Last week I had the opportunity to interview Tony Zito, the CEO for mediaFORGE, a company that “has widgets comin’ out their ads.” More to the point, mediaFORGE creates widgets as a new means of display advertising. What that means is they don’t do online advertising the way most people do. Don’t ask them to create a banner ad for you. They won’t do it. They’ll give you a widget instead…and you’ll be glad they did. According to Zito, their widgets perform with a conversion rate that’s three to five times higher than standard banner ads. You can see some of their widgets on their showcase page.

Think about that conversion rate over standard banner ads…three to five times more conversions. So if you’re getting a 3% conversion rate now, you could be getting 9% or even a 15% conversion rate by simply ditching the ads that people don’t like anyway for something they’ll engage and act on. Zito thinks this is the next phase of display ads. I happen to agree. We know banner ads don’t work. Even stats from four years ago show they haven’t been working for a while.

Widgets seemed to really take off last year as more marketers looked to them for sales and promotions. According to Zito, “last year was the year of the widget, but this year is the year of ‘how do we monetize the widget?’” For all the interest marketers are showing for new media marketing opportunities, the inevitable question is: “Ok, now what? When does this start making money for us?” That’s a question that all social media marketers are dealing with and one that mediaFORGE seems to be providing an answer for.

What I’ve personally be perplexed by for a while now is that if not banner ads, what do you recommend for mere display ad purposes? I think Zito and mediaFORGE are going down the right road. The widgets provide something that has value to the customer or prospect. It allows a person to engage an ad rather than simply being interrupted. I don’t know for sure if widgets are the next wave of display ads, but it sure seems like it’s going the right direction.

The latest episode of The New Mediology is now available in iTunes or you can listen online.

In this episode, Nathan and I discussed the online advertising methods we have seen work since on the last podcast we talked about banner ads as something that doesn’t usually work online. If you listen to the podcast (or have listened to previous podcasts) be sure to leave a message on the comment line at 1-800-881-6059.

If you have a blog I hope you see it as a strategic marketing tool for your business or organization because it is. One thing you should be doing is blogging specific keywords and phrases that describe you and your business, products, or services. If you have a Google AdWord account you have already identified the keywords you want to be recognized for, so why not use those same keywords straegically in your blog post titles and throughout the posts themselves?

The stats I continue to see pop up after doing a little research suggest that 70% of online searchers prefer natural search results compared to paid search results like AdWords. That’s why it’s important to be found on the left-hand side of the Google search page more than the right-hand side. You get more than twice the traffic.

Here’s how it can work…

Let’s say I want to be discovered as a new media marketing or social media marketing expert in the Nashville area (which would be nice but I personally don’t want to be too geographically fixed so I wouldn’t necessarily use these specific combinations of keywords). I would probably do a steady stream of posts over the course of several months where I would use the words “social media” or “new media” and “Nashville” in the post titles and through the blog posts themselves. I would also look for variations on these keywords like “social media marketing” and “middle Tennessee” or “new media marketing” and “Nashville-area.” I could even get more specific with phrases like “social media consulting” or “new media coaching” and then also tie that into the Nashville or middle Tennessee keywords.

As you can see there’s a lot that can be done here and it’s just the beginning. There are all kinds of alternative phrases I haven’t even gotten into like digital marketing, online advertising, interactive media, interactive marketing, etc. I expect if you just took 15 minutes to focus on the keywords for your business you would come up with a nice, long list too. Once you get your list, identify the top ten most important ones so you know where to put the bulk of your energy.

One more thing to do is to really focusing on tagging your posts with the same keywords as you’ll see I’ve done below with the same keywords that you use in your posts. Jeff, over at Mossy Creek Custom saw a great increase in traffic to his blog once he started tagging more specifically.

After a few weeks start searching the keywords to see if your posts are turning up. Also, check your stats and see if there are some specific keywords that seem to be sending a lot of people to your blog. You may be surprised

So, to recap, here are four things to do:

1. Identify your keywords. If you haven’t identified your keywords with a Google AdWords account, take some time to create a list of all the phrases you would hope to be found under in a Google search. After this, pick out the top 10 that are most important and start with those.
2. Post strategically and regularly. If you post four times a week, maybe one of the four posts every week will be a strategic post with your selected keywords. You should plan to do this for a few months to get good coverage because it may take that long before you see it show up on Google depending on how competitive your particluar market is.
3. Tag you posts. Tag well. Tag often. Tag like you marketing life depends on it…ok, not that much, but you get the idea.
4. Measure. Check to see what’s working and what isn’t. You may have some surprisingly high performing keywords that you didn’t expect. If so, you should consider blogging about them more often.