January results are in!

The first month of the ad network is now behind us and we are all very pleased with the results. As with any new venture, we’ve learned some things. Some were obvious and some were not so obvious.

The bloggers got paid. (At least those who told us how to pay them) A couple of critics of our ad network had the nerve to ask us if we were actually going to pay bloggers to place ads. Well, ask our bloggers. Our fee structure is fair and bloggers were paid based on impressions and not based on clicks like Google. As more advertisers get on board with the network, bloggers will make more money and we can allow more bloggers into the network.

Solid stats worth the money. Going into this, our theory was that if you placed high quality ads on high quality blogs, the click rate would take care of itself and advertisers would love that. This was dead on… I love saying we were right. We placed 108,000 ads in January and the CTR was great!

Online advertising is about influence, not popularity. In theory I knew this to be true but now we’ve seen it in practice. Blog readers are more likely to click an ad and take action if they know and trust the blogger.

Being “ad light” helps earn the highest returns. Have you gotten enough newsletters or  seen enough blogs loaded with advertising? Our theory has always been… light on ads = heavy on returns. If you look at our bloggers you’ll see that none of them heavily advertises. A couple of ad blocks is plenty.

A well executed blog will draw traffic. One of our bloggers blew us away with her ability to draw traffic. Her secret? Stick to the basics. Write witty content, write a great title, and tag the snot out of it. Then let the search engines do the rest.

We are looking forward to a bright future with the blog ad network. If you are interested in either joining our network or advertising on the network, let us know!