You need to engage 500,000 opinion makers, not pester 100,000,000 nobodies!!

What a powerful slogan that holds a deeper meaning to the definition of targeted advertising.

Till recently; online advertising was still taking the first steps in this huge field, and it was considered a hype that will end soon, like anything in its beginning.

We started experiencing the direct email advertising, and some would go as far as to purchase email lists and they would buy a lot of money for them, especially if these email addresses were verified and active, which increases the price and supposedly value of such lists.

Almost all major advertisers in the world tried this method, which opened a window of opportunity for innovators to start working on engines that control what you receive in your email inbox, hence; spam control and don’t we love these? So, direct email is not as powerful as it used to be and this created a need for something more effective and gives the required results.

Banner advertising and utilizing web space to market brands, products, services, etc. seemed like a logical solution, and the bidding was now on web space rather than email lists. Portals like Yahoo, MSN and others lead these initiatives and the rest followed. This method is effective only if it was targeted, so if you have a portal that has a good amount of traffic, this does not represent a solid factor without targeting. Why is that? Because you need to reach those who are interested in your message, and not just anyone.

What makes this more interesting; is that the major differentiating factor now is the CTR, aka Click Through Ratio. It does not matter how many times the ad was viewed as how many times it was clicked, so by clicking; the message is delivered. Therefore; the higher the CTR, the more effective the ad is. Of course the attractive design plays a major role as well.

The latest component in the advertising recipes is the blog. Blogs have a more personalized nature than websites, hence; they provide a more specific message as it will hold the identity of the blogger him/herself. It is like a testimonial where this blogger announces that he is confident of this product, otherwise; he wouldn't have promoted it and placed it on his blog, makes sense, right?

So after email, spam control, banners, CTR, etc. could blogs be the next big thing in advertising?

Blogads seem to think so; check it out for yourself here and let us know what you think!