August 8, 2005
adrants
Regular readers will have probably spotted my Adrants ad on my sidebar by now.
Steve Hall’s Adrants and I have been trading ads for a while now. His ad on my blog, my ad on his.
Adrants is a great read. Deals with all the quirkier [read: desperate] stuff being churned out by the agencies. What’s even more impressive is Steve seems to have turned the blog into a successful ad revenue generator for himself. Very cool.
As far as I can tell, Adrants drives over 300 people a week to gapingvoid. In total, that makes over 30 thousand people so far.
Of course, compared to how many people a TV spot can reach, it’s a drop in the ocean. But when you’re just trying to target advertising people in a meaningful way, 30K is a hell of a lot.
Now as a result, my blog is pretty well-known in adland. Sure, it took a while. A few hundred every week. But after a while, it added up.
So here’s what I think my fellow bloggers should start doing more often: Find the coolest blog in the industry you’re in, and see if you can’t make a deal with the owner.
Hey, it worked for me.
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How about if you are one of the coolest blogs, would you go about and allow some minnow to have an ad on your site? Would you wait for them to seek you out or go and stick up an ad for them on your own bat?
At the moment you only have an ad for Adrants. How about picking some small fry and sticking an ad for them under the Adrants one? Maybe let your readers decide since they already provide a wealth of information on this site in the form of comments. I’m not brown-nosing Hugh but you have weight in the bloggersphere now and could help out someone who deserves to be seen.
Same goes for other “A-Listers”, if they all picked someone small and had a free ad for them in a prominent location for two months it would grow the other site and grow the overall community. We all want more quality in this place.
*Hippy rant over*
Loving Hugh is easy cos…
Today seems to be a Hugh Macleod love-in on this blog, as for the second post in a row I link to him. Today Hugh suggests Find the coolest blog in the industry you’re in, and see if you can’t…
I’m with the hippie on that on… all the big boys should pick a handful of “project blogs” to pimp.
On that note, if you have a dog that needs walking, Hugh; I’d do that in exchanges for an ad.
A while back Halley (http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/) campaigned for the A-Listers in her corner of the blogosphere to link to new voices. I think it’s a great idea to link to the smaller players.
The problem isn’t linking, it’s linking to “someone who deserves to be seen”. The reason we can’t find the someone like that is because there’s too much noise out there, how much better would an A-Lister be at finding that someone?
I love AdRants, and I doubt I ever would have found it if I hadn’t stumbled upon Gaping Void first.
And the picture was the thing. I tune out the “LinkLube” section and all other “blogrolls” out there. They’re good for Google Juice but I don’t think they have much more purpose.
With the whole (largely ridiculous IMO) “A-Lister” meme, I think most highly-trafficed people would at least consider linking to your lower-traffic site if you link back and are genuinely interesting to them. That sounds a bit like what Hugh may have done with AdRants originally.
But generally, I think your best bet is the high(er) road. Provide great content, provide it free, and get your friends to link to you. Then your e-friends, etc etc. Country’ll grow.
BTW, I linked to GapingVoid on my blog for a simple reason having nothing to do with Google and such (with which Hugh’s fine now anyway) — my reason is that I really enjoy GV, and most of the people who read my blog (most of whom know me personally) would *never* find it otherwise.
Coming soon, affirmative action for blog links. Hugh, by virture of his popularity, will be legally required to link to 3 unknown blogs per week.
Hint — write something worth reading, and the links will come.
Also, it seems like bloggers have lost perspective rather quickly. If you’ve got 5 or 10 regular readers you are way ahead of 98% of the writers that have ever written.
“Find the coolest blog in the industry you’re in, and see if you can’t make a deal with the owner.“
What if you are the coolest blog in your industry and your industry still doesn’t give a rat’s ass?
Find a new industry
Worldviews, Trade Shows and Blogs
Peter Jennings dying of lung cancer just changed my worldview on smoking. While I’ve quit before, I now really sense the urgency more than ever and am trying to do something about it. Why Peter Jennings? Because he was 67