The First Professional Guide to Monetizing Your Website with In-Text Advertising I’m happy to share that the new book is out!  The Hidden Treasure in Your Website: The First Professional Guide to Monetizing Your Website with In-Text Advertising (the link goes to Amazon). Humbly, author Tomer Treves is me, the same person behind this Online Siesta blog, so I can’t review the book objectively. But I think it’s only reasonable that I would recommend it… Well, friends, I recommend the book – please buy one copy for yourself and 10 other copies for your family and friends...

Media Planning Glossary How complex has it become? The once rather simple online media plan has now become a monster. And considering the fact that it is just a fraction of the largest all encompassing advertising plan, it’s simply mind blowing. After the competitive research, campaign goals discovery, audience targeting, geographic distribution, and all the other necessary steps… Only then comes the media mix which in all template plans includes sponsored links, sponsored search and SEM, banners, rich media advertising… And then each of these is further analyzed according to...

Website Magazine Ranks In-Text Advertising Networks among Top 50 Good news for in-text advertising: Website Magazine has ranked in-text advertising networks among the Top 50 viable advertising and affiliate networks to consider using in 2011. It seems that the double-underlined links have finally become standard for Web content monetization. I was personally happy to find Infolinks (#39) as the highest ranked pure in-text advertising network. I take this opportunity to post here an article I wrote for Website Magazine (originally published in July 2010) hoping to start the New Year with a good...

Now that I’ve already come up with the top ten reasons not to use in-text ads and given you ammunition against your in-text-loving friends, you might even find yourself joining them… So, to be on the safe side, I thought it may be useful for you to also browse through the top 10 advantages and benefits of in text ads on your site. The issues are quite similar, but the angle of view is reversed. I also deal with most of these issues elsewhere in more depth, but this list can prove to be handy as an overview. 1. In Text Ads are Quiet When reading content online, we all got used to reading continuously...

In Text Ads Go Display In the early days of in text advertising, the double underline links opened bubbles with textual ads, mostly alongside a thumbnail image of the ad’s landing page as a preview. With time, the text ads gave way to more and more graphic ads that looked more like the regular banners. This trend is still in progress and the balance between text ads and banner ads is not fixed yet. In fact, this balance is very different between markets and it seems that in markets where in text ads are still relatively new, text ads still hold the reigns, while in more mature markets, banners...

Where did the Bubble Go? When defining in-text ads, the little tooltip that opens upon a mouse hover nicknamed “bubble” was a fundamental part of it. But, as it usually happens with definitions, there are exceptions. Some advertising methods that insert ads dynamically within existing online content do so without the so called bubble, or with variations of it. Generally speaking, I find the bubbles to be a crucial part of the success of in text advertising. The ability of the users to view the ad before clicking it guarantees the double permission process – when hovering with the mouse, users...

What are Related Content In Text Links? They look like in-text ads with double underline links and a bubble that opens upon a mouse hover, but their content is different. Instead of commercial content from an advertiser, the bubble offers additional content from various sources. They are informational links. The offered related content can be in the form of links to potentially relevant pages from the same website or from other websites. Sometimes, and mostly when the content is originated in another free website like Wikipedia or YouTube, the content can be made available within the bubble itself,...

Free is not really free. For every free offer we take, we actually pay with our most precious currency – our attention. This is why the free model would have to evolve in order to survive. The FREE Debate Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired and author of Long Tail started it all with his recent book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Malcolm Gladwell, renowned author of Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, reviewed the book in the New Yorker with a frown. Seth Godin, marketing guru and author of the recent Tribes and many others, stated straightforwardly that Gladwell was wrong, and has dubbed...

What makes those double underline links so promising as a method of advertising? It’s the crucial difference between interruption and permission. Although this concept still seems very fresh, the idea was presented by Seth Godin a decade ago in his marvelous book Permission Marketing, and if you still haven’t read it, it’s never too late. Traditional advertising is based on grabbing the attention of people away from what they’re doing – TV commercials, newspaper ads, telemarketing phone calls, and even online display banners. Godin calls this Interruption Marketing and shows how it’s...