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Great video from the recent Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show -



Featuring: Bill Gates, George Clooney, Matthew McConaughey, Hillary Clinton, Jon Stewart, JayZ and others.

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Media Buy: "The buying of advertising space from a company operating media properties. The cost of a media buy varies depending on the specific media property on which the buyer wants to advertise, the size of the advertising campaign, the specific times at which the advertisements are to be displayed, and other specific features of the advertising campaign."

The term media buys is not new. For many years, media buys have been used to describe the process of purchasing advertising in magazines & newspapers and on the radio and television. Although these are still viable advertising mediums, the internet is by far the hottest commodity in the advertising market, which is why it's important for you to have at the very least a basic understanding of online media buys.



To make things as simple as possible for you, this guide will highlight the three main types of online media buys and break down the companies, pricing & details for each one.

Banner
Banners are the most common and well-known type of media buys. Banners (along with the other two types of online media buys) can be priced in one of two ways: CPM or CPA. If you purchase a CPM banner, the amount you pay will be based on the value of every 1,000 views the banner receives. For CPA banners, you only pay when your banner is actually clicked by a visitor (think PPC ads).

Here's a look at some of the most popular companies for purchasing banner advertising, along with some of their sample prices:

Blogads
1500 of America's most influential blogs

PerezHilton.com
One Week
1 Banner Running Top Right Column
$9,000
48,467,066 Impressions
CPM = $0.19

TuckerMax.com
One Week
Premium Banner Right Column
$1,400
1,485,295 Impressions
CPM = $0.94

CuteOverload.com
One Week
1 Banner Top Left Column
$2,000
869,942 Impressions
CPM = $2.30

DailyKos.com
One Week
Premium Banner Position
$15,000
5,168,615 Impressions
CPM = $2.90

Federated Media
Partners with sites that are leaders of influential conversations within their industries, communities and peer groups

BoingBoing
6,380,000 page views per month
160x600 (CPM = $14.00)
300x250 (CPM = $20.00)
728x90 (CPM = $20.00)
125x125 (CPM = $7.00)
125x125 (CPM = $10.00)

Dethroner
100,000 page views per month
728x90 (CPM = $20.00)
160x600 (CPM = $20.00)

Wikia
104,470,000 page views per month
120x600 (CPM = $20.00)
125x125 (CPM = $10.00)
300x250 (CPM = $25.00)
125x125 (CPM = $10.00)

b5Media
310 blogs and 10 million unique visitors a month

Small Box : CPM = $3.00
Leaderboard : CPM = $5.00
Wide Skyscraper : CPM = $8.00
Medium Rectangle : CPM = $8.00

Gakwer Media
15 of some of the web's best loved publications

300x250 : CPM = $10.00
160x600 : CPM = $10.00
728x90 : CPM = $10.00

Newsletter Sponsorship
In an online world that is dominated by blogs and social media websites, many people are quick to write off email newsletters. However, Mike has stated before that you can't beat the ROI on email marketing, and newsletters are no exception. Newsletters are an excellent way to connect with a tightly focused audience on a more personal level.

AdRatesOnline
Your Online Advertising Marketplace

HerMoment.com
Average Newsletter CPM : $4.00

eFanGuide.com
Average Newsletter CPM : $5.00

LaughingPlace.com
Average Newsletter CPM : $8.00

Scot's Newsletter
Covers operating systems, broadband, do-it-yourself networking and computing issues

48,000 subscribers (currently guaranteeing 44,000 successful deliveries)

Position 1 : $616 : CPM = $14
Position 2 : $572 : CPM = $13
Position 3 : $528 : CPM = $12
Position 4 : $484 : CPM = $11
Position 5 : $440 : CPM = $10

Text Link
We all know that Google doesn't like it when links are purchased with the intention of improving search engine rankings. However, even Google doesn't have a problem with text links being purchased for the sole purpose of advertising. Because text links can be used for legitimate advertising, they can fall into the category of media buys.

Although you won't find any companies that publish their information about text link CPM (which is why there aren't any examples published here), if you are interested in this type of media buy, you can contact almost any of the major banner advertisers listed above and work out a deal. As you probably already knew, the CPM for a text link is usually going to be lower than the CPM for other media buys.

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As Mike pointed out at the beginning of November, while PPC and Media Buys are great ways to quickly generate traffic, none of these methods can beat the return that can be generated by a properly executed email marketing campaign.



Although most of us are not only familiar but also comfortable with using email to communicate in our daily lives, properly executing an email marketing campaign requires some additional knowledge. Once you have read this guide, you will have a thorough understanding of exactly what a successful email campaign requires.

Before we get started, there is one important concept that you need to understand:

What is the difference between spam and legitimate (opt-in) email marketing?

Spam is defined as any email that is “unsolicited and sent in bulk.” On the other hand, legitimate opt-in email marketing “is a method of advertising by electronic mail wherein the recipient of the advertisement has consented to receive it.” Whereas companies that engage in spamming can face extremely pricey fines, opt-in email marketing complies with all necessary laws and regulations.

Now that you understand that obtaining the recipients consent is what separates spam from legitimate email marketing, let’s look at the five major components of email marketing:

1) List Acquisition

The first step for any email campaign is acquiring a quality, opt-in email list. Depending on the demographic and size of the list, you will pay between $0.02 and $0.45 per record. Each record should include at least the following elements:

Name
Email
Timestamp
Source
IP
Physical Address

Before purchasing a list, be sure to ask these three questions:

How fresh is the list?

When was the last time it was used?

What are typical delivery/open rates?

2) Campaign Development

Before you start the actual process of delivering your emails, you need to develop your campaign. This involves:

Your Message
You need to define what you are trying to accomplish with your email campaign. Having a clearly defined goal will have a huge impact on your campaign's conversion rate.

One of the best ways to clearly define your message is to write the headline for your campaign. Being forced to write an email headline that will convert can help you to dial-in and focus your campaign.

Here are the four things that your email headline (and the overall goal of your campaign) should have:

Sales Copy

By first going through the process of focusing your campaign and writing your email subject line(s), creating your sales copy will be much easier. Writing copy for an email campaign is basically like writing it for a PPC campaign: although you have more space to work with, your goal is to offer a "call-to-action that catches your prospect by the throat and forces them to click-through!"

Graphics

Including quality, easy to distinguish in your emails will accomplish two things. Not only will it catch the attention of the recipient, but using your graphics to convey your company's brand will help give your email credibility.

3) Landing page

Although the process of creating a landing page for an email campaign is similar to the process of creating a PPC landing page, email and PPC landing pages are two different things. Trying to use a PPC landing page for an email campaign will inevitably lower your conversion rates.

As Dawn illustrated in her recent post, the key to a successful landing page is making it as easy as possible for the visitor to complete. From stripping down everything but the necessary elements to pre-populating information, focus on creating a landing page that is simple for visitors to complete. As with the email message itself, the landing page should have a strong call to action and use graphics to enhance the overall experience for the visitors.

4) Email delivery

Over the past few months, we've dedicated several different posts to helping you maximize your delivery rates, but here's a recap of the important information you need to know to get your emails into your recipients inboxes (instead of their spam folders):

-Remove any email marketing subject stop words and black listed phrases from your headline/message.

-Send from a clean dedicated IP address.

-Control the speed of your campaign to avoid greylisting

-Offer an opt-out option at the bottom of your email (to avoid having recipients report your emails as spam)

-Confirm your domain Forward/Reverse DNS are properly configured.

I recommend reading Mike's full Email Marketing: Delivery Rates Optimization post if you have any other questions about this step of the email marketing process.

5) Reporting

As with any online marketing campaign, the key to maximizing your investment is tracking and analyzing your email marketing campaign. To accomplish this goal, it's important to use a email marketing service that offers tracking of message opens, click-throughs, conversions, spend and ROI. It is also extremely useful if the service can offer these tracking capabilities in real-time.

Even though companies Constant Contact and aWeber advertise themselves as “email marketing companies,” these service only offer one or two elements of the email marketing process. For example, Constant Contact offers email delivery, while InfoUSA provides list acquistion. For a system that offers all of the features that we discussed in your article, you will need to use the Software Projects Self-service Email Marketing.

I am typically an early adopter. I've got to get my hands on the latest iPhone & BlackBerry. I absolutely have to dissect MySQL 5.0 as soon as it starts Beta and I'm a sucker when it comes to testing 2nd (and 3rd) tier PPC engines.

Yet, I admit it, it took me a very long time until I jumped on the FaceBook bandwagon.

It wasn't until two months ago that I created my personal FaceBook account and "joined the revolution".

It was around that time that a basic SoftwareProjects FaceBook application, surpassed 1 million "users", so I figured I have to check what the hype is all about.

Two months later, I became a FaceBook pro.

I accumulated 150 "friends", comprising of -

1. My real life friends (about 10%)
2. Friends of my friends
3. People I'd love to befriend
4. Celebrities within my niche

I joined dozens of networks, relevant to my niche. I formed new networks and contributed to ongoing discussions.

I met a lot of new people, made sure to update my FaceBook status and poked others when they poked me.

In short, I really gave FaceBook a fair chance.

--

Today, Monday December 3rd 2007, exactly 60 days after I began my personal FaceBook experiment, I decided to Deactivate My FaceBook account and kiss FaceBook farewell.

I'm going to keep my LinkedIn account for now (although the value of LinkedIn is close to nil, at least the noise level is not as bad as FB) and I'll be on the lookout for Social Networks version 3.0.

To summarize this experiment, here are 10 things we learned about FaceBook:

1. A FaceBook "friend" is not your real friend.

It just means that person have agreed allowing you to subscribe to their updates, much like subscribing to a twitter rss feed. In fact the correct terminology should have been "subscribers" and not "friends" but that's just not as sexy.

2. Having a FaceBook application with 1 million "users" does not translate to cash very well (we tried it). That is, unless you're looking to get paid for your skills, helping others develop their own FaceBook applications.

3. FaceBook ad traffic doesn't convert (you were right QuadsZilla)

Spending $5,000 and making $24 back is not fun. FaceBook users are not in a mindset to buy. Yes they might install your stupid FaceBook app, but no they will not be pulling their credit card anytime soon.

4. FaceBook is a Gossip site (thanks Loren)

No one puts their real life on FaceBook. Much like your business Resume is a glorified summary of your boring experiences, your social Resume is a superimposed perfect You.

5. All Your Data Are Belong To Us

FaceBook data is public. All your status updates, photos, wall posts, pokes and contact information, is readily available to anyone. Think about your future employer next time you upload a "me getting drunk" photo, or set your FaceBook status to "Damn. I'm so depressed, too much pressure".

6. You cannot use FaceBook to spy on your ex.

She knew you would, so she made sure her FaceBook profile would paint a picture that is ten times brighter than real life.

7. Simple is better (thanks Chris Pirillo for breaking it down)

FaceBook users are not technology saavy, yet the average learning curve for a new FaceBook user is very short. At the same time, the uber geek favors FaceBook for it's clean consistent interface.

8. People love FaceBook messages

It is typically easier to get a message read by an influencer in your industry, by sending them a FaceBook message ("from a friend") rather than an anonymous email message. But chances are, they're not going to take you too seriously either way.

9. FaceBook is not about Content.

Users with quality content are going to share it through their blogs, not their FaceBook pages.

10. FaceBook is a great photo-sharing and event-promotion tool.

11. (Bonus item) Prediction:

Social Networks version 3, is going to feature a mashup of:
* WordPress/YouTube (your Content)
* FaceBook (your Community, i.e. friends, partners, customers, fans)
* StumbleUpon/Digg (Recommendations engine) and
* Twitter (your Status) like technologies.

The combination of the four will enable more meaningful two-way dialogues with your audience, while maintaining full control over the end-user experience.

--

What have been your experience with FaceBook?

Do you see FaceBook as a viable medium to drive quality traffic to your website? Or is it nothing more than a popularity contest?

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When creating a new PPC account, the single most important task is taking the time to setup your PPC campaigns correctly (Hint: the more campaigns, the better).

If you'd rather take a shortcut of slapping some keywords under a single campaign so you could launch quickly and see what sticks... well, you might as well write a blank check to Google Inc and forget about making money with PPC.

Why?

Because as I posted ealier -


You need to measure PPC ROI and then make changes - tweaking bids, updating ads and pausing adgroups that are not delivering a positive ROI.

Without a properly structured PPC account, you're not going to be able to make product level changes to improve your ROI.

Think Granularity. You'll pay less (Quality Score), enjoy a higher click-through and effectively control your ROI.

--

To demonstrate this, I'd like to share with you how we recently setup a PPC Account from scratch for an eCommerce-store client, selling 20,000 electronics products.

Products

The first set of campaigns we created are going to hold all Products. We're going to have unique relevant ad creatives, keywords and ad groups per every single product the merchant is offering.



Due to Google's restriction on the maximum number of adgroups you can have under each campaign, we have to divide products to several groups. In this case we chose to do this alphabetically, although at times it might be easier to divide products by category.

Note how we create separate campaigns for the Search and Content networks. This is done to achieve maximum control, allowing us to use different bids, different ads and different keywords for the Search vs. Content networks.

You should really treat Search and Content as two completely independent engines.

Phrases



The DirectMatch campaign group includes all keywords and ads addressing users who are directly searching for our merchant's website.

Phrases include all two to five word phrases that fall under short-tail keywords for our merchant's vertical (Hint: We keep all long tail and other experiments in a separate account)

Competitors



The Competitor campaigns hold all competitor company names, unprotected trade-marks, key phrases and slogans.

We keep competitor product-names under the Product campaign groups, matching every competing product to one of our merchant's products.

Seasonal & Events

These campaigns include everything that is triggered by a shopping season, holiday, media events etc.

Every single industry and vertical is affected by these fluctuations. You just need to be smart enough to utilize them.

Think outside the box and you'll be able to harness the latest hurricane, or last night Oprah, or a news story about Britney Spears, all driving relevant traffic to your site.



--

Let me know if you'd like to see more specific examples like this and learn more about our aproach to setting up adgroups, ad creatives and keywords.

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