SmallBusinessNewz

Many of the old industry thinkers seem to have a hard time understanding that in the age of filtered information where you can instantly reference what you want and when, it's becoming less and less effective to force or push ads on visitors.

Study after study show that the more savvy a user becomes the less and less they click on PPC or other advertisements. This trend is referred to generically as "banner blindness" and as it increases, each targeted user who does click / respond to the message becomes more of a commodity and the price for that response goes up as well.

This has created a situation where the most profitable way to monetize website content is by blending it with advertising or creating some type of a merger where you get both together. I've written about this "new" internet advertising model before and I wanted to blog about it again, because it's so important, yet seems to be overlooked by most of the mainstream media at their peril.

An example of this type of merger is the local news solutions we put together for RISMedia that involved local content authors sponsoring a local real estate area which they live and getting their message out there. We push these advertiser produced content areas with the full power of RISMedia - a real estate authority so the individual content ranks well and instead of banners, visitors get a nice consistant experiene with more content to digest. It's a win win. The simplest example of content mixed with advertising is publishing a blog where you give away real information and advice while also promoting your marketing message. Your advertising yourself and your services by creating informative valuable content.

Not all examples of content mixed with advertising are good ofcourse. Bad examples are literarlly flooding Google blogsearch right now and infesting hte web. Go ahead and see how many blogs on viagra are out there. They don't really contain any good or unqiue / valuable information, but are more like reguritates crap posing as a real blog or information to lure click to affillaite sites. There are a ton of these out there.

In the last few years we also saw the birth of sponsored blog posts wher ethe author was paid to review a product or service, witch I think works decently nice, except blogs thqat engage in too much of that risk losing their crediblity and reader base, So ideally it would have to be balanced with lots of very organic content.

As many newspapers face extinction they've begun to start more aggressive monetizing their online content with afilliate offers. The problem is many of the offers that provide the highest returns also are the most spam / catch 22 / like free credit checks, credit cards and other like stuff. I believe we're in the infancy to the middle of this trends and it's only going ot get stronger and strong er with hundreds, then thousands, then millions and more. It'll be fun to watch and see how slick this content bundled with advertising we plan on slowly unraveling more product offers like RISMedia's Local program that allow our visitors to take advtange of this trend. If you're running a large website that creates a lot of content, I'd definitley look into providing solutions that combine content and advertising in a more seemless way than soley banner or ppc ads.

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