangers click on the advertisement when they’re curious and depending what you have on your blog at the time, you may be gain an extra subscriber.
If you’re not gaining subscribers from the clicks, the banner you are using for the advertisement usually portrays to your blog’s image. Whether your getting clicks or not, advertising on a blog to market your own blog is still advertising nevertheless. As I’ve said before, I personally haven’t spent more than $3 on advertising since there are so many free services out there, but there are times where I still don’t receive clicks.
Receiving more clicks on a advertisement placed by a blogger seems to be very important for some reason. I certainly did believe that when I received more clicks, I would receive more traffic. That is correct, but at the same time, it is wrong. The correct thing is each click does mean you receive 1 visitor, but the bad thing is not all advertisements receive clicks.
Basing on Entrecard and Spottt’s free advertising model, you can pretty much say that there is a lot of traffic that gets sent out from those two services. These two services basically puts a widget on a blog and allows you to place a 125×125 banner on the widget when it is your turn. You would also have to put the widget on your own blog, but that’s usually how free services work. There’s always a catch 
When Entrecard launched, I guess that Graham signed an agreement with Darren Rowse and John Chow to use their widget. I didn’t have a clue that it was paid for, but it has pretty much ended now. Anyways, getting back on topic here. Many Entrecard members were waiting in line to get onto the widget’s advertising spot for these two humongous sites. The only problem was after the advertisement was placed, it didn’t send as much traffic as previously thought.
The biggest problems that I see bloggers encounter when they use advertising as a marketing method is that so much is being expected. No matter how much an advertising spot costs on a blog, it may not return as much as you think. This totally doesn’t mean that the blog you were advertising on was doing false advertising on their blog stats. It just means that the visitors to that particular blog didn’t want to click on the ad. Come on, I was advertising on John and Darren’s Entrecard widget and only received about 60 clicks each. Even though it was when Entrecard had a small 100-300 member community, I believe that the difference would be the same.
There could be a lot of reasons why your advertisement doesn’t receive the expected click results, but advertisements range with many different strategies and it may also mean that the visitors to where your ad is placed is just way too smart to click 
. Here are some of my suggestions on getting the most potential out of your advertisement (banner images / text links):
Have eye catching images / Have eye catching text- Stick with one design / Stick with one phrase
- Link to a popular post / Link to a popular post
- Don’t go overboard / The phrase should relate to your blog title
I previously did a post about “Advertising The Correct Way” and you can basically say this is a follow-up to it, but with a twist. No matter how many subscribers a certain blog has it doesn’t factor in to the traffic results. As soon as you understand this, you should advertise on other blogs with no worry.
Do you worry about how much traffic your ad gets?
Following your footsteps,I didn’t spent a penny for advertising .I used entrecard for some time now and I should say I was successful to an extent.
While getting clicks to your advert is one challenge,converting a click is another challenge.Let me add tips to convert a click to a reader…
1.As you have said before,the blogger should have a well written “About” page.A reader would always read the “About” page before clicking on the subscribe button.
2.Try to have a unique theme.Trying news ones may help.
……and I don’t get any more ideas..hope you would bring up a post on this……:)
Mike,how intelligent it would be to ask the publisher about the usual CTR of the ads on his site?.Would that contribute towards finding a better site to advertise and getting more clicks??.
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Thanks for that tips..In my site i did not put some info in my “About” page.But when I search more I bout it, it has a good feedback to other bloggers..About the CTR I think you must have nice and unique design to your template and to your font size of your text..I have a post about on how to increase our CTR.Hope it can help
http://movies.dingexx.com/2008/06/05/25-ways-to-increase-our-ctr/
My last blog post is..25 ways to increase our CTR
Hi Mike,
Have tried advertising via Spottt and Entrycard. Can say that Entrycard is really losing its steam as it is sending less traffic.
Spottt didn’t work for me with only 1-2 clicks for the entire 2 mths I had the widget on. Testing it further
I agree with the suggestiona about making the most of your ads. i believe that catchy images would best fit the marketing strategy, However, I think to generate more visits and clicks on the ads, the blog itself and the ads should come hand in hand. Meaning, they should be related. Some bloggers just post ads for the sake of having ads in their site. Well I have nothing against it but it would be best to make the ads and the topics of your blog congruent with each other.
By the way I haven’t tried entrecard and spottt so I would be meek on their benefits until I have tried them myself. Goodluck bloggers.
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I don’t know if he’ll care, but it might be a good idea to ask for permission from Gary Jones of BlueFur if it’s okay for you to use that Marketing 101 picture. He uses it on his BlueFur blog (blog.bluefur.com).
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I have Experimented quite a lot with EntreCard and the traffic is certainly starting to die off. I havn’t tried out Spottt yet but I do hope it performs better than EC.
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I just started my blog a couple of days ago and haven’t even bothered with those free services, since I believe that I could spend the time on something more useful.
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Sometimes writing great articles isn’t always enough either. It’s tough out there.
What you have said in this post all makes a lot of sense with what you are saying about the type of images you have on your banners. I have trialled a few now and then with EC just to see if there is a difference in the number of visitors you get and I certainly think there is because of how much more traffic I got (I can’t really prove that ‘scientifically’). I have not tried spott and I don’t think I will. I still have the EC widget up on my blog but EC traffic is slowing down a whole lot and I wasn’t really happy at times with what I got from them. I think I could learn a few lesson from you especially with you not having spent more than $3 on advertising because I need to work on getting more traffic to my blogs.
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If you join a free service make sure it is not a detrimental decision. For the 20 or so click you get from Spott or EC is it really worth the time you spend? Good Content, great blog layout, and give readers something interesting, which I fail at miserably, but with over 3000 adsense impressions a day, I guess a few of my carefully hidden posts are doing their job
, i’ve always said, front page is for casual visitors, the back dated(not for front page viewers) posts with purpose are your real traffic bringers.
I must agree with paul. just like what I have said in earlier post..it would be the coherence and the quality of posts that would also attract visitors.
And additional thing, blog posts that has some type of humor and posts that are usually ending in questions would make the visitors more involved in the topic and this would encourage them more to comment on your post, thus, more visitors would most likely come across your blog.
My last blog post is..Einstein And Manilyn Monroe Look-a-like
I am using entrecard and have been getting some good traffics from it!
I do not use spott as it requires placement at places that I could not provide…
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Yes, I worry about the amount of clicks and visitors that I get from the ads I place, not with entrecard though, it is virtual credit!
I would probably advertise cheaply at a low traffic site which has mainly non-blogger visitors or advertise dearly on problogger sites which have a lot of blogger and curious non-blogger traffic. I don’t think I will ever advertise on medium traffic site with predominantly blogger viewers, they are blind to most ads…
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I worry about the low traffic I get and so Im glad I read your article because I di not even know about Entrecard Ive seen it on several blogs but never really knew what it was about so now Im going to go and see if it will be of help to me and also even going to check out spott maybe it will do me good also. I do want to thank you for all the advice I have learned alot here today and plan on using what I have learned here and see if it will improve my traffic especially get traffic started to my new blog at http://dotblogger.blogspot.com I posted my very first contest on it but I still have not gotten the response I wanted. So Im going to look into what Ive learned here at your site. How about you want to enter my contest at Dotblogger? the rules are simple..
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