Many of us are familiar with advertising on our blogs. Most of the time these are banner ads on the side or top of our webpages, or pay-per-click methods of earning some money on our sites. Did you know that isn’t the only way for someone to earn a little extra dough on their website?
There’s a company out there known as CPAlead that is the leader in a particular type of advertising that I’d never heard of until yesterday, even though the company has been around since 2006. It’s called “click per action” marketing. The company uses a model referred to as the Content Gateway Marketing model. Let me break it down for you as I understand it.
First, if someone on your site wants to see premium material, instead of dealing with potentially annoying banner ads, they have to do something in order to see it. Play a game, take a poll, watch a video. When that’s been done, that’s it. No banner ads, no hoops to jump through, no signing up for anything, and best of all, no money out of your consumer’s pocket. Your consumer is done, you’ve been paid, and advertisers have gotten their word out.
CPAlead works with publishers and advertisers so that both parties can succeed in their goals. Advertisers do not get charged if a consumer doesn’t complete the action. CPAlead works with advertisers to target groups based on various criteria (like geographic location and topic of the website) so that advertisements aren’t falling on deaf ears.
On the other side of things, publishers don’t have to sit around and hope that they get clicks on their banner ads. Advertising is brought directly to the consumer, making interaction with the advertisement more available and enticing, which gives you, as the publisher, more of a guarantee of income.
The best part is that not all of your content has to be behind the gateway. If you decide that some of your content is premium content, instead of forcing consumers to pay for it, make them do a simple task and they can see whatever information they want.
I think this is a great idea. People are likely to do an activity in order to get the information they need and/or desire. Come on, think about it. In this economy, we’re all looking for stuff that is essentially free. On a related thought, isn’t that why the whole SOPA/PIPA protest happened? Don’t we all want access to free information? Yes, time is money, but is 5 seconds going to kill you in order to see free content? I really don’t think so. I know that I wouldn’t mind doing this in order to see premium content.
What are your thoughts on this type of advertising? Would you use it for premium content on your website? Could this be the future of online advertising? What nontraditional types of advertising have you used on your webpages? Leave all of your thoughts in the comments, and we’ll see you here again tomorrow!
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