Saturday, April 21, 2007

Advertisers

Advertising through AdBrite is quite unique compared with many other services on the web. Perhaps most important is that it does not require a minimum spend like most networks. You can simply shop site by site, or run through the network to see what might be converting best for you.

Get Started wtih AdBrite Today - Browse the Marketplace - Click Here

Network ads- AdBrite's network is set up much like Flickr in that it is not contextual, but done by tags. Every publisher tags their site with keywords that might be appropriate for their audience, and then when you run network ads, your keywords are matched up with publisher keywords.

Flat Rate model- The flat rate is another unique feature of the AdBrite system. Flat rate works to the Advertisers benefit because you can write incredibly strong and persuasive ad copy, and receive larger than average CTR's, without having to pay anything extra. Many advertisers make the mistake of using their standard Google (click but only if you are going to buy) ad copy. With AdBrite it is most beneficial to write copy that will get more clicks.

Direct CPC- Direct CPC is a great way to test out a site. It will cost you more per click than flat rate typically, but if you are not sure whether a site is a good fit for what you are advertising, direct CPC enables you to test a site. We have seen that the most successful advertisments are done with flat rate, but have started out with direct CPC.

Conversion Tracking- If you are running ads, and more importantly network ads. It is to your benefit to implement the conversion tracking pixel. This allows you to see what sites throughout the network are converting for you. From here you will have a better understanding of sites that you might want to buy on a flat rate basis and repurchase.

What CPC Can I Expect?-Get a better idea of how your campaign will perform by comparing the statistics below to the industry your campaign will promote. Select the industry you are promoting and see its avg CPC. Industries that have no statistics are not displayed. To locate this tool go to the bottom of the display page for the particular site you're looking at - just above the 'ad zone' description. This will give you more of an idea of how you're particular offer will perform on the site your viewing.

Active Interstitials- AdBrite’s active interstitial is a very unique ad format and possibly the cheapest traffic on the internet. For a starting bid of $.01 per visitor you can have users put directly on your landing page. Without the nightmare of developing creative and by simply providing a landing URL, you are ready to get started. More than just a banding tool this ad format is one of a kind, and is successful for both branding and direct response advertisers.

Tips and Tricks.

-Always check the hottest sellers list on the home page to see what sites might be new, or relevant at the current time period

-Always check out the "ad specials" section in the advertiser dashboard, you will typically find some great deals.

-Try multiple campaigns with different ad copy to see what might be converting

-Think outside of the box, and think demographically. If you want college students where might they be?...if you want to reach women, what sites might they be on?

Get Started wtih AdBrite Today - Browse the Marketplace - Click Here

AdBrite Tips

Publishers: Tips and Tricks.

Get Started wtih AdBrite Today - Browse the Marketplace - Click Here

  • Never start your pricing too high. It is better to error on the low side and get advertisers hooked, because then they will be willing to pay higher prices for your inventory when the pricing increases.

  • Make sure your placement is worth buying, the popular sellers in the marketplace tend to be sites with the most premium inventory.

  • Spend some time tagging your site, and giving proper demographic information

  • In your site description provide ideas of advertisers that you think might convert well. You know your audience best.

  • AdBrite is more successful if you sell a FEW premium placements as oppposed to just MANY backfill placements.

  • Hard code all placements because of the concreteness of "your ad here". Putting AdBrite in rotation doesn't perform as well.

  • Allow a ramping period. AdBrite is a tool to help sell your own inventory, and think of it as a virtual salesperson for you. Any salesperson needs some time to gain traction. Just like an auction, the beginning price is never the final price.

  • Entice advertisers with specials. You have full control to set pricing so make occasional specials to entice advertisers.

  • Enable AdBrite’s auto pricing which will raise automatically as inventory sells, and lower itself as vacant inventory sits unsold.

Advertiser: Tips and Tricks.

  • Always check the hottest sellers list on the home page to see what sites might be new, or relevant at the current time period

  • Always check out the "ad specials" section in the advertiser dashboard, you will typically find some great deals.
  • Think outside of the box, and think demographically. If you want college students where might they be?...if you want to reach women, what sites might they be on?
  • Try multiple campaigns with different ad copy to see what might be converting.

Try AdBrite Today - Browse the Marketplace - Click Here

AdBrite Guide

Want great traffic? They have a zillion publishers in a broad range of categories to select from.

Want to make money with your site? Put some inventory up for sale in the AdBrite marketplace.

Get Started wtih AdBrite Today - Browse the Marketplace - Click Here

Want to target your ads to specific demographics – you can.
In the competitive landscape of online marketing it’s nice to find a company that works closely with you. Whether you are an advertiser trying to optimize your campaigns or a publisher trying to maximize your revenue, they work with you and are flexible rather than stonewalling you without an answer.

Moreover, there’s a huge marketplace of publishers to buy ads from, and a large pool of advertisers who want to buy ads.

AdBrite Tips and Tricks
Quality: You may judge the quality of a publisher's site based on several criteria including Alexa rank, number of page views, number of AdBrite ads (do they show just one or four), and their ad location (upper fold of the site or bottom of the page).

Ad location: If there's one ad at the top of the page, that's ideal. But make sure that the ads are visible and in the upper fold, if not, then the price should reflect the site's ad visibility. For example, if the ads are located at the very bottom of the page or mixed in with other ads, you should expect to pay a lower price than if the ads are displayed in the upper fold (where visitors need not scroll down the page to view the ad) or if the ads have no competing ads nearby.

Keep an eye on your ads. The publisher may move the ads, which could affect the number of clicks your ad generates. But don't worry, AdBrite is good about taking care of their advertisers and will reimburse you accordingly.

Get Started wtih AdBrite Today - Browse the Marketplace - Click Here

Recurring Ads
If your ad is set to run on a "recurring" basis, then you’ll obviously need to keep an eye on it to assure nothing has changed to decrease its performance. Ideally, you're able to purchase the ad at a low rate and the publisher will approve it on a regular basis. If the price of your recurring ad drops you will get the campaign at the lower rate automatically. If the price of the ad increases, your ad will run at the original price you paid--this is a real plus with the AdBrite system.

A recurring ad will typically be approved since with most sites that run four ads, approval occurs with the natural ebb and flow of ad run dates. There’s usually room for your ad at the price you paid, but in certain cases it may get pushed to the next available slot (run date). If a new advertiser buys an ad at a new rate (generally higher), then their ad will run before yours, but in most cases you won't have to wait long for your ad to run again.

Recurring ads and month long ad campaigns can prove to be beneficial when that site doesn't have all four advertisers during that month. If your ad is running for the duration of the month, there may be a few or several days where you may receive more clicks since there are only two or three or even one ad competing for those same clicks. Though most of the time publishers will have all four ads running, there may be those few days throughout your campaign when only two ads are runnning, and those are the days you’ll see a big up tick in clicks.

Finding More Sites
Check the link at the bottom of the publisher page that says, 'people who advertised here also advertised on'. This a great way to find other similar sites that will work for your product or offer--certainly these sites are worth testing.

Today’s Ad Specials
Check the daily specials section--DAILY! The daily specials are located at the bottom of the page in the ‘my account’ section.

Advanced Purchase
Buy month long ads in advance if the price is right - hopefully they'll be approved. The clear advantage of an advanced purchase occurs when you buy a month long ad at $950/month for say June, July, and August, since the rate for this particular site has been in the $1,500/month range. That way you’re locked in at the lower price. This is important as sometimes sites don’t offer the recurring option, so this is a way to get around that problem and stay on a site for a lower rate.

Performance & Ad Testing
Test, test and then test some more. Try one day tests on different days of the week (usually there are some variation for the days of the week), or do week long tests to gauge different levels of performance. Headline text plays a key role as does your landing page, so vary both and compare the results of all your testing prior to purchasing and renewing those ads.

Monitor your campaigns and corresponding click levels. If you see lower than normal click numbers for a site, submit an edit for ad copy because your current creative might now be a good fit with the audience.

However, in instances, the publisher may have moved the ad to a less visible position or they could have pulled the AdBrite listings all together. At times publishers will pull their ads for some reason. Don't worry, AdBrite will always reimburse you based upon when the ad was pulled--they always do their best to keep you happy.

International Traffic
A lot of sites have foreign traffic, and most advertisers are looking for just US based traffic, so be careful in the sites you select. This can be one of the few drawbacks of some AdBrite sites. A number of publisher sites send a broad range of traffic and unfortunately you won’t know the exact percentages of international versus domestic traffic until you’ve tested the site. But, AdBrite does offer advertisers an alternative--run of network ads. The great thing about RON ads is that you can specify from which countries you want to receive traffic.

Test different landing pages. For instance, if you have an offer that only pays out commisions for US based traffic, you may consider using a landing page that includes links to international based offers or to ads that don't require an action (such as a lead or impressions), so you get paid when some just clicks on the ad or for each impression. This way you'll take advantage of some of that unwanted international traffic (or traffic that doesn’t usually generate revenue for your offer); at you’ll least get paid for some of the traffic. Say one site sends a ton of international traffic but just enough domestic ( US ) traffic to make this site work for your margins. You could have the domestic offer as the center piece of the landing page and then on the periphery you have ads for international visitors or Adsense. For instance, a site sends 70% US traffic and the rest is from Europe or the UK , list a few offers or ads that pertain to this traffic on your landing page.

Get Started wtih AdBrite Today - Browse the Marketplace - Click Here

Selecting Headlines
Just a few words can make a huge difference. You'd be surprised. Some of the more popular terms used are 'FREE' or those racy terms, such as 'SEXY' or 'HOT'. Try to use words that attract the visitor’s attention. In this case, prequalifying your visitor is not the best strategy. Since you've paid for the entire day, week or month, your goal is to maximize your clicks and increase exposure to your offer. If you're not successful with your current headlines, see what other advertisers within your industry are doing and alter your ads accordingly. Take a look at some of the Adwords listings at Google and the Overture listings at Yahoo to get an idea for what types of text ads work in your area or niche. You don’t necessarily want to copy directly but rather tweak their ideas a bit to your needs, maybe their ads will even spur you to create a new headline entirely.

Browsing Sites
Search Adrite's categories to match publisher sites with the offer you're running. If it's furniture you're selling then try to find sites related to furniture such as antiques, new homes, moving or mortgages. Try to aim for related sites but think outside the box, you might find a new site your competition doesn't know about yet.

Check Adbrite's new sites listings, 'new sites', past seven days' and 'yesterday'. Then narrow down further by Alexa rank and traffic origin. You'll often find the best deals if you're the first to buy an ad on a new site, but it's a good idea to do a couple of tests before buying a long term ad. Sometimes the ad rate will be set too high and supply and demand will drop the rate down in the first few weeks but usually the initial rate is lower so it’s good to get in early. While experience can really be helpful here he early bird steals the worm so to speak.

Keep a look out for today's hot sellers on the right side of the homepage, often these sites offer some good deals or are fairly new. And while your surfing the web, always be on the look out for AdBrite listings, you never know when you'll find a site that fits your demographic and has AdBrite ads running.

Account Rep
Build a strong relationship with your AdBrite account executive. They will be a great help to you and will notify you when there are new sites and/or a list of sites that could work for your offer. They're here for you and will assist you in any way they can and as you spend more and more money purchasing ads you can work towards a NET 30 payment terms to help you further increase your advertising budget. If you spend more than $10K per month please contact AdbriteGuide directly and we can put you in touch with the right AdBrite account representative.

PPC Tips and Tricks
Narrow your targeting and demographics with PPC ads--country, age, income, ethnicity, and more.

Test different landing pages – change images and or text.

Bid $1.00, you'll only be charged the lowest rate that is required to be listed on a site. Be cautious at first but you can bid much higher than you think and you’ll only be charged what it takes to get you on the site.

Setup numerous campaigns, try 5 to 10 different RON ads for your offer or product, using different headlines and descriptions and run them at the same time. Obviously cut ads that are not working but try to find 5 good ad headlines for your product and keep those running at the same time. Set your daily budget to $200.00 or higher since you typically won't hit that daily spend limit.

Get Started wtih AdBrite Today - Browse the Marketplace - Click Here

Publishers Keys
AdBrite offers a few different options for displaying ads, and much like Google Adsense they can mesh right with your site. You can choose to show one ad or numerous ads--you have a lot of freedom in terms of integrating the ads into your site. Place AdBrite ads only on your homepage or on every page of your site, it's entirely up to YOU, the publisher.

Make sure to select "show RON ads" when you don’t have any advertisers who have purchased an ad for a period of time. Set this as the default so you’re always showing ads and earning revenue.

Select whether you want to show gambling and adult type ads or more conservative ads that fall in line with your site.

Tag your ad zone
Attract more relevant advertisers to your site. Help advertisers in the AdBrite Marketplace to find you by giving them keywords relevant to your content, your audience, your audience’s interests, etc.

What are some words that describe your site? ex: camera phone pics, camera phone pictures, mobile blog, etc...(enter one keyword or phrase per line).

What can advertisers sell to your visitors? ex: camera phones, gadgets, ipods, ring tones, etc...

What kind of people visit your site? ex: men, geeks, the MySpace crowd, sports fans, new yorkers,, san franciscans, singles, movie lovers, musicans, ets...

Highlighted listing -- $19.95/month.
Attract buyers' attention by showing off your listing in AdBrite 's directory with a highlighted listing.

General listing -- Free.

Get Started wtih AdBrite Today - Browse the Marketplace - Click Here

Publisher FAQ’s Top 5 questions:
How do I sign up? Getting started is easy. Simply sign up with AdBrite and paste a small snippet of AdBrite HTML on your site. In minutes, you can be ready to start selling ads to users on your site, as well as advertisers that use the AdBrite network!

When do I get paid?
AdBrite issues payment in US Dollars on a net-60 basis and mails checks on the last Thursday of every month. If your net-60 revenue does not meet your minimum check amount, this revenue will roll over to the following month.

What does this cost me?
Setting up an AdBrite publisher is free and easy. Through a small snippet of HTML placed on your site, AdBrite will handle ad serving, scheduling, billing, customer service, and Ad sales. AdBrite takes a percentage of the ad sales, the amount depends on the type of ads you are selling.

Can I set my own price?
Yes. You can manually set your own price or allow AdBrite's autopricing to adjust your prices for you. Autopricing will enable you to set the initial price, and will raise or lower the price according to demand. The more advertisers there are competing for your ad space, the higher your price will be.

I currently use other ad services on my site. Can I still use AdBrite?
AdBrite feels that a publisher should have complete control over his or her site. For that reason, AdBrite does not require exclusivity.

Get Started wtih AdBrite Today - Browse the Marketplace - Click Here

Adbrite Publishers

AdBrite evolved from the idea of creating a tool to help web publishers sell their own ad space. It is an automated system that gives full publisher control to accept or deny ads, and really be able to sell their own ad space.

AdBrite is not a typical network like AdSense or YPN where it just serves ads that are targeted towards your site. AdBrite is a great incremental on top of programs like AdSense or YPN.

If you had someone who e-mailed you to buy an ad on your site for a specific amount of time, how would you respond? AdBrite is an automoated tool to help you set your price, eliminate negotiations, and provide full transparency to the advertiser and publisher.

Get Started with AdBrite Today - Browse the Marketplace - Click Here

Why use AdBrite on top of other ad services?

Imagine you knit sweaters and sell them on eBay. You typically sell a handful a month, but then you learn that one of your customers owns a chain of clothing stores. After some successful transactions, you both decide that partnering outside of eBay would be beneficial and to create a more formalized partnership. You now have something much larger than what you initially had through eBay.

AdBrite is very similar to this concept.

If you put up some premium ad spots up for sale in the marketplace you will have many advertisers who try out your site. Some will work, and some will not, but as you start to get more consistent advertisers you will be able to build larger advertising relationships and sponsorships that are completely within your control. You know who is buying ads, what they are paying, and whether they have seen success with your site (based on repurchaing). This is also the perfect lead source if you have an internal sales team selling ads for your site.

Other ad services control the advertising relationships and typically pay quite well. AdBrite is your opportunity to control your advertising relationships so that all of your revenue is not dependent upon the success of your ad network.

There is no reason not to have some inventory up for sale in the AdBrite marketplace, because the code on your site can be completely hidden, and you can set pricing, so you never know when an advertiser might come shopping through the AdBrite Marketplace and pay the price you demand for certain inventory.

Tips and Tricks.

- Never start your pricing too high. It is better to error on the low side and get advertisers hooked, because then they will be willing to pay higher prices for your inventory when the pricing increases.

- Make sure your placement is worth buying, the popular sellers in the marketplace tend to be sites with the most premium inventory.

- Spend some time tagging your site, and giving proper demographic information

- In your site description provide ideas of advertisers that you think might convert well. You know your audience best.

- AdBrite is more successful if you sell a FEW premium placements as oppposed to just MANY backfill placements.

- Hard code all placements. because of the concreteness of "your ad here". Putting AdBrite in rotation doesn't perform as well. Just like an auction, the beginning price is never the final price.

- Allow a ramping period. AdBrite is a tool to help sell your own inventory, and think of it as a virtual salesperson for you. Any salesperson needs some time to gain traction.

- Entice advertisers with specials. You have full control to set pricing so make occasional specials to entice advertisers.

- Enable AdBrite’s auto pricing which will raise automatically as inventory sells, and lower itself as vacant inventory sits unsold.

Get Started wtih AdBrite Today - Browse the Marketplace - Click Here

Tips For Making Money Selling Text Links With AdBrite

I’ve recently become impressed with the potential for making money from a website by selling text link ads. During May I generated over $250 USD from selling text links on my blogs just from the brokerage service provided by Text-Link-Ads.com. It’s not a huge amount of money but it’s cash I didn’t have before. If you are aiming to become a full time blogger then any extra sources of income helps, so you may want to try selling text links yourself.

AdBriteJohn Webster from AdBrite Guide contacted me about his new website aimed at helping publishers and advertisers maximize their return from another text link broker, AdBrite.com. AdBrite offers a similar service to Text-Link-Ads.com, brokering deals between website publishers and advertisers. As a blog publisher this means you can leave the selling of your advertising inventory to companies like AdBrite while you just work on making the best blog you can. All you have to do is add your site to their system, place some code on your site, then watch the money roll in (theoritically at least!).

Of course factors such as how much traffic you have, what industry your site is in, your site’s PageRank (What is PageRank?) and where you place the add code will determine how much you make, but as I said, anything is better than nothing, so it’s worth a try.

John kindly offered a list of tips for me to publish to help you get the most out of AdBrite as a publisher and an advertiser. I’m posting the tips for AdBrite publishers (those wanting to make money from text links) here. The AdBrite advertiser tips (those wanting to generate traffic from buying links) are posted on my other blog, Small Business Branding.

Tips To Maximize Your AdBrite Income

  1. Never start your pricing too high. It is better to error on the low side and get advertisers hooked, because then they will be willing to pay higher prices for your inventory when the pricing increases.
  2. Make sure your placement is worth buying, the popular sellers in the marketplace tend to be sites with the most premium inventory.
  3. Spend some time tagging your site and giving proper demographic information.
  4. In your site description provide ideas of advertisers that you think might convert well. You know your audience best.
  5. AdBrite is more successful if you sell a FEW premium placements as opposed to just MANY backfill placements.
  6. Hard code all placements because of the concreteness of “your ad here”. Putting AdBrite in rotation doesn’t perform as well.
  7. Allow a ramping period. AdBrite is a tool to help sell your own inventory, and think of it as a virtual salesperson for you. Any salesperson needs some time to gain traction. Just like an auction, the beginning price is never the final price.
  8. Entice advertisers with specials. You have full control to set pricing so make occasional specials to entice advertisers.
  9. Enable AdBrite’s auto pricing which will raise automatically as inventory sells, and lower itself as vacant inventory sits unsold.