CONTEXTUAL ADVERTISING: Online Marketing Has Become So Simple!

Contextual Advertising

Contextual Advertising is a relatively new form of advertising on the web that will consider the context of the site, a page or a search query, to display ads from advertisers that correspond to the topic. Its usual form is text-based, using regular hyperlinks, sometimes small graphics and brief descriptions to attract users that may be interested. It is usually highly targetted and is better accepted by users because it is less obstrusive, less bandwith hungry and more relevant than the classic graphical banners. For example, a web page about photography will automatically draw advertisers selling cameras and other photo related accessories. It also has the benefits of making the job of a web publisher easier to find sponsors, as the contextual advertising company acts as an automatic middle man between publishers and advertisers, who bid for specific keywords using an auction system. The same can be said for advertisers, since they now have access to thousands of possible web sites to automatically advertise on. It usually works as Pay per Click, meaning the publisher only generate revenues when a user actively click on an ad, as opposed to Pay per Impressions, an older system that generates revenue based on the number of time the ad is displayed.

Google was on the forefront of this innovation when they created Google Adsense, the first major contextual advertising program. In the beginning, these new ads appeared with their search engine, but they soon expanded it to include webmasters and their web sites, which they named their "Content Network". Using a few ligns of Javascript code, publishers could insert Adsense on their web pages and it would then automatically serve relevant ads using Google's search algorithm. Google also considers other factors such as the geographical location of visitors and their languages, so ads can actually be different for each visitor. Other companies followed with similar programs, but they lacked the sophistication of Adsense since they demanded specific keywords from webmasters instead of detecting them on their pages. Other big players on the web are now slowly embracing this terrific new marketing technology, such as the Yahoo! Publisher Network and MSN adCenter. Contextual Advertising is making it now possible for smaller webmasters and publishers who own small hobby sites to monetize their efforts without spending all their time dealing with appropriate sponsors that may not necessarly be interested with smaller sites when taken on an individual level.

Contextual advertising programs and Google Adsense Alternatives

Here we list companies that offer this marketing solution to webmasters. Google Adsense is often considered the prime choice, but they do have restrictions and some people may be refused to their program.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Online Marketing Has Become So Simple!

I was thinking about why it had been so hard for me to market and build a sufficient amount of traffic to my websites. I’d gone through many different schemes and programs trying to figure exactly what made this thing tick! I’d been through hosting FFA pages, to classified ads, through pay per click advertising. I had been marketing on the internet for years in the dark throwing away one advertising method after another and then I finally figured it out! And it was so simple…

It all boiled down to this in a nutshell. There are basically only two types of advertising on the internet period. There is short term advertising that will bring you quick hit exposure such as ezines, pay per click, paid to click, safelists. This type of advertising will bring you a quick surge in visitors to your lead pages, but once the amount of traffic that you have bought has been used up you won’t be able to make use of it again until you buy another traffic package. I love advertising this way, but I found out that when times came where I didn’t have a whole lot of money to advertise, then I would be faced with a period where I couldn’t get much exposure for my business. So this was a drawback to me!

The second type of advertising is long-term advertising. When I say long-term advertising I’m talking mainly about methods that will allow you to leave a text link advertisement of your website on a website or in an article that sticks on that site forever or for several months and draws traffic or is passed around the internet by many people virally and draws traffic permanently. I’m talking about some forms of classified advertising, article marketing, squidoo lens, search engine submisssion, traffic bars, 12 month sponsor links and so on and so forth. I’m basically speaking about advertising that once you do it enough times you can bring back considerable amounts of traffic to your webpages that lasts for a very long-time! The only problem for me was that use of this type of advertising takes a while to implement so the need for short term growth and cash was hard to come by.

I started looking around the internet at some of the succesful marketers and I began to notice a trend. Every one of their marketing campaigns consisted of short term methods that bought quick traffic, and long term methods that once you put the links out there or built enough members(traffic bars) you could get free traffic forever and it grew virally! As soon as I made note of this, every thing became clear to me.

To be successful on the internet, In a nut shell all you had to do was combine short and long-term traffic building strategies that have been proven to work in your campaigns, utilize an autoresponder for follow up and be consistent every week in your efforts to build your base. Once I understood this I knew that this could be applied to any worthwhile business and you have a great chance of being successful!