SeoAlchemist

Outbrain“Good Advertising” which is meant to achieve a great aim “Reader Trust First, Revenue Second” is all basically about the following:

(1) Bloggers grab their widget that allows readers to rate the bloggers’ articles.

(2) Advertisers then pay for placing their “Sponsored” links in that widgets ($10 per month per each link);

(3) If the blogger opted in showing those “Sponsored” links in his widget and if his blog is relevant, that “Sponsored” link will appear within a good content and people will feel like clicking it (if the link has been manually pre-approved by the OutBrain team).

The widget looks as follows:

All that sounds quite good and naturally I thought it was a good idea to give it a go.

I decided to compare how it works with two articles which are similar in topic but different in style:

1. Announcing MyBlogGuest: Community of Guest Bloggers (press-release style announcement of my guest bloggers’ forum);
2. How Guest Blogging Made Me 5-Figures in 2009 (a viral post on the same topic written by Glen Allsopp).

The dashboard looks quite promising: for every date you can see how the links performed in terms of:

• Number of impressions;
• Number of clicks;
• Number of “Share clicks” (how many times the page got shared on Twitter or Facebook);
• “Word-of-mouth clicks” (number of clicks Twitter and Facebook shares generated);
• “Traffic Lift” (Percentage of additional, non-paid traffic generated by link sharing”)

Each article I tested ran for about a month. Both behaved very similarly: they had lots of impressions daily (really “lots of“), just a few clicks, and zero shares and “word-of-mouth” clicks (though the viral post did get a few more clicks):

#1

#2

I don’t mean to say I was very picky when selecting the posts to advertise or tried to choose something really outstanding. I chose the articles on the spot just for the sake of testing; but the fact that the stats looked exactly the same for both is a bit alarming, don’t you think so?

Now, OutBrain does have content tips to make the most of advertising (which I seem to have followed by the way):

• News articles, blog posts, press releases, product/service reviews;
• Something that focuses on readable, enjoyable content (versus straight sales page or contact form);

Have you tried OutBrain ads? If you have or if you plan to, don’t forget to come back and share your experience!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

My Experience with Outbrain “Good Advertising”