Web Marketing Strategy Update

Want to display ads in your blog’s RSS feed, but haven’t been accepted by the gods at Google?

Well, you could always edit the feed yourself — I did that. Trouble is, your ads soon get stale when they’re hard-coded in. But who’s got the time to mess about updating them? And that’s assuming you have the technical knowledge required to edit the various PHP files in your blog, that generate the feeds.

A while back, after applying to Adsense for a second time with no luck (God knows why they won’t let me run ads in my RSS feeds), I looked all over for an alternative to Adsense RSS ads.

I couldn’t find one.

Then last week while clearing through some email clutter, I discovered that in January I had received an email from BidVertiser informing me that they now offered ads for RSS or ATOM feeds. Actually, what I’d stumbled on wasn’t the original announcement, but an update two weeks after the fact:

Following the successful launch of BidVertiser Ads for Feeds, we have now added 3 unique solutions that allow you to keep your current feed address (including FeedBurner!) when running BidVertiser ads for Feeds:

Google makes money by selling targeted advertising space. That’s its core business. Providing search results is simply the vehicle for doing so. Search doesn’t generate revenue in itself.

Has it ever occurred to you how contradictory the goals of these two activities are?

One being to provide perfectly targeted search results, the other to sell as much advertising as possible?

What would happen if every time someone performed a search, they found EXACTLY what they were looking for in the first few results?

This is what would happen: people would hardly ever click on the Adsense ads displayed on the results pages.

Why do people click on ANY link?

Because they think that it will take them to a page about whatever it is they are looking for.

Why do people click on the Adsense ads around the search results?

Because they think the ad is more likely to take them to a page about whatever it is they are looking for than the other links they see on the page.

Key Point: