Today, as I signed in to a site on which I place some of my advertising, I was faced with a warning message to the following effect: “Will people who use rotators to display their banner ads please take them off or they will be removed immediately they are detected“.

As it happens I only have two banners on that site so it isn’t a major issue for me. Unless I can persuade the site owner into a change of mind about banner rotators I’ll simply stop using it for that part of my advertising.  However, I do not understand the logic of this coming from someone who presumably is a marketer as well as a site owner.

Take my own case. A few minutes ago I checked my advertising database. I have banners displayed on several hundred locations around the web.  One campaign alone can be in well over a hundred different locations. At one time I used to enter each banner separately into each site, but then came a disaster!

A fairly well-known marketer withdrew a product that I had been promoting. I had that product’s banners in around fifty different places around the web. Fortunately I had a database record of where I’d put them (or at least, most of them), but the task of going to all those sites and manually replacing each one was horrendous.  I still occasionally find the odd one I missed.  Who has time to spare for this kind of thing?

That sort of problem does not now arise in my marketing. I use the Intellibanners rotator system, so that a banner campaign covering dozens of sites can be managed from a single point I make one change in the Intellibanners control panel and the display instantaneously changes in every location.

What’s more I can use the rotator to split-test alternative banners to see which gives the best results, and can promote several different products and services simultaneously – deciding which ones should be given the greatest percentage exposure. When a new product emerges onto the market I can get its banners out into dozens of advertising locations in just two or three minutes.

Now I know even from my relatively limited experience as an advertising site owner that there are unscrupulous advertisers out there who will pull every trick in the book to slip their undesirable adverts past the unwary administrator. This, however, surely cannot be a sufficient argument for banning the use of such a powerful efficiency aid by responsible marketers.

My advice is that, if you don’t already use it, you should sign on for Intellibanners, use its facilities to the full and if a site threatens to delete your ads talk nicely to them (as I plan to do in this case) but if they insist then just quietly take that part of your business elsewhere.  If you are into banner advertising in anything beyond the most minimal level you cannot afford the time to manage every banner location individually.

- David Murray -

In the past few days, both while reviewing other people’s ads and also while writing my own, I’ve been thinking about titles and headlines.

On a typical Ad Exchange there are text ads, html ads, traffic links and solo emails.  Some, including Text.AdMastery, also include a word cloud and others have various forms of classified ad.  The great majority of these require some kind of title or headline.  It may be as little as one or two words on a word cloud or a lengthy phrase or sentence on a traffic link. In other areas of Internet-based marketing, such as email advertising, the title is of equal importance.

The headline or subject line (different terms are used in different contexts) is what people see first. In many cases the title is the only thing they see, and whether or not they click on it to explore further depends on the degree to which it has captured their attention and piqued their curiosity.

Headline writing, as a branch of copywriting, is both an art and a science – or maybe it’s a “scientific art”. Whatever, we all who try to earn our crust on the web need to get better and better at it.  We’ll never be good enough because although there are certain unchangeables about human responses there are also rapidly shifting patterns of fashion and public interest. It’s yet another essential field demanding life-long learning and continual improvement.

I just came very close to spending some money!

Now I don’t want anyone to think that I have a fundamental aversion to that practice.  I’m not a rampant freebie-hunter.  However, I will not shell out my hard-earned cash on OTO upgrades when I have neither had the oppportunity to test out the basic product to see whether it’s any good nor even seen a demonstration of features on the web site.  Too many people are conned into spening money on the upgraded versions of total rubbish – and, yes I’ll admit it, I’ve sometimes been among the conned.

This afternoon, though, I suspect that there was nothing wrong with the product.  It was a series of software scripts, with a free offer as basic and a bunch of paid enhancements for a price.  The author (or vendor, who I think was also the author) did the right thing.  He put up some demos.  Great idea!  However, it would have been nice to be able to see them.  After a 500 error and two returns to the front sales page, presumably via 404 routing, I gave up.

Yes, I could simply have clicked the PayPal button and gone ahead on faith, but why should I trust the scripts of someone who can’t even get his web site links to work?

As I said in the heading to this post, “Quality, quality …”.  Where art thou, Quality?  (with apologies to William Shakespeare).

A news item that caught my attention this morning was one on Slashdot (the news blog for geeks, nerds and anyone else who likes to be diverted by bits and pieces of techie news).  Apparently an update of the popular AVG anti-virus software identifies a key Windows file as a virus.  See “AVG Virus Scanner Removes Critical Windows File“.

I don’t myself use VG, but thought it might be helpful to include a mention of it.  What also caught my attention, though, was the rather pedantic debate that followed in the blog comments about what should be the plural form of ‘virus’ -  virii?  viri?  viruses?  I think probably the last of these – in spite of my having learned Latin at school and having a tendency toward ‘i’ endings.  Have I nothing better to spend my time on?  Let’s get back to the serious stuff.

Anyone like firesales?  I’m not sure where the fire was, but there’s an interesting collection of good things at Firesale Inferno.  Now I’ll be honest; I have not bought into it myself.  I already have too large an accumulation of things waiting to be read and used, and just have to draw a halt somewhere. However, I did read through a lot of the site and was impressed.

I recommend you take look.  There may be something there – either the full collection at an extremely attractive price, or some individual part of it – that just hits on what you need (“scratches your itch” so to speak).

Have good day.

This morning I came across a blog post which, although drawing some different conclusions from mine, reflected some of the concerns about the development of ad exchanges which have been floating around in my mind for many months.

Some may wonder what the owner of a very new exchange can yet have to say on this subject, but I comment less from the standpoint of an owner than from that of a user.  Given that these small exchanges have only existed in their present form for less than two years, and most have sprung up in the past six months, I reckon that as someone using them since late-2007 I can be classified as something of a veteran.

In the early text ad exchange sites it did not take long to use up a hundred views at a traffic link; now it can sometimes take months as very few people read them.  As the variety of advertising options on the sites increases (sometimes confusingly so) the attention given to any one specific component of the service will be lessened.  That is understandable, but from the point of view of both owners and advertisers it is important to have people coming back regularly both to place and to view ads.

The daily reinsertion of text/html ads is an important factor in that regularity, but it must be structured in such a way that members feel it to be a worthwile use of their time.  Also, while there on the site, these members need some encouragement to view the ads of other members.  After all, this is an “exchange”.

The points (credits) structure, both earning and spending, has a great deal to do with this; when referring to points one has to consider how many of these are needed to buy another advertisement.  In an “exchange” what matters is how many ads have to be clicked in order to earn the right to send another oneself.  The mental arithmetic has to be done site by site; a number of ‘points’ as such means nothing.

In launching the ad exchange at AdMastery.biz I decided to make little difference between points earned for clicking on solo emails and traffic links.  I didn’t go to full equality, but went a long way toward it.  Similarly, the points for clicking text and html ads are much higher than I’ve been accustomed to receiving as a user elsewhere over the past months.  Hopefully this will attract people to view ads on-site as well as at their email boxes.

Having the mix of traffic links which remain in place and text/html ads which require daily reinsertion is in my view a useful feature, provided there are sufficient other incentives to draw people back to the site both to carry out that renewal and while they’re there to view some other links.

The technology has developed during 2008, with a wide range of innovations appearing.  In many of the early exchanges, for example, there was no facility to save a text ad.  This was quickly corrected but still many exchanges do not have the ability to save html ads, making it necessary to enter the details in full every day.  Personally I don’t now use html ads on sites which lack this time-saving functionality.  There simply are not the hours available to spend re-entering everything day after day.  On the positive side the availablility of this efficiency aid does take me back repeatedly to many sites which have it.

Sadly, though, many sites seem to be becoming little more than solo email exchanges – or even solo give-aways – with little visiting of the site apart from entering new emails.  I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that in principle, but is that what the owners really visualise as the future of their sites?  I suspect not, and it could be dangerous for the future of this advertising niche as a whole; or it could lead to the emergence (I suspect fleetingly) of a separate sub-niche of solo-exchanges destined to go the way of the old ‘regular’ safelists.

I’m tempted to carry on and discuss the quality of advertising – both the quality of what is advertised and the quality of its presentation.  That, however, can wait for another day.  Meanwhile, thanks to the good people at the Ad Factory blog for triggering me to put pen to paper (sorry, fingers to keyboard!).

I’m in a reflective mood today. Maybe it’s the impact of the election in the land of my American cousins. (Yes, I do have ten of them, spread from Illinois to Florida – quite apart from the more general historical trans-Atlantic “cousinship” of Britain and America).

Whatever the cause, I’ve been thinking about freedom. There are so many places in the world where still there is little or no freedom. Slavery is still not totally conquered. Freedom of conscience is constantly under threat. Freedom of religion is a distant hope for hundreds of millions around the globe. And yet in the United States and my own country, Britain, we have so much freedom that we tend to take it for granted … and run the risk of allowing it to be eroded because we’ve become accustomed to its existence.

But what about freedom for business. The Internet now gives us an enormous freedom to present our various commercial offerings before a global public, but it was not always so. My mind goes back to the early nineties, before the Web. I was then an enthusiast for Compuserve forums, but “crass commercialism” was not on the whole welcomed. And outside the electronic world, on the ground in many countries, freedom to operate any kind of business was a novel experience.

I spent much of my time then in countries of Eastern and Central Europe which only two or three years earlier had been under the control of centralised communist bureaucracies. My role as an adviser was to work with groups of aspiring business people encouraging them to develop businesses with high standards of ethical conduct and to resist the corruption which surrounded them. Initially the biggest challenge was to convince people that this was possible. Freedom was increasingly interpreted as license to cheat, steal and deceive.

Looking to those parts of the world today there are still many challenges ahead, but thankfully there are now many home-grown examples of business with integrity. Freedom with responsibility is more widely understood. Sadly, though, there are too many examples of the opposite in countries which have long been privileged with liberty.

What has this to do with Internet marketing? A great deal, it seems to me. We have tremendous freedom. We need to use it responsibly. Business ethics is not merely a subject for glossy promotional brochures and bureaucratised compliance programs in the corporate world.  It is something for the daily life of every online marketer.

Yesterday saw the launch of the latest edition of Rob Benwell’s blogging ebook, “Blogging to the Bank 3.0“.

Many Internet products and ebooks shoot like stars into the sky with highly promoted launches, and then just as quickly fall back to the ground never to be heard of again.

“Blogging to the Bank 3.0” is a demonstration of the lasting value of what Rob first put out over two years ago.    Not only have thousands of people bought the previous versions, and many of these made considerable incomes from implementing the recommendations, but Rob himself has continued to expand and refine his scheme.

This latest edition incorporates much of that continued learning.  It starts with choosing a topic and progresses through building the site, populating it with good content, promoting it, and even preparing to sell it if that’s what you eventually want to do.

At first sight it may seem to have similar content to other ebooks on blogging, but as I read it last night I realised quickly that this was written out of deep and deepening experience rather than being merely a rewriting of well-worn plr material such as is found in so many other places.

The main content is divided into ten steps, each with a short chapter , easy to read, and logically structured.  If I have one criticism at this point it is with the obvious lack of proof-reading.  Spelling mistakes abound.  One really irritating thing is the frequent confusion of similar words; “there”, “their” and “they’re” come to mind as one example of this, the three quite different words being treated almost as interchangeable.  Sadly this is commonplace in Internet material.  It is sloppy, and  personally I find it annoying but have to admit that it doesn’t detract from the intelligibility of the content.

Along with the main ebook come a number of other documents (as well as a couple of useful pieces of software).  The first “Blogging to the Bank” ebook is there, and also some later supplements.  It is in these that many will find content of which they disapprove.  There is a pdf file entitled, “White Hat Blogging Techniques” and another called “Black Hat Blogging Techniques”.

The first of these confines itself to fully ethical methods; the advice on interlinking of multiple blogs in an interconnected network is very sound.  It rejects the sometimes advocated method of building backlinks from hundreds of almost contentless sites which in any case now is counter-productive, at least with respect to Google ratings.

The second one contains ideas which Rob Benwell himself  admits many will not like and to do him justice he is quite open about this, simply saying in effect, “You can make a good income without these things; if you don’t like this part just miss it out”.  My own advice would be to read it, ensure that you understand what is being suggested, and then decide whether or not you feel comfortable with it.

Personally, for example, I do not like the idea of “stealing” blogs – even though legally it almost certainly is not theft it does seem to me to be taking undue advantage of someone else’s misfortune.  As I said before, the author’s position is, “I apply these methods, but if they offend your sensitivities, there’s no need for you to use them.”

A big difference between this latest version and the previous ones is the advice not now to use the Blogger or WordPress sites for free hosting of blogs.  Not only does that approach limit your design options but it puts the entire blog under the control of someone else – and Blogger now belongs to Google who in spite of their excellence in aother respects are not exactly noted for having a customer-friendly process if they suddenly decide to disapprove of a site (sometimes for no obvious reason).  Rather host your own blogs using the WordPress script, or one of the other blogging  systems such as B2Evolution, on your own rented server space.

In summary, this is 90%+ high quality content and well worth the $37 I paid for it yesterday.  I’ll be using many of the ideas that I picked up from “Blogging to the Bank 3.0“.