Placing good advertisements in traditional media can cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars. In some cases, this does not include circulation cost, color ads, and loads of other aspects. When you place an advertisement, you are going to want large coverage so that your product or services can be seen to larger audiences. This can be a problem with traditional advertising. For example: putting ads in your local newspaper only provides exposure to the local audience and most ads in television networks are only shown in their own region. While the price may vary it can cost a lot more should you advertise in well known magazines or on a television network. If you have a small budget and want to get the most from your advertising with little cost, then advertising online is by far a best option for you. Advertising online is versatile, cheap (in some cases free) and is great for a beginner.
One of the biggest advantages of online advertising is that you are getting international audiences through internet access, which means millions could be seeing your ads and be interested in what you have or what you do. The most common online advertising method (and what we recommend you to use as well) is called display advertising which includes contextual advertising. Two popular online advertising services being used by most webcomic and other comic sites are Google AdWords and Project Wonderful. Before we start with the two online advertising sites, let take a quick look at what contextual advertising is about.
Contextual advertising
“Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising for advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile browsers. The advertisements themselves are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed to the user” – Wikipedia (huehuehue).
Contextual advertising is targeted advertising that is shown on websites, blogs and other online media. The ads that are shown in the advertising slot is based on either the relevance of your website’s content and/or what your visitor is searching for. So, if the website is about flower arrangements, then the advertisement service will automatically find ads that are closely related to flower arrangements like gardening tools or flower pots and show them to visitors. If there are none, then other unrelated advertisements will be shown instead.
An example for our case – you have decided to create an advertisement for your comic artwork or webcomic. Once you have created it, you then continue to publish it using an advertisement service site.The ads service site will then publish your advertisement in search engines or websites that are relevant to what your advertisement is about and also to web users who are looking for what you have (comic artwork/ webcomic).
Instead of placing ads all over the internet, popular contextual advertising services like Google AdWords/AdSense or Yahoo Advertising shows their ads in their search engines and/or within keyword-relevant searches and websites. The advertisement is shown as either an image or text. Some contextual advertisers take things further and use display advertising such as pop-up ads, or interactive advertisements as part of their marketing approach or delivery method. This is in general a great way to market your products, services or websites.
There are two sides that you need to know about contextual advertising. There are the advertisers on one side and then the publishers on the other end.
Advertisers are people who decide to create an advertisement for things like their product, events or services that they offer. They will the set a cost per ad before deciding to publish it.
Publishers are the people who publishes or displays the advertiser’s ads on their online platform such as a website or blog. After the ads are clicked, the publisher gets paid (usually by the advertising company) a sum of the advertisement cost.
The advantage of contextual advertising is in the versatility of placing the price per ad (the cost). It can be priced for as low as one cent ($0.01) per ad to several or tens of dollars and will be charged only if clicked or selected. That’s right, the deduction or cost of advertising is in effect only after your ad is clicked. Keep in mind that although you can price your ad at its lowest cost, higher priced ads will most likely be prioritized, meaning that it will get better ad placements in search engines and relevant sites.
For example: if you are placing an ad that cost around $0.05 per click, your ads will have better ad placements than ad that others put at the cost of $0.04 or lower than that.But should someone place an ad that cost around $0.07 or more than what you put out, their ads will get better ads placement.Ads that cost higher gets better ads placement meaning that better priced ads will be positioned at the areas that are most visible to internet users or visitor traffic.
Some major advertisement service sites have search engines to show their advertisements to the public online. Web users that use any the more popular search engines like Google or Yahoo will be able to see advertisements while browsing through or search using the search engine.You will be able to see them most notably on either the top of the page just below the search bar or on the right hand of the first few searches. For example: Google AdWords will put up advertisements on their search engine Google and in websites that uses their service. Yahoo Advertisement does the same thing by placing their ads in their search engine Yahoo and in websites using their service.
Now, there are two popular and reliable adsite we recommend you to use :Project Wonderful and Google AdWords/AdSense. Lets have a closer look at them.
Project Wonderful
Project Wonderful is popular amongst webcomics or comic and art related sites. This adsite offers ads that are closely related to comics.In fact, comics make up for over 50% of ads being shown using Project Wonderful by advertisers.This percentage mostly comes from various comic artist, webcomic creator as well as illustrators who wants to advertise their work to other comic relevant websites.With very flexible payouts, Project Wonderful works great for both advertisers and publishers.
When compare to bigger adsite like Google AdWords/AdSense or Yahoo Advertising, Project Wonderful lacks the wide coverage and visual access of advertisement through larger online traffic.This is because Project Wonderful does not have the advantage of advertising to traffic from search results or its own search engine but can only advertise their ads through websites and blogs that use their ads program. But to most users of Project Wonderful who is into artwork and webcomics, this is not considered a setback at all as the adsite’s workaround with comic and art related advertisers and publisher can sometime prove to have a better if not a more specific result.This altogether could make up for the lack of larger traffic. Project Wonderful includes programs for both advertisers as well as publishers.To know more about Project Wonderful -Click Here
If you are looking to advertise on websites with close relevance to comics and artworks, then you should give Project Wonderful a try.Otherwise, take a look at Google AdWords/ AdSense instead.
Google AdWords and AdSense
The Google AdWords and AdSense program are created to serve each other and benefit both the advertiser and the publisher. Google AdWords are for advertiser who creates advertisements for their service or product at a very versatile and affordable cost, which will then appear on relevant Google search result and also on website that uses the Google AdSense program in their website. Once the ads are published, Google AdSense program will then send created ads to individual websites.Google will then pay the webmasters of the AdSense program for ads displayed on their site that was clicked on by users or visitors.The payment depends on the advertisement type.The transaction is pretty straightforward.
You do have the option to customize the display of your advertisement . For example you can choose which country you want to show your ads to, you can choose the language of your ads and you can also choose the specific time that you want to show your ads. When it comes to flexibility of customizing your ads campaign, only a few could go on par with Google AdWords. Google Adwords and Adsense is trustworthy and a strong adsite mainly because it has its own search engine where ads are shown through search results,(so you do not have to worry much on whether people will see your ads) millions of people using it for advertising ( including big companies) and is owned by Google (which makes advertisement program on a solid, safe and secure foundation) .
Unlike Project Wonderful, Google AdWords does not have the have the niche or market specificity for comic art/ webcomic, which is why Project Wonderful is the choice for most webcomic and comic art sites.The closest you can get to having niche or market relevance in publishing site is by adding relevant keywords to your ads.This will then enable the ads to be shown to traffic that searches relevant keyword related to your ads and also published by publishers with websites or blog with relevant themes (but will also affect the visibility of your ads to your audience if not done right). If no keywords are added, your ads are then published in general, meaning that it will also be shown on websites, blogs or searches not specific to your niche or market.(This is actually not that bad as it can boost awareness to what you have or what you do.)
If you are looking for a broader line of audience and are alright with generalizing your advertisement to other sites (not specific to comic related sites), then Google AdWords is something that you should look into.
There are tons of articles and videos online on how to get the best of contextual advertising, so you might want to go check them out. There are also several advertising services that are worth checking out but we suggest starting with either Project Wonderful or Google AdWords/AdSense first.
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