The FOOA conference was targeted mainly at ad agencies and big players who buy millions of dollars in advertising and were looking for better ways to reach their niche customers. That said, there was a steady focus on advertising on some of the larger blogs out there – and, in turn, if you were a larger publisher, how you could monetize your blog or publication.
Some of the companies below, like PayPerPost and BlogAds, cater to publications of all sizes, while some of the others like Federated Media and The Deck are highly selective and only work with high quality, high traffic blogs. Here are several of the numerous ways you might consider monetizing your blog – or if you’re an advertiser, here are numerous choices you have to reach niche audiences.
PayPerPost – PayPerPost and similar sites (ReviewMe and SponsoredReviews) allow advertisers to pay a specified price for a mention on a blog. Most of these services require some type of disclosure, so the blogger will mention that they have been compensated for writing a review of the advertiser’s product or service. Though the idea of having advertisers pay for posts has been controversial, many prominent bloggers have embraced the idea, including John Reese, Andy Beard, and Dave Taylor.
BlogAds – Henry Copeland provided some information on BlogAds, which runs blog advertising on 1500 leading blogs and is big with political bloggers. BlogAds run alongside blog content rather than as the content, like the PayPerPost model. In fact, Copeland was very vocal at the conference about his disapproval for PayPerPost. Interestingly enough, his criticisms were aimed at PayPerPost bloggers not disclosing that they were being paid to write about a specific advertiser, something PayPerPost makes it very clear they do require.
RSS Advertising – Brent Hill from Feedburner spoke on how publishers can monetize their content by running advertisements in their RSS feed. Feedburner is a Chicago-based company that provides statistics for RSS feeds. I use them for my RSS feeds and recommend that if you publish a feed, you open an account to keep track of who is subscribing to it. (And they’ll be around a long time as Google just bought them.) For those of you with a larger reader base, Feedburner offers ways to advertise in your feeds.
Federated Media – For the larger publishers out there, Federated Media brokers deals between larger, well read blogs and ad agencies looking to target specific niches.
The Deck – Jim Coudal spoke about the extremely exclusive niche ad network, The Deck which has an interesting policy. Blogs in the network can only show one 120×90 pixel ad on their blog and are not allowed to run any other ads. They make 17 ad slots available and sell each slot for about $5700/month. Sites in The Deck focus on creatives and web designers.
IndieClick – Another niche ad network that focuses on indie music, movies, fashion, and news. Check them out.
Join our weekly Marketing Success mailing list and receive our free 43-page Small Business Marketing Plan guide. 
