Aaron Brazell, aka @technosailor and founder and lead editor of Technosailor.com, when he spoke at Izeafest 2009, shared his thoughts on what makes someone an “influencer.” The difference between being a celebrity and an influencer, he said, is that, “Being a celebrity gets you attention now; being an influencer gets you attention over the long term.”
A few of the characteristics of an influencer, according to Brazell, are: Read the rest of this entry »
Paid tweeting is nothing new. We’ve all seen spam users and posts in our Twitter feed and our following list, but usually the attempts are painfully obvious and easily dismissed. A new venture, Sponsored Tweets, by IZEA founder Ted Murphy (the guy with the tongue, in case you, like me, didn’t recognize the name but know the face) is bringing sponsored tweeting to the mainstream, and he has a pack of celebrities, both traditional and online, to back him up.
The idea is simple: companies pay Twitter users to mention their products in a favorable light. It’s paid content, not uncommon in the blogging world, brought to micro-blogging for the first time in a concerted, organized and coherent way. It even includes an attempt at transparency, via a “disclosure engine,” use of which is required for Sponsored Tweets posts. Read the rest of this entry »
As respected online publications such as Salon.com, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal removed all or most of their paid subscription models over the course of the decade, conventional wisdom formed that holding print content intended for a mainstream audience behind a pay wall was a noble but failed experiment.
But are paid subscriptions on the Internet poised to make a comeback, albeit in a different form?
There are several standard ways to make money in the highly competitive online publishing space. The dominant one for years has been free content supported by advertising, but the massive amount of supply (even of the high-quality stuff) coupled with a worldwide recession have pushed down rates that advertisers are willing to pay for ad space, squeezing profit margins for most online publishers.
TechCrunch’s MG Siegler points out a not-so-little secret about online display ads: most people couldn’t care less about them:
The web is increasingly filling up with ads. Many sites, including this one, have a bunch of them all around with the hopes that you’ll find one relevant to you, and click on it. Of course, most of you don’t. And if you do, it may be by accident.
While there are a number of other ways to make money at the online content game, such as using content to sell products and services, there are a few factors at play that could pave the way for online paid subscriptions to make major headway over the next few years.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve recently been researching ways to promote my own site, at places like Facebook, among others.
The problem, as is always the problem with internet advertising, is finding a simple, cost effective way to bring my ads to potential customers who’re actually looking for my services. Google Ads are one way to try to insure you reach the people you intend to, but advertising networks are another.
Design Ads is a brand new network (doesn’t officially launch until 2009, in fact), which provides a targeted solution for those in the web design field. Ad network models are successful because they ensure a healthy cycle of targeted material that will remain fresh and relevant to viewers, so you’re ad won’t become stale or melt into the background by virtue of visitors seeing it every time they go to a specific site.
The people behind Design Ads clearly know their target market. They list among their discriminators for publishers the fact that the advertising is simple, and clutter free. Design blogs and online magazines will, after all, be more concerned than other outlets about the effect of advertising on their site’s layout. Revenue rates are reasonable, and are priced according to unique visitor statistics, not click-throughs.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
