A New Way of Looking at Advertising

A New Way of Looking at Advertising by Alastair McIntyre of Electric Scotland USA LLC www.electricscotland.com

With people spending more time on the Internet than watching Television and the decline in readership of newspapers and magazines in favour of web editions it is clear that there is a challenge for companies that use these traditional channels.

We seem caught up in pay by click and other similar models and as the audience matures it is also clear that this model will be challenged.

The way forward is for companies to build longterm relationships with synergy web sites.

Consider the top 100,000 web sites in the world. A significant number will be foreign language web sites. Universities will often be found in this group as their students will make great use of them. Another load will be porn sites. Then there will be many sites that don't take any advertising at all. That means we are down to low thousands where you can advertise.

What advertisers should be doing is finding web sites that are high quality with decent traffic, anything from 250,000 or more unique visitors per month. 10 such sites will give you 2.5 million unique visitors and a hundred would give you 25 million.

Talk to those sites as most will be interested in doing business. BUT don't talk of payment by click, rather talk about how you can help those sites develop better in return for some money and content. After all if you help a web site get more traffic then you also stand to benefit.

There may be a program that the web site could really do with to expand their offering... can you develop it for them from your internal resources?

Is there content that would be great for the web site to have but they don't have the resources to purchase it?

Take for example a site that would love to have a 15 volume publication on their web site. Can you help them by purchasing it for them, get it scanned in? In return you could have your company name on each page of the publication something like... our thanks to X for providing this content for us and X could be a link to the company web site or special landing page.

Many web sites do build a community feel around them and so regular visitors will visit often and if a large company is seen to be helping their "favourite" web site then that gives them a real positive feel for that company. Further than that the company could then offer regular special offers to that web sites visitors. When they are clearly supporting the site then surely regular visitors would be interested in knowing more about the company that is supporting "their" web site. So some historical background of that company would be acceptable and regular news bulletins about what they are doing would be welcome.

Many web sites have newsletters and blogs in which the advertising companies can get involved with. Not an advert but as part of the content.

So if this approach is followed think how you can help your group of web sites be even better. Should the web sites you pick have decent traffic then they must be doing something right to achieve the visitor numbers. What can you do to help them increase that traffic?

At the end of the day many really good web sites with decent traffic are part time businesses or one man full time businesses. So some money is always good to have but content is also good to have. Say that each of your web sites received $1,000 a month. That's say 100 web sites and so this costs you $100,000 a month. What are you currently spending on TV, newspaper and magazine advertising a month? All of those media are seeing reduced visitor numbers or less time spent on their media.

So... come in as a friend of the site and look to see how you can help. You'll get a lot of positive feedback that will improve your bottom line and dare I say it... you may well have more fun doing it.

A New Way of Looking at Advertising - To learn more about this author, visit Alastair McIntyre's Website.

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