Bloggin Ads

It has been mentioned before here on Bloggin-Ads that advertising is one of the ways to market your business or your blog out to onlookers. There are many ways to advertise correctly and there are many ways to advertise incorrectly, but it tends to cost you money no matter what the case is. Alright, there are some free advertising opportunities open for some of us, but you must admit that they’re never as good as if you were to buy an ad from Shoemoney or Problogger. If you’re going to pay for some advertising spots, you better be ready for the hefty sum that you may have to fork out.

Before I continue on what I’m going to discuss about through this post, I would want you guys to read my part 1 and part 2 series post on “Advertising The Correct Way”. After reading it, you should understand why you would need to advertise and doing it correctly.

Anyways, lets say that you choose to advertise on John Chow’s blog. Why do I choose John Chow? Well, he’s the blogosphere celebrity, so why not choose him. His blog offers many many advertising opportunities for companies or bloggers, but you would need to pay so much money that you would need to think more than once.

Lets take a look at the numbers on John Chow’s advertising spots ($/month) shall we:

125×125 - $500
468×60 – $1,000
300×250 – $500 (total 10 in rotation)
Stripe Ad (text link) – $250 (total 10 in rotation)
Featured Site Status (text link) – $240
RSS Feed Footer (text link) – $200
Sponsored Reviews – $500 (one time fee)

Alright now that you see John Chow’s rates, you should have a feeling of how deep your pockets would have to be to afford a piece of your own advertisement on John Chow’s blog. The blog receives over 300,000 unique visitors a month, so if you advertise on any of these spots, you would get some sort of exposure. Some may be higher, but some may also be lower depending how much you wish to spend.

Face it, John isn’t going to lower the prices on his advertising spots, but instead raise it. You may get some discount, but even though John is a great guy, he is trying to make a living. Since I know that I won’t be able to afford to pay for any of those marketing advertising opportunities, I may as well try to partner up with some friends or fellow bloggers to split the total cost.

Doesn’t paying less for a 125×125 advertising spot on John Chow sound a lot better than paying $500 a month yourself? What you do is go talk to a few of your friends or fellow bloggers and discuss on how you guys could share one advertising spot. By assuming that John Chow’s advertisements run for 31 days and you get 4 friends to share the 125×125 spot, you would be paying $125/month for about 7.75 days of advertising.

There is guaranteed exposure on a blog the size of John Chow’s because the huge network he has backs up the rates he charges for you to advertise. Now doesn’t that sound like a great plan to you?

The possibilities are endless because you can split the costs with 30 other friends/bloggers, which brings down the advertising cost to $16.20 for one day of advertising. Now I wouldn’t go that far as to split it between 30 other persons, but it would definitely drop the huge $500/month rate down to a more affordable rate.

Why even stop at 125×125 banners when you could also split costs into other banner spots and sponsored reviews. John Chow’s sponsored reviews tend to give out the most exposure, but is limited to only a few links in the review itself. I’m sure you can provide the links to Michael Kwan and he’ll add them in the right places for you.

What if John Chow won’t let me? You’re bound to get the blog owners a bit angry (Shoemoneyub, Problogger, Uberaffiliate, Zac Johnson) if you were to try strategy, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t agree. You’re the one that would be gathering $500 up to pay John Chow and if John Chow gets the money, he shouldn’t have any complaints on that.

If you’re the blog owner giving out advertising opportunities, scheduling in your times, advertisers, images, and everything into a simple Microsoft Excel file would allow you to keep organized. OIO Publisher does a great job at keeping things organized and scheduled, so you won’t have to worry about putting in the banner at the right moment.

I’m sure some of you have thought of this before, but why not give it a try? Won’t you want to gain traffic from John Chow’s blog by only paying a fraction of the cost?