How to Advertise on Blogs

Bloggers that have not quite attained a level of readership to merit direct advertising/sponsorship will usually add Google AdWords or other automated ad networking tools on their blogs. But as blogs become more popular and garner lots of attention, more sophisticated advertising relationships are usually established. Sometimes these relationships can be established directly with a blogger, but more often they are handled through a blog ad intermediary. These intermediaries perform a helpful function in making sure blogs and blog advertisers (and the specific advertisements) are a good match. They're not afraid to tell a potential advertiser that they can't place ads on certain blogs or that a particular ad is not fitting for some blogs. Clearly the dynamics of buying and selling ad space has shifted, but making good matches is so much more important in blogging because the environment is so open and uncontrollable. Once the genie is out of the bottle, he's not going back in.

There are currently three big players in the blog ad network space and more enter every day.

Blogads - In addition to being Newfangled's new upstairs neighbor, Blogads was a real pioneer in the blog advertising market.

Federated Media - John Battelle, author of The Search, and contributor to Business 2.0 magazine founded Federated Media which groups bloggers that share common ground into advertising groups a.k.a federations.

AdBrite - I'm not as familiar with AdBrite but from my research when Blogads and Federated Media are mentioned/compared (on blogs), AdBrite is often mentioned as well.

Well that will just about do it for this month's newsletter on blogs. And just a reminder... now that you have an RSS reader (you have one, right?) you should be subscribed to the Web Smart Newsletter, but now you can also subscribe to the Web Smart Blog, which will regularly add the latest information to past newsletters to keep them current and helpful to our readers. By the way, if you like this newsletter, why don't you give us a little link bait love and recommend us to Digg, tag us in del.icio.us, and favorite us in Technorati? Comments also welcome...