The Frager Factor: Like a great 10-year aged Scotch, lest we forget ...

"Like a great 10-year ?aged Scotch, lest we forget the value of aged advice from the smartest domainers alive!"

Here's a ten-year old exchanged between two domain superstars on a once elite forum. It may remind you how you must be constantly re-examining your domain strategy because I see so many folks still stck in this ten-year ago place.


Kevin:
Let's not limit ourselves to banner ads. There are many ways to skin the ad cat. Successful advertising is all about creativity and making sure the advertiser's ads work and they make money and you money as the publisher.?

When you work directly with advertisers you can build creative long term relationships together and go beyond the traditional ways. You can create full page ads which are served as sections or subdomains on your site for them. You can offer placement of downloadable advertising PDF files describing their company's full product line. You can create online media rich commercials to play on your site and connect interested prospects instantly to a live sales agent at the advertisers sales center. You can do contests. Freebie offers. There are hundreds of ways to advertise creatively. You can do combo deals where they get banner ads, multimedia ads, and newsletter ads.?

This is why its so important to get to the position where you have control and where you and the advertiser connect directly. When an ad doesn't pull right away for example, because your sales reps have a relationship they can go back in and close another deal offering another ad at discount or a new type of ad to try. The point is the most money is made when you and your advertising know each other. You build trust and integrity this way. They see you working to create ways to make their ads stand out by doing things differently and they'll love stuff like that. Advertising becomes exciting this way. Its no longer work, it's a fun challenge and competition to get advertisers and then to create ad campaigns that zing in the sales for them.

Roxy:
PC marketing really changed the way webmasters and online businesses advertised their products and services. Doesn't anyone remember back around 1998-2000 when banners and buttons were the big thing?

I worked as an account manager for a big travel site called Travelfile which primarily on AOL's network. We sold clients pages under specific categories that would highlight their business, but a big thing was banners and buttons.?

Those ads were sold exactly as Kevin describes - which was familiar to anyone who bought advertising for offline media. While we did have reporting on results like "impressions," there were no guarantees you would get anything. The only difference is we did do the banner creatives for clients that didn't have their own.

The problem came that once the client saw the number of "impressions" (or they would sometimes track results with their own stats/sales), they would complain that they didn't want to pay for only "impressions" because just getting eyeballs didn't justify the cost.?

So at that time, there was a kind of backlash overall on the Web against banner advertising as a result of clients being able to track "click throughs" to their site and perhaps even sales connected to the banner ad. What evolved was "PPC" and paying only for clicks.?

Who can argue with "clicks" - it's not just a call to action; it's a resulting action - except to say the PPC Service is providing bogus stats or pointing out issues with "click fraud." Not a term we heard back in 1999.?

I think we are seeing things moving full circle, as many things do in life. When the web was new, it was the new wild west, and the playing field was flat and open to anyone, big or little.?

As the Web has matured, and it's been over a decade (or 70+ years in Doggie years - what are web years? Ummm, I always envision 1 web year = to 3 years offline, no reason why).?

So we now have big players who figured out how to make money beyond what anyone thought 10+ years ago. And they _don't_ want to deal with a bunch of little guys. I know this after working in SEO for since 2000, and the difference in what it took back then and what it takes now to be a little guy competing out there. BUT the fact is that right now PPC's bread and butter is the small-medium businesses.?

Will we see a mindset change to monetizing every eyeball, it may happen and it won't be in the context of just the internet - it will be a change once we have a true mobile web - where every user is tracked 24/7 (no vague clicks from an IP adress either).?

Your thoughts?

Like a great 10-year aged Scotch, lest we forget the value of aged advice from the smartest domainers alive!

Source: http://fragerfactor.blogspot.com/2012/09/like-great-10-year-aged-scotch-lest-we.html

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