Week 2 - Blogs

I myself have been keeping a blog for about a year now so I'm pretty familiar with the whole concept of blogging. Of course my blog is dreadfully unpopular so advertisers aren't at all interested in it. My blog is for movie reviews and I have built a collection of fellow movie review themed blogs that I keep up with. These also don't feature advertising and that's kind of why I like going to them. It makes the blogs seem a little more personal and down to earth, which makes me feel like I can trust them more. There's no banner ads or clutter, just one person's opinion and it makes everything feel a little more intimate and connected. Personally I enjoy blogs more if they don't feature advertising.

For the purpose of this post however, I have been following a few other blogs that do feature advertising in some form. After looking at them for a few days now I came to one solid conclusion...blogs with banner ads and so forth don't work nearly as well as ones where the advertising is within the actual blog post.

The majority of the blogs I looked at went the latter route and any ads or advertising area featured within the actual post itself. For the record, some of the blogs I looked at include "Three Minds on Digital Marketing", "Ad Rants", "Adverblog," and more. By placing the advertising within the post, you're more than likely going to read it and pay attention to it. I found myself pretty engaged in posts about subjects such as the new Angry Whopper at Burger King and a virtual test drive for Toyota, things I don't normally care about but found myself paying close attention to. 

I honestly can't even explain why I found this method so effective. I think it goes back to the idea of it being a lot more personal this way. You feel more connected with the product than you do simply looking at a still advertising image of their product.

Another thing I found with blogs that have advertising outside of the posts, is that after visiting the site for a couple days, I completely stopped noticing the ads all together. I'm guessing this isn't exactly what the marketers want. It just became second nature to ignore them. I couldn't even tell you what the ads were for now. 

You're there to read the posts, not the ads. Therefore combining them into one entity is a much more solid strategy. Having the ads within the post also allows much more to be said about the product, where a banner ad can only have a few words at the most.

I think blog advertising is only going to become bigger and bigger down the road. It allows marketers a level of intimate interaction with the consumers that few mediums provide.