Sunday, 11 May 2008

Free advertising - does it really work?

Since our launch, thousands of websites and bloggers have used our Adleaf free advertising to promote their website. Many have benefited from the service. Some have asked us why we are displaying paid advertising in addition to the advertising from the community. The paid advertising are meant to help cover the cost of our servers so that the service can remain free to our members. Moreoever, we used the excess ad inventory to display paid ads. After running the service for a while, we have to say that there is no silver bullet for driving traffic except to create high quality content and a compelling service. Some of you may have heard that repeatedly from us. Therefore, Adleaf does not claim like many other sites to drive thousands of users to your site. Adleaf free advertising is meant to supplement any existing website marketing strategy that you employ without the need to pay for extra cost. However, if using Google Adwords and other paid advertising service, we encourage you to do so.

Technorati Tags:

Posted by caven at 9:27 PM in Advertising
Responses (0)

Tuesday, 6 March 2007

Enhacing the quality of the community

In order to ensure that the community is pasting their Adleaf code, we have enhanced our algorithm so that an account is temporarily deactivated when the Adleaf code is not detected on the user's website. This is important as it would only be fair to users who have faithfully placed Adleaf free ad code so that they can earn free advertising credits and in turn get their ad creatives advertised on other website.

We have also worked to enhance the quality of the community so that websites displaying objectionable creatives or content will be suspended until corrected. This ensures that the advertising appearing on Adleaf users' website are respectful and clean. We will continue to enhance our service so that we can mantain and improve the quality of users and websites found on Adleaf.

Technorati Tags:

Posted by caven at 9:46 PM in Advertising
Responses (0)

Saturday, 13 January 2007

Browser Market Share

Understanding the browser market share of visitors coming to your site is important in helping you optimize your site for the different browsers out there. Sites that are rich in DHTML, Ajax and Javascript should ensure that the websites are compatible with the dominant browsers out there. We took a representative sample set of the traffic data in our community and ran a browser market share analysis. The result is that Internet Explorer 6 has the largest market share out there followed by Internet Explorer 7. FireFox trails behind though it commands approximately 13% share of our traffic data. Safe to say, if you were to optimize your site for browsers, the priority is to make sure that your website is at least compatible with Internet Explorer and FireFox. The data is provided below in the form of a pie chart.

Adleaf not only provides free blog advertising for your blog or websites, our service also provides tools for your to analyze your traffic data including any browser compatibility issues.

Technorati Tags:

Posted by caven at 3:38 PM in Advertising
Responses (0)

Thursday, 11 January 2007

Google AdSense Compatibility

Many of our users have inquired about whether it is acceptable to put Adleaf free advertising together with Google Adsense on their website. We have clarified that when there is a Google Adsense present on a member's website or blog, we do not show contextual advertising on Adleaf since Google Adsense does not permit a competitor's advertising to be contextual. Therefore, a member should not put both a Yahoo Publisher Network ad together with Google Adsense on the same website or blog. However, since Adleaf switch off its context sensitive advertising whenever there is a presence of Google Ads, it is not an issue in terms of compatibility with the program.

We encourage members to use Google Adsense or one of the other paid affiliate program to generate revenue for their website. We mention Google Adsense specifically as it is great at delivering relevant advertising and therefore has one of the highest click thru rates for any advertising affiliate program out there. The golden rule to be successful in Google Adsense is to make sure you never click on your own publisher id ads even if accidentally since click fraud is the least tolerated.

Technorati Tags:

Posted by caven at 12:16 AM in Advertising
Responses (0)

Sunday, 7 January 2007

Promote your blog

We get many questions from users on how to promote their blog or website better. Using paid advertising programs like Google Adwords does help increase traffic to your blog. However, if you are thinking about your return on investment (ROI) on paid advertising, it is important to understand your web traffic better. If you want to just draw traffic so people can read your blog, that is fine. However, if you are hoping that your traffic converts- meaning that someone actually ends up clicking on an ad on your site thus generating some income for you or buying some product, then it is important to understand how you spend your money on advertising. Unless, your blog or website is super compelling, most likely the user that you paid for may never return to visit again. That is almost like throwing a dime away each time. To be realistic, you should not expect all your paid users to return though. However, at least a percentage of them should so that your web traffic is growing organically.

Here is an example. Assume you plan to spend a budget of $5.00 daily at $0.20 per click. If you spend that budget fully, you can expect to get about 25 click thru from this advertising programwith your $5. Suppose your blog or website generates a 1% click thru. This means that you will need a 100 click thrus from your paid advertising program to your site before you can even generate 1-2 click thrus assuming page views per visitor is about 1-2. Now, if your blog affiliate program pays you $0.30 per click, it means you have paid $20.00 for 100 click thrus that generated 1 click = $0.30 on your own blog or website. It does not take very much to figure out that this is a money losing proposition since you are making $0.30 for every $20 you spend.

However, if you are very sure that you can convert a percentage of your paid click thrus, then it may be advertising dollars well spent. As we have said, if you just want to pay for people to read your blog or come to your website, that is fine! However, if you want to make some income, you might want to start thinking about how to promote your blog or website better. Have your blog advertising strategy or website advertising strategy ready if you want to start generating some decent income.

Technorati Tags:

Posted by caven at 10:52 AM in Advertising
Responses (0)
« February »
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
26272829