Most modern advertising and marketing strategies are trite, because they’ve been used hundreds–if not thousands–of times before. Consumers have seen the same ads so many times that they’ve now grown accustomed to them. These days, vanilla marketing by itself just isn’t enough; you need to be innovative and think outside the box. That’s exactly where guerrilla marketing comes into play. [Read more…]
Registering a domain name and turning it into a profitable blog takes time. It takes patience, hard work and quite a few clever decisions. Some people would even argue that at times it takes a little bit of luck. The one thing that’s for certain is that it’s not easy.
Though most people know how difficult it is to create a profitable blog, many are surprised to learn how easy it is to kill one. Getting noticed might take a long time but losing the lions share of your readers can be achieved surprisingly quickly.
If you’ve been enjoying a certain amount of blogging success of late, here are seven mistakes that you should avoid making at all costs. [Read more…]
Mashable writes about the Scribd Store, and it got me thinking. Ebooks is often the logical spinoff product for a blogger, and while it might sound appealing to end up on a Kindle, the chances of that are just ridiculously small at this time. No, if you want to be read on an e-reader of choice that is not in fact a disguised surf tablet, you’ll have to rely on ebooks.
Enter Scribd, the document hosting service that lets you embed docs in all their glory, and their store. If Scribd could built a central place for people to buy ebooks and reports, then that would be a great deal for bloggers. [Read more…]
I can’t see any other reason than Twitter wanting to open the partner floodgates with this blog post, profiling the recently hired business manager Kevin Thau. Sure, a welcome post is nice and all, but doesn’t this scream “please get in touch with your brilliant monetizing ideas so that we can make a few bucks!!!” to you?
For now, Kevin is assessing all opportunities, picking up ongoing threads, and also actively working on our mobile business strategy. If you send email to our partner address or to kevin (at) twitter.com then you will be corresponding with the intrepid Mr. Thau.
Maybe I’m cynical, but I don’t think they have any solid ideas on how to monetize Twitter, other than the obvious ad solutions. Hopefully they’ll prove me wrong and do something funky with the mobile carriers?
Los Angeles Times runs a piece on Twitter, focusing on how to make money on the service. They’ve got co-founder Biz Stone to mention some of the models considered, like the corporate accounts approach, as well as identity verification. I like that last one, it is funny since it point to a flaw in social media rather than actually adds something that shouldn’t already be there:
“Like, users who want to know: is that the real Shaquille O’Neal or not?” Stone said. “Maybe we could help users by saying, Yup, definitely the real Shaquille O’Neal. That’s a real account. We checked with them.”
That being said, the article is more focused on the ad services already running on Twitter, especially since Stone himself doesn’t consider ads at this time. Twittad is mentioned, obviously a more successful service that I could’ve guessed. [Read more…]
Prominent WordPress theme designer Brian Gardner has released a new open-source theme set called Revolution Two to essentially replace his highly popular Revolution WordPress theme. The new theme set includes 10 themes for free downloading.
The release comes two days earlier than previously anticipated, with Gardner saying in his most recent blog post announcing the launch of the new Revolution theme, “I figure I owed you all an early release.”
That, or he really just wanted to be able to nurse his post-Halloween sugar hangover on Friday night. :)
Starting November 1, the original Revolution theme will no longer be available for purchase (although existing Revolution buyers will still receive support “for life”), except for necessary updates for 12 months to maintain compatibility with WordPress. Instead, Gardner has opted to go the open-source route for monetization, with plans to sell premium support for the free Revolution Two themes on an annual ($99.95) or lifetime ($149.95) basis.
Follow the Revolution Two project on Twitter for project updates.
Have you ever used the Revolution theme for WordPress? What do you think of the new Revolution Two themes? Do you agree with Brian Gardner’s decision to make the Revolution Two themes open-source?
A few weeks ago, Jeff Chandler reviewed Adjix on Performancing. Adjix lets Twitter users (or perhaps other microblogging services) monetize their accounts by shrinking URLs a-la tinyurl, but then puts up ads on the resulting page.
Based on the comment thread and the one on the follow-up post detailing an interview with Adjix’s CEO, readers mostly had negative impressions. Many were appalled at the thought of monetizing Twitter readership in this way. It was tantamout to facilitating spam, they say, and this would most likely result in loss of credibility. Others have commented that Adjix is impractical because of its use of frames rather than redirects, which effectively makes bookmarking difficult. [Read more…]
Chris Garret recently wrote about the suggestion that clicking on ads would be like tipping a blogger. Consider the opposite. Are you the kind of blog reader who would go to great lengths just to avoid clicking ads?
I’m like this sometimes. And it’s not only because I’ve grown desensitized to ads (ad blindness). But it also stems from being overly-cautious. For one, clicking on bad links seems to be one of the popular ways of getting infected with malware. Because of this I try to avoid clicking emailed links. I usually copy the URL and paste. Or if it’s a service I use, I type the URL directly. And when browsing, I always check the URL on my status bar before clicking. If I find an AdSense ad interesting, I usually just type in the URL–if the URL is visible–on another tab to see what it’s all about. [Read more…]
In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. (Source: Google).
TNX (pronounced “thanks” as in text/SMS-speak) is a new text link advertising platform that targets both publishers and advertisers equally well. For publishers, TNX offers the opportunity to earn TNX points which can be used for various purposes simply by displaying TNX text ad links on their pages. For advertisers, TNX provides a cheap and effective way of getting high-volume, non-reciprocal links from thousands of websites that are part of TNX’s program.
Joining TNX is free for publishers and TNX has made it a breeze to join–only the most basic information is needed. Publishers and advertisers can register at http://tnx.net/register.php. You automatically get 2,000 TNX points upon sign up. TNX also has a promo by which you get an additional 5,000 points free by posting on this thread in the DP forums.
Once you’re logged in, you’re greeted with TNX.net’s main dashboard, which will be your main starting point whether as a publisher or an advertiser. As a note, I think the main page’s design can benefit from a more vibrant color scheme. But otherwise, it’s been setup to be intuitively easy to use.
The sidebar provides the tools you need in starting with TNX.
For publishers, the sidebar includes easy access to the TNX code that you need to paste in your blog or site theme for the TNX ads to appear. You also get quick access to site management (adding and managing TNX-registered sites registered) and the TNX-points transfer.
You can monetize earned TNX-points in two ways: either by selling to other TNX users at a price that you decide, or by selling to TNX itself at a given fixed price (currently $0.61 per 1,000 points). TNX will then send you the funds via PayPal. There is a minimum $5 for payouts and a 150,000 point daily transfer limit. As a security measure, users can only transfer up to 50% of his existing balance at a time.
The TNX code page provides code both for Perl and PHP. You have a choice of codes–TNX provides a variant of the PHP code that allows the ad output to be cahed, minimizing server load and bandwidth. TNX also provides an experimental code for ASP and ASPX. All the things you need to get started earning TNX points has been well prepared by the TNX team.
One nifty feature is the earnings calculator that will help you estimate how much you can earn, based on your website’s parameters (PR, link popularity; of course, assuming all your links are filled).
For advertisers, the sidebar gives quick access to starting an Ad Campaign. Thanks to TNX’s well-organized Ad Campaign wizard, creating and ad campaign is easy and intuitive. You can set the parameters for the sites where your ads should appear on: website categories, geo-location, number of Yahoo Backlinks (YB) and Google Page Rank.
TNX even provides a calculator of how many links you will get on based on the parameters you chose and your spending plan (in TNX points)
After setting your spending price and the other parameters, you have to load your actual ad copy to the TNX registry. There are two way of doing that: for campaigns with large volume of links (maximum of 2000 links), you can upload a text file containing the ads; or if you have a few ads, you can use the provided form. TNX also provides excellent tips for an effective ad campaign; starting advertisers can learn a lot from them. It’s also nice that TNX has made this part easy and painless.
TNX also features an affiliate program that provides an opportunity for publishers to earn TNX points by simply referring people to use TNX’s service. There’s a 13.3% payout percentage from the earnings of the websites of users you directly refer. TNX provides more than one way of advertising options that the affiliates can use: direct links on your sites registered to TNX.net, referral links, or direct links on other sites.
In summary, I think TNX is a great new hub for your text link ad needs and opportunities, catering well to both advertisers and webmasters. The use of TNX points instead of plain ol’ dollars makes things more flexible.
