Just got this e-mail.

Subject: here’s my 2 cents
Body: Blogads kick a**. They reach an informed, connected audience without parallel in the advertising universe.

Michael Addicott, CEO
CognitiveLabs.com

Mike Madden of Gannett looked at politico Blogads and found another success story: “We made back our investment within the first hour of putting them up,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a strategist for Daschle’s campaign.

In Mediapost, Kate Kaye does a great excavation into the nitty-gritty of the Blogad campaign for Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik.

And as Dan Gillmor, technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and author of the visionary book on grassroots journalism called “We the Media,” writes a column about Google’s potential problems, he mentions Microsoft, Yahoo and, gulp, “a small company called Blogads” as examples of threats to Google’s share price (today $110.) Thank you Dan… or maybe not, since I sense the cruel gods of fate and finance frowning (and squinting) in our direction even now.

A remarkable editorial in today’s New York Times advises readers to log on to blogs to get the scoop on the upcoming Democratic convention. See for yourself. Astonishingly candid. (Via Jeff Jarvis.) Before it disappears into the Times’ archives, I’ll copy a chunk for the scrapbook:

People who think the mushrooming world of wannabe polemicists and their Web logs, or blogs, is merely a high-tech amusement should talk to Senator Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican.

In Web lore, bloggers are credited with relentlessly drilling Senator Lott after he expressed segregation-tinged nostalgia for the Strom Thurmond presidential campaign, a story that the major news media initially missed. Mr. Lott was subsequently forced to quit as majority leader.

Beyond its power as a source of news and commentary, the Internet has proved itself to be the ultimate fund-raising tool. Bloggers can be crass and biased, but politicians no longer scoff at their rich online realm. Hence the red carpet at the conventions ‘ at least for some of them.

The Democrats, needless to say, are already paying for their venturesome invitation. They received applications from 50 bloggers and later announced there was room for only 30. Conspiracy theories are already abounding on the blogs of the disinvited. Such is Web life. We do wonder whether a blogger’s buccaneer self-image will suffer from having to wear a garish credential necklace just to watch conventioneers as they mainly say, “Nice to see you!” to each other. Will bloggers be tamed into centrism? Or, like Mencken, will they gleefully report that the convention’s main speechmakers are “plainly on furlough from some home for extinct volcanoes”? Log on to find out.

Want to advertise on some of the convention blogs? You can advertise for the week on fifteen of the biggest for $1290. Here’s a package for your convenience. (If you know of any convention-going blogads sellers I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll amend.) Update: here’s a completish list of all bloggers at the convention: http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/001461.php

Online advertising guru Tom Hespos has tasted blogs and now wants a whole meal.

Jeff Jarvis exchanges e-mails with Jeff Sharlet, the editor of a new site called The Revealor, about the efficacy of the site’s recent advertising campaign. The low down:

The Revealer spent $7 k on advertising in the last month or so (most of our budget). We decided to divide it, roughly, between conventional online media and blog ads. Blog ads blew the conventional media out of the water.

Talking Points, Little Green Footballs, DailyKos, Matthew Yglesias, Hit & Run, Washington Monthly and Donald Sensing all generated multiple times more traffic than ‘conventional media.’

And all are for sale right here.

Film-maker Brian Flemming bought a Blogad on Talkingpointsmemo promoting a book called “Sue Me,” which is intended to shame Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s posted the results of the ad campaign so far — lots of clicks and some of that juicy stuff that PR professionals crave: “earned media.” Any revenues from the book campaign will be plowed right back into more advertising.

This morning’s inbox brings a raging testimonial from John Hlinko, founder of ActforLove.org, a personals site for activists, and also creator of DraftWesleyClark.com, which led the charge to get Wesley Clark into the presidential race.

We’ve advertised online before, but when we started using blogads — our traffic literally tripled overnight. Normal banner ads let you reach a mass audience, but blogads put you in front of Net ‘influentials’ — the people who love to dig deep into a subject, and tell others all about it. With blogads you don’t just get click-throughs, you create evangelists. The blogads for ActForLove.org not only got massive click-throughs, the bloggers themselves started talking about ActForLove.org on those same blogs — and on a number of others throughout the Web. You simply can’t get that kind of ‘amplification’ benefit with normal banner ads.

Mediapost magazine included Blogads in its roundup of new trends in online advertising.

Stephen Bach, creator of the Dude where’s my weapons? tee shirts, recounts his experience buying blogads on Talkingpointsmemo. Among other things, Steve writes:

The ad went live at the end of March, and within a few hours, not only were we getting hits, we were receiving actual on-line orders! The entire ad was a direct link to our site. Simply by clicking anywhere on the image or copy, the reader is immediately directed to http://www.dudewheres.com By logging into blogads.com, we are able to track the number of page views, AND the number of ‘clicks’ (the number of readers who click on the link to our site.) In one week, over 650,000 people saw our add, and over 6,600 visited the site (about a 1% ‘click-through’). Out of that 6,600, we sold to 2% in one week, all for a $300 investment.

Charles Kuffner has some answers from campaign staffers.

Meanwhile, the pilot fish of political blogads — the t-shirt seller — is still thriving. I got this message the other day from Stephen Bach, who is selling piles of Dude, where’s my weapons? T-shirts thanks to his blogad on Talkingpointsmemo: “The response has been incredible! P.S. I Googled ‘Dude Where’s My Weapons’ and found my t-shirt picture on two other political blogs, WITH a link to my site. Viral marketing is a wonderful thing!”

BTW, for all you folks who think that bigger is better in web-design — the simple landing page for Stephen’s ad (the page you see after you click) is a great example of how to do things right:

— we get punched in the face with Stephen’s offer: 90% of the visual communication is about his product.

— an unadorned design keeps the visitor focused on doing just one thing: acting. Think of the landing page as a bull’s eye that has just one logical outcome, not as a supermarket that promotes 57 distractions.

— the page should look neat and professional, but not too nice. An occassional rough edge emphasizes the human beings behind the HTML and lets customers know that their money is being spent on better products and not cutting edge web design.

A bullseye landing page can make the difference between just recouping your ad spend and making a five or ten-fold return.

Dealing with various blog advertiers, I’ve seen that these lessons apply whether you are selling t-shirts, fund raising for candidates or enlisting partisans for a cause.

Of course, some very fancy designs can work well too, but the risk/reward definitely suggests that money spent on design frills won’t increase your returns.

To put it another way, if you’ve got $4000 to spend on “blog advertising,” you should spend $500 on designing five good ad images, $600 writing good copy for the landing page, $100 designing a landing page and $2700 on ad space on blogs. (You can save on the landing page copy by cannibalizing some of your direct mail copy.)

Update: Later in the day, I called up Bach. Turns out he’s been doing marketing for 20 years. Rather than beginner’s luck, his brutally simple landing page is a tested and refined customer catcher.

James Wolcott in April’s Vanity Fair:

“Don’t dismiss blogs as the online rantings of B-list writers. Interlinked and meritocratic, seething with fierce debate and rivalries, they’re the best thing to hit journalism since the rise of the political pamphlet.”

Thank you to Jeff Jarvis for excerpting so much of the article.