Advertise Your Blog-Part Two
In our last article Suzanne explained WHY you should advertise your blog, and some advertising companies you can use to place your ads. They offer the advantage that the advertising companies provide the statistics for how the blog is doing. They list the traffic and pageviews of the blogs.
I’m going to look at another option. Blogs that offer advertising directly through the blogger. No middleman. Which sometimes means you’ll get the same traffic exposure for lower prices. These blogs usually have a link to “advertise here” or “advertising rates” or something similar. Some will have a page and post their rates. Some will list off their statistics such as visitors or pageviews per week. While you can take them at their word, you should do some other research on your own regarding the popularity of their website.
Things to consider:
1) Do they have an active blog? Do they post daily or at least regularly?
2) Do they have a comment section with a lot of activity? How many comments do they get on their posts?
The following are some different rankings available that you can check. All can be gamed to some extent. So check them all out and make informed decisions. Go to these sites and put in the URL for the site you are checking out.
3) Technorati. Technorati ranks blogs based upon incoming links over the last 6 months. The higher the technorati authority “the better”. Technorati only counts one incoming link to a site per site. So if one site links to you 10 times, it still just considers that as one link.
4) Alexa . Alexa is another ranking system. It used to be heavily swayed by webmaster & internet marketing type people visiting your site with the Alexa toolbar installed. Alexa recently changed their algorithm to hopefully take out some of this bias. In this case, the lower the number in Alexa ranking, the better.
5) Google Toolbar Page Rank. Google ranks websites from 0 to 10. The higher the number on Page Rank, “the better”. This is Google’s view of the authority of the website. Their algorithm is vaguely known. They penalize sites for doing paid reviews, selling pagerank through textlink ads and other no-no’s they’ve determined. So a site could still have really good traffic for you and a low page rank. Google updates the page ranks about 4 times a year. Or not.
You can find out a site’s Page Rank if you have the Google toolbar installed on your browser. Go Here and scroll down to toolbar, click on it, and it will bring you to a page for the proper toolbar for your browser.
Use these rankings, along with statistics provided by the blogger to determine if you think advertising directly with the blogger is a good fit for advertising your blog.
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