I originally wrote this article for Digital Journal.

We’ve all heard of Google Adsense and the revenue it has generated for marketers and Google. The thing is that Adsense is no longer considered the strong earner it once was for internet marketers as generating income online continues to slow down.

Adsense revenue has normally been generated at its peak by high traffic website owners who continually have fresh content for their users daily. As more users enter the online world with websites and blogs, it makes new bloggers and website owners wonder how they can generate any type of income with all the competition on the web.

Research has shown that Adsense revenue has been difficult to come by for the basic blogger. In a study conducted by Technorati, of 174 blogs:

85% allowed comments on their blogs
33% used Google Adsense
45% generated no revenue
40% generated less than $5,000 per year
4% generated over $100,000per year

The study shows the discrepancies of using Adsense or not. Though there are other methods of generating revenue through your blog, Adsense has become the household name for blogging revenue. Services such as PayPerPost and Smorty offer bloggers a way to generate some revenue by advertising an ad on their blog, but these services can only do so much for your blog.

Is blogging becoming more difficult to generate any sort of income? Yes, but it’s not impossible. There are no easy methods or schemes to reach high amounts on revenue in your blogs, but can a basic blogger ever get a piece of the action in the blogosphere?

Branding is the foundation of marketing and is inseparable from business strategy. It is therefore more than putting a label on a fancy product. Nowadays, a corporation, law firm, country, university, museum, hospital, celebrity, and even you in your career can be considered as a brand.

As such, a brand is a combination of attributes, communicated through a name, or a symbol, that influences a thought-process in the mind of an audience and creates value. As branding is deeply anchored in psycho-sociology, it takes into account both functional and emotional benefits. Therefore, those attributes compose the beliefs that the brand’s audience recalls when they think about the brand in its context.

The value of a brand resides, for the audience, in the promise that the product or service will deliver. Clearly, a brand can recall memories of a bad experience. The value for the audience then would be to avoid purchasing that brand.

In conclusion, branding is the blend of art and science that manages associations between a brand and memories in the mind of the brand’s audience. It involves focusing resources on selected tangible and intangible attributes to differentiate the brand in an attractive, meaningful and compelling way for the targeted audience. Brand management then becomes the organizational framework that systematically manages those customer-centric processes. It aims at gathering intelligence, allocating resources, and consistently delivering the brand promise over time at each contact-point with the customer.

According to Master New Media, Online video marketing is the key business differentiator for web companies wanting to communicate effectively their product profile and benefits within the shortest possible time. Putting together a video tutorial on your blog or website doesn’t automatically bring you a great conversion rate to selling products. There is more to effective video communication than just slamming some video content up on your web pages.

Creating video content is very complex and highly multidisciplinary art. According to Master New Media,

The average attention span of a web user today is measured in seconds. Once delivered to you on a red carpet by a major search engine search query, or by a recommendation link on a review blog, the new web visitor applies only a very limited effort and time to see whether she can make sense of what you are communicating/selling/proposing and to decide whether your content, style, look and approach are a good fit for what she was actually looking for. If you can engage her interest right there and then, and offer a fast, highly visual way to let her discover what your “message” is, you have done bingo.

You can’t play many tricks to fool readers. Since today’s web users already know what they are looking for it’s hard to attract attention with your videos since nobody goes around looking for random videos. You really need to address the desire from the user to get at what they are looking for in the least time possible and in the most effective way.

Ad agencies deal with passive approaches. Their clients don’t have to click on this or that to explore. They have one shot to get their message across. there will always be a place for those TV spots and print campaigns but in today’s marketing world it’s simply the jam and not the bread of a complete package.

Web agencies deal with a very interactive audience. Even the simplest web sites require for the viewer to point and click to get there. The world has become much more interactive. The mass majority of consumers has already researched a product before buying. If a company’s web site crashes their computer or takes forever to load they get bored and select the next one from their search list.

Instead of listening across the clothesline about who makes the best product consumers are turning to blogs to see who has what and how well designed that product is. Gone is the day where consumers bought products on blind faith. Today’s consumer is well informed and wants to be treated as such.

While advertising agencies and PR firms are very talented they are not web designers. The web sites that come out of the advertising firms are often poorly formatted. Web agencies deal the problems of formatting and accessibility. Coding. The designers can come up with the next greatest innovation but if the coders can’t find the right web language then the site will fail. Coding has taken on a new dimension for the web. Prior to the rise of web marketing campaigns code languages although complex didn’t have to deal with the types of media that are now being requested of them. Everything in the web coding world is changing at a rapid pace. Within a web agencies the front end and the back end have to work together to produce a reliable product that doesn’t crash a consumers computer. Even if that consumer has a computer from the stone age.

Original post by TubeMogul.

Online video is one of the best venues to engage an audience. This new medium allows the video creator to communicate a message on multiple levels. Video has led a way for people to learn, and consequently, legendary brands have been created.  As a case in point, think of traditional internet marketing; when was the last time that a paid search listing or banner ad raised your blood pressure or induced you to forward something to a friend?

With online video you can also reach a huge audience for a minimal investment, thus the ROI of online video marketing can be astounding.  Consider that according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau; more than 50% of the US population will watch video online next year.  That’s 155.2 million people, and we’re just talking the US!  Increasingly, people are watching a lot of video as well.  According to comScore, Americans watched 9 billion online videos just in the month of July.

Like everything else, there is no “free lunch” as the video-sharing sites don’t charge to host your content, but getting your target audience to watch and forward your video is no easy feat.  That’s where we come in.  Since we are tracking videos across the major video-sharing and social networking sites, we know a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t.