The importance of context links, contextual ads and contextual advertising is more important now than at any other time in history. Never before in the history of advertising and marketing have potential sales lead and customers become so desensitized to advertising. We are literally surrounded and bombarded with advertising everywhere we go. The airwaves and webpages we are exposed to constantly feed us with ad after ad and promotion after promotion to the effect that in most cases, we hardly ever see them anymore.

If you look around at this blog, you will see a large variety of instances where advertising is used. You will see affiliate and freebie links at the top of the page in the form of drop down menus. You will see special offers and “click here” links beneath the titles of the articles. You will see a large list of link exchange partners down the right side of this and usually any other blog that has exchanged links with other bloggers and webmasters. You will see post article affiliate links designed to temp readers and subscribers into clicking through if they read through to the end. You will see a slide up ad slide up from the bottom of every page advertising some promotion. You will see a bloc of free marketing tools after each article. You will see blocs of text or image ads at the beginning and end of each article. If you visit this site and many others via the root or homepage, you will be presented with a giant pop up that literally covers the majority of the content.

All of these types of advertising have their advantages, but these forms of advertising is not what this article is about. This article is about the single most effective form of advertising available to publishers. That form is know as contextual advertising. Contextual ads and contextual links have far more power than any other form could hope to ever have.

Whenever a visitor visits a website or a blog, they have, by default and over time, been preprogrammed to filter out all of the forms of advertising that are not integrated with the content that they are searching for. For this reason, any visitor to this site may very well, close the pop up, ignore the slide up, ignore my link partners down the right hand column, ignore the affiliate links and tools at the very top of each page as well as the image and text ads at the beginning and end of each article in addition to the “click here” ad beneath each article title and the post article affiliate links and marketing tools.

The desensitized brains of these visitors will automatically filter all of these out and focus exclusively on the content. That is where the power of context links, contextual ads and contextual advertising will shine through.

Why is this the case? Simple. It is part of the content and directly related to their search query, provided they found your article via active searching. There is a term that many marketers use. The term is “pre-sell“. For anything to be sold, it has to be pre-sold meaning the prospect has to be warmed up to the idea of purchasing or opting in to obtain the product. That is the reason landing pages and sales pages are so long. The longer the landing page or sales letter, the more of an opportunity there is for pre-selling. Pre-selling comes in many forms. It may be a list of benefits, a string of customer testimonials or a strong call to action to name a few. The longer the copy, the more opportunities there are to insert contextual advertising in the form of links, ads or opt in forms. Contextual advertising succeeds because it interacts with the reader. Non-contextual advertising never has the opportunity to do this. For this reason, the next time you are swapping links or ads, request a contextual link or ad and take advantage of the opportunity to interact with the reader.