I think the reason entrecard is as popular as it is right now is because of the ‘dropping’ that goes on.

People run around dropping cards to A, boost their credits, and B to gain some clicks back from having their card left in other people’s ‘drop list’.

People don’t mind so much having people drop and run, because it boosts their traffic a little, but is also does give exposure to people who otherwise have no reason to visit.

Being able to earn credits for dropping and being able to drop to your heart’s content stimulates an economy of credits.

On the flip side of that your blog is ranked based on the number of drops on average over a week x2. So having lots of drops gives you a higher ranking on their site.

Having lots of drops on your blog isn’t a bad thing either, it gives you a higher rank, some other blogs that DO have more traffic but less people that use or drop entrecard don’t rank as high as your blog may because you might have more people coming to drop cards.

Which again isn’t bad, the rankings are skewed, but that’s the point, to give the lesser blogs more exposure and to try and share the traffic around a bit more. It’s also an incentive to the blog owner who does have more traffic to promote entrecard more to boost their rank inside entrecard, again, this is a win for entrecard, more exposure for them.

Now, what they have done is changed the calculation of credits to advertise on a blog.

Before to advertise on here for example it was 150 or so a day, I don’t get a lot of entrecard traffic, but I do get around 200 unique visits a day, and I have gained new readers from having people visit from entrecard.

Right now it’s 2 credits to advertise on my blog. So they have totally killed what my blog was worth simply because there’s no big queue of people waiting to advertise, there’s no big queue because I decline ads to try and keep some quality and relevance, so right now I have to forgo quality and relevance in order to get my rank back up.

Is this better or worse?

Well I know why they have changed it, they want to stop the ‘spam‘ of people dropping everywhere to gain credits, they have forgotten however the fact is that’s why they are popular, you can visit 1,000 blogs, get 1,000 credits and 1,000 blogs now have 1 extra visitor, everyone wins.

Now there’s no real value in visiting other blogs, or dropping cards, there’s no value for me to have an entrecard widget up high in my site anymore – or at all. Having it up high meant people dropped, putting it down lower means they didn’t, so I can put it down lower now and not worry about drops.

So entrecard loses, they are going to get dropped below other widgets, they are going to lose visitors, other sites are going to lose traffic and people will stop using them unless they change their weighting to something better.

Personally I think it should go back to how it was, rank sites based on the number of drops, BUT moderate the people dropping, weight the drops so the first 50 or so are 1:1.5, the next 50 are 1:1, the next 50 are 1:0.75, next 50 are 1:0.5 and so on, so your encouraged to drop 50 or so, then the next 50 are 1 to 1, then after that your classified as a heavy dropper or a spammer, so the credits for dropping diminish.

This way the people who visit a legit number of sites a day under 100, get rewarded, and it limits net worth of spamming.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this because I think dropping was a large part of the entrecard economy and it’s going to really kill them, pricing a site based on ads waiting is stupid personally, no longer is a site based on quality, just the number of people in a waiting list, a quality site that moderates what types of ads being shown will lose out and the shit sites that take everything and swap ads will benefit.

I don’t get it, I’ve come across so many sites, and blogs (blogs are the bigger culprit here), that have a bad design, almost no real traffic but shitloads of ads.

There are more ads than there is content at times, most of the spots are “advertise here” or are just affiliate links.

The massive amount of ads aren’t making them money, they would be better off removing the ads and concentrating on producing a better site that people wouldn’t just bounce from right away.

By delivering quality content with 1-2 target advertising techniques you’ll make a much more cash than by just abusing people with ads everywhere.

There’s a big downside to having ads everywhere, even if you do have truckloads of traffic, the visitors become ‘immune’ to the ads, they are used to seeing ads everywhere and it becomes a visual overload that is looked over rather than clicked on.

You’re pushing away your visitors from clicking on ads, and your advertisers wont advertise with you again if you’re not delivering a healthy CPC rate.

Take JohnChow for example, his blog is flooded with ads, as soon as I load the page 5 of the 10 main ad spots are all for 1 program, different people are advertising the same affiliate program, saturating the site with the same crap and making me more immune to what’s being advertised.

The only way to achieve a healthy CPC rate from JC.com would be to have him recommend your site in a post. Other than that I’m sure you would be getting clicks from advertising on there, just nothing compared to someone tell you to go visit a site (engaging the visitor with the advert, rather than plastering ads everywhere).

Since I’m busy and haven’t discussed the topic for a while, I’m going to revive some old posts about PPC marketing.

• 8 PPC Marketing tips for every campaign I do
• Perfect example of a bad adwords ad
• PPC Campaign Intelligence

I actually have a fair bit of knowledge in the area, I just never get around to talking about it!

Will try in the future, but for now I have clients and a dying laptop battery to deal with!

Back on the Amazon story a little…

It’s extremely important in business to keep your customers happy, a happy customer is a repeat buyer, it’s cheaper to have an existing customer buy again than it is to acquire a new customer.

It typically costs 30%+ more to make a sale from a new customer, than it does an existing.

How so?

Simple, to acquire a new customer alone it requires marketing, and most of the time sales support. Both cost time and money.

Something people don’t often factor into their marketing spend is the time that it takes to produce the marketing campaign as well. Even though say your cost per click is $1, and you get 100 clicks a day – total daily spend of $100, you might have spent a week designing the campaign and the landing page for it etc (collateral).

Your time for the week is worth say $1,000. So your monthly spend on the campaign could have been 30x$100 a day ($3,000) + the 1 week setup and the additional 1 day a week for monitoring the campaign ($1,500) which is a total for the month of $4,500.

So your monthly cost per click which in theory was $1, is in reality $1.50, a 50% higher rate than expected.

So you’re spending in theory, $4,500 a month on brining in new customers, a small portion of which will actually make sales, but to make a sale of an existing customer, who’s not an active buyer already would only take a phone call, or an email, either a personal email or a newsletter, these things only take minutes to a couple of days to achieve, and if you have a database of say 3,000 names, you could drum up a higher conversion rate than your CPC campaign is achieving, mostly because these customers have dealt with you before, they know and trust you and should be happy to buy from you again.

In theory you would have only spent $500 to make more sales than your $4,500 from your CPC campaign with a higher profit margin since your profit from the sales aren’t having to cover marketing expenditure.

In saying that, it doesn’t mean you should stop marketing to attract new customers, it means your new customer acquisition marketing should be just that, targeted at new customers, not everyone.

You should have different marketing strategies, one for new and one for existing. Your new customer acquisition marketing should be competitive with your competitors and offer something more, and your existing customer marketing should offer them reassurance on customer service and a comeback and buy again deal, maybe a discount for being a loyal customer.

Project Wonderful has put together an advertising network based on bidding per day, per advert.

Basically you can outbid other people like any auction, but your only bidding for the ad spot for the day.

You can see a historical average of bids so you can estimate what the ad will go for on the day your bidding for.

It’s a good concept in theory, but the bidding process is bloated, too many things to click, the interface design is poor, the site design is poor and the name ‘project wonderful’ isn’t inspiring.

I might write up some more about it later, I’m still playing around with it, I’ve bought a couple of ads here and there, it’s not a great bidding process, and it’s very hard to find websites that would be relevant to what you want to advertise on, there’s no searching by category or browsing types of sites.

Regardless of that I really do like the idea, I think this is the way all ads should be, I’m not a fan of people just setting a price and only taking that price for their advert, I think advert pricing should be proportional to demand and how much people are willing to pay.

It works out better for both people involved, the seller and the buyer.

I’m actually going to add their ad boxes to the site and see how it goes, will be interested to test the selling process.

I’ve been looking around at the forums over the last few days and looking at who’s selling advertising on their sites / blogs, mostly webmaster and business ones because that’s the traffic I’m after.

Being a forum, I can go back over the last couple of weeks of postings and check out who’s offering what, and at what price. For the traffic etc I think some are overpriced and some are alright.

But what’s surprised me is that people have turned down my offer for their ad spots.

Not all of them, just a couple.

What was my offer? Well the sites that weren’t overpriced I was willing to pay their full rate, but for the sites that I thought were overpriced, I decided to make an offer, one that I thought was fair and not far off what they were wanting, it was never more than 50% of what they were asking.

The other thing is, I didn’t make an offer to anyone that had not filled the space, I only made offers to people that clearly didn’t end up selling the space, so they either had a advertise here button, or an affiliate link.

Here’s why I’m surprised.

The month has started, so if they are selling month to month, like they were advertising for, then their billing cycle has started and the days that have passed start discounting the rate of the ad.

So if the ad is $300, and it’s the 5th today, then the ad’s remaining worth is $250 ($10 per day, 25 more days left).

On top of that, I’ve made them an offer, its money in their pocket if they want it, its revenue they would otherwise not have.

Not to mention they would have a new relationship with an advertiser, someone they can talk to in the future to draw more advertising from, so it’s a chance to establish an ongoing relationship.

These guys didn’t even come back and counter offer, or offer me a reduced rate if I was to buy additional months…

And some of these are blogs that are ‘experts in making money’.

Pathetic if you ask me.

Ad space anywhere is worthless until someone is willing to pay for that space. And the rate they are willing to pay is proportional to their returns. The higher the return they can make from your ad space, the more they will be willing to pay.

If these guys took my money, and the ad spot did work out for me (which is their job – to drive traffic to their site, and to their advertisers), then I would be more than happy to pay more next month.

I’d be stupid not to?

Sure you want to make $X per month from your site, but unless you can produce value for your advertisers, you won’t have any.

If you are then you’re like me, you’ve launched hundreds of dot com’s over the years, some have been worthless, but you tried anyway, but some have done quite well and profited.

Either way, an essential part of starting any online business is research and planning.

A key difference with an offline business is that the internet is local, everything is local, and you can use any service or buy any product made by anyone anywhere in the world. It doesn’t matter.

Whereas with an offline business, it doesn’t matter much if the market you’re starting you business in is already saturated, because there might not be anyone doing it in a particular area.

So in my opinion, whatever it is that you’re starting, there’s a high chance that someone else is already doing it, and it’s accessible to and probably already being used by your potential customers already.

You really need to find these sites, bookmark them and asses them, work out their weaknesses, their strong points, and how you can make your product or service more attractive to the people already using your competitors services, and your potential customers.

Putting your service up online and marketing isn’t enough; you need to really have a good hook to bring users your way.

On top of that, marketing research is essential, as much as I like advertising on Google, it’s saturated with people overpaying for clicks now days, which is why I think their revenue from clicks has dropped recently, but that’s another topic.

Whatever your product or service is that you’re wanting to advertise, I guarantee you that there’s sites out there that offer free content, articles or some kind of community with traffic that are in the same niche as the customers that you’re after.

This is where you want to advertise, most of these sites already have Google ads on them, but you find you can often get a better rate by buying direct, not only that, try to establish a long term ongoing deal, or some kind of offering for the site to offer to their users, and you’ll find the marketing costs will start to drop and the traffic to your site increase more than that Google can offer per click for the same price.

Is duplicate content really that bad?

I haven’t got on the ’stop stealing my content’ bandwagon yet that every blog I’ve seen is on, I understand people copying general content, images etc for websites is a straight up violation, but blogs being syndicated isn’t the same in my opinion.

There are heaps of blogs out there that syndicate other blogs content automatically, these blogs provide no value to anyone really, most are bad default templates so it’s obvious no one really works the blog, their only purpose is to build links, and search traffic which in turn produces money from advertising for whoever owns them, bloggers bitch and whinge about their content being syndicated on these blogs but seriously, they are doing you a favour.

They are pushing your content to more people, giving you more back links and saving you time that you would spend marketing and ‘guest blogging’ anyway.

Yes, Google punishes duplicate content, but it’s not super harsh and not for the owner of the content, your site will be more legit and less punished then someone who is syndicating lots of content anyway.

If your content is being syndicated, start posting with more links back to your own site and win from whatever traffic these syndicators are bringing in, like shit people, its free marketing, use it eh?

I’m creating a PPC marketing campaign for a new site in our network – poposco, and I’m going to be creating the campaign on the AdBrite PPC network for a change.

While I do this I’ll walk you through the process and why I do it.

In a couple of weeks I’ll show the results of the campaign and any tweaking I performed to increase its performance. Let’s get started.

PPC marketing can be a very effective way of marketing any website if you do it correctly, the effectiveness of any campaign can be measured by your KPI’s (key performance indicators), so this is where we’re going to start, at the measuring point.

What’s a KPI and why are they so important?

A Key Performance Indicator is basically a point of measurement, before you build any marketing campaign, free or paid, you need to think, why am I doing this? At the end of it all, what would I look at to deem my marketing efforts a success?
In our case, I want to achieve two things

1. Attract visitors who would use the service and return to the site
2. Build a member base of users who submit content

So my KPI for number 1 would be traffic, and not just traffic I’ve bought, but sustained traffic and increased traffic.

For example, if I buy 1,000 clicks, I will receive 1,000 visitors. If all I receive over the duration of the campaign is 1,000 visitors – then my fist KPI wasn’t much of a success, the visitors aren’t returning, nor are they referring other people – if they like what they see and if it’s of relevance you’ll find users will refer other users. Regardless, if our total traffic is just 1k then we’ve failed on the first KPI.

On the other hand, if we buy 1k clicks and over the duration of the campaign we end up with 1,500 then we’ve had some success.

For the second KPI we’re going to keep an eye on registrations, since we’re not advertising anywhere else at the moment, only on AdBrite, we can assume most of the registrations will be driven from this marketing, we’re not going to assume too much, but at this stage it’s not going to hurt too much to assume. In future campaigns we will track clicks to registrations with tracking codes.

Kids, don’t try this at home, never assume anything, and always track with codes. I’m not since we’re not advertising anywhere else right now.

It’s not all running around blind, I will be checking my referral stats and look at the tracking data, I can see the number of registration page and submit page hits from ads we’ve placed, it’s not optimal but It’ll do for now.

Pre-creating the campaign

Now that we have our KPIs, we need to think about what we’re doing before we rush off and do it; firstly yes we need to build some ads, but not just any old ads, we need to build ads that will help us meet those KPIs of ours.

When your building ads, one thing I see way too often are ads with no meaning, pointless ads that aren’t targeting anyone, there’s no call to action or reason for anyone to click the ads, and the ads on describe where they are going to be landing, they are pointless.

This is where building KPIs first helps, we now know what we need to build the ads for, we need to build ads that meet our KPI requirements, that why were marketing in the first place right?

Other overlooked items when creating a campaign is our budget and duration. Our KPIs are measured on those factors as well, marketing campaigns aren’t open ended forever funded ordeals; they should end in a set period with a fixed cost in mind.

Another thing to keep in mind here is the marketplace in which you’re advertising with, AdBrite isn’t the greatest place to advertise a website for webmasters, so this is going to be a little test marketing campaign, I’m going to keep the budget small and time short… see what happens. If it turns out that the response based on our KPIs are good, then I’ll increase the amount of spend and extend the campaigns for a few more months.

For the time being I’m going to restrict us to a $5 a day 1 month long campaign to limit our potential loss.

Creating the campaign

SO let’s get started, shoot on over to AdBrite, if you don’t already have an account, create one.

Once you’re there, login then click on the ‘for advertisers’ tab.

Under the ‘for advertisers’ tab there’s a link called ‘create a new campaign‘, click it to get started.

The first thing we need to do with this Text Ad is to setup our Geographic Targeting.

I want to target the big English speaking countries, I think that’s going to be our demographc, so under geographic targeting, I’m going to specify regions (countries) – Australia, United States, United Kingdom and Canada.

The next step in our campaign creation process is Category Targeting.

Since the site is based around webmaster topics, business, marketing, technology and what not, I’m going to select specific categories rather than showing the advert across the whole AdBrite network.

I think this is a crucial step when creating a campaign on AdBrite, the whole network is deadly, there are lots of random sites out there you really don’t need your advert to display on, like humour sites, real estate sites and more.

So to keep away from those areas I’m going to use the following categories

• Business and Industrial
• News
• Technology
• Blogs
• Business and Finance
• News and Reference
• Small / Medium Business
• Social Networking

On the category targeting page, at the bottom there’s an additional option – Target site by quality, again another step which I think is important to the success of a webmaster targeted campaign, by choosing the option ‘Only show ads on sites with family-friendly content and professional presentation’ should hopefully weed out the sites that are built to exploit clicks on ads and keep the advert on more professional sites with quality traffic.

Demographic targeting is next but there’s nothing there in need of change so I’m leaving that alone and skipping direct to Keyword Targeting.

I’m not going to describe how I came up with my list of keywords, there’s lots of ways and articles around about how to come up with a list of keywords for your site, if I was do start talking about it here it I could do a few posts worth of content so I’ll leave that for another time, this article will be big enough as it is.

Anyway, I recommend coming up with a list of keywords and using them for keyword targeting. Again this should help cut back on sites that aren’t relevant to people we’re targeting.

Setting your budget

To start off I usually set my campaigns to a modest $5 a day budget, with a $0.20 cost per click.

I keep my daily budget low so in case all the clicks end up being $0.20 each and were not receiving traffic that meets our targets we don’t blow too much money too fast. You will see below that even though our MAX cost per click is 20 cents, most of the clicks ’should’ be in the 2 cent per click range.

It’s always a good idea when testing things to keep your daily budget low; it allows you to not over do your spending while you’re still testing, it gives you time to tweak your targeting and the text in your adverts.

Once your campaign is producing quality traffic then start ramping up your daily budget, but in the meantime start small and build up over time.

You can see in the image above that our campaign is expected to be shown 3.5million times a day, across around 600 sites with an average cost per click of $0.02.

We should expect around 121 clicks per day which will only eat into 45% of our budget.

Now that data is based on their current network averages, I think with the way we word our adverts that we should be able to max out our daily spend and produce over 200 clicks a day.

If we can max our daily spend with keeping our CPC low then we’re in a good position to control the flow to of traffic to our site, not having to sit around desperately wanting more traffic, we have a tap we can turn on and off when we want more or less traffic – which in my opinion is a good thing.

Creating our text adverts

To create our actual text adverts we need to again look at our KPIs

1. Attract visitors who would use the service and return
2. Build a member base of users who submit content

We have 2 different targets here to achieve and in order to do this I’m going to create at least 3 ads per KPI.

Why 3? Well there’s no real great reasoning, I usually create more, but I wouldn’t create any less than 3 per KPI, having a few variations will give you enough of an indication of what style of ads are attracting more clicks than others and for what reasons.

For example if one of your ads has the word FREE in it, and the other doesn’t, but the advert with FREE in it is getting the majority of the clicks then we know why, the clickers are after something for free. Make sure they are getting it or cut the advert.

For our first KPI since our site is unknown (we don’t have any brand awareness yet) I’m going to try and use the name of the site in the adverts, the more the users see the unique name hopefully the more they remember it or notice that it’s being advertised around the place and build some interest within them to visit the site. This is a benefit with text ads; the domain is at the bottom of the advert and I’m going to keep it simple with just showing ‘poposco.com’ not some random URL on our server like ‘http://www.poposco.com/home/index.php’

Another tactic I’m going to use is include the word ‘digg’ in the advert, since poposco is a digg.com style of site, if the users are interested in that kind of thing then that’s our target market and we hope they click.

The final thing I’m going to try is direct the user to an article link direct on the site.

I’m no genius ad copywriter but there’s enough variation there to let me know what will work and what won’t and I can go from there re-writing and tweaking the adverts.

Our next ad group is going to target our 2^nd KPI, attracting new article submitters.

Again I’m going to use the digg angle, everyone knows it so why not, I’m also going to try the newspaper style ‘wanted’ ad headlines, see what it does.

Okay that should do.

There’s a rule I always use when I create a PPC advert, and that is to never send users to a generic homepage. It’s stupid, your advert is giving the users an expectation of what they are going to see after they click, and if you don’t deliver that expectation they will leave your site in seconds.

Deliver that expectation. Whatever you describe in your text ad, send them to a page with more information about what you told them already. Not a generic product page, build a page for the text ad if you’re selling a product, be specific and to the point, don’t content overload either.

However, when your homepage is the bulk of your content and that is what you are promising, then it’s alright, and in our case that’s what we have, a content rich homepage and that’s what the site and adverts are all about, all except our 6^th advert in the first group.

For that last advert in the first group I’m going send the user direct to the link of that article on poposco.

By doing this I’m going to achieve 3 things. Firstly I’ll know by the click through rates what people are more interested in, a digg style webmaster site, or 8 tips of PPC marketing. Secondly if they do click the advert they will be exposed to the site which is our KPI goal, and thirdly if they don’t visit any other pages on poposco hopefully they click the link to read the whole article which is on my talkingdynamics site – so more traffic for here.

For the second group of adverts I’m going to send half direct to the submit page, and the other half to the homepage. Why not everyone to the submit page? Well I want to see how smart people are; I’m thrown them to our site which obviously works like digg, if they want to submit an article is the site easy enough to use to achieve that?

That’s something we need to know, if submissions are low maybe we need to have a bigger more visual button on the pages to let people know how to submit an article, the rest that hit the submit page hopefully will submit.

I’ve put together an incentive to submit an article, it’s imperative for a new site to have a hook to get people using it, in our case we want content submitted all the time, if the users are submitting and reading hopefully it will help the site more returning visitors, until there’s a steady stream of submissions we’re going to offer some freebies like advertising.

When creating a campaign always consider a hook, most of the time a product of service isn’t all that interesting, but if you can offer something else attached to your boring product then it’ll help it sell, you see this done all the time in traditional marketing.

Conclusion

Well that’s it really, there’s a fair bit to consider when building a campaign, even on a simple network like AdBrite. You need the appropriate landing pages, hooks (offers) and ad variations to test your advertising before you dive in spending too much.

The next thing you need to do is report and optimize your campaign before you increase your ad spend, but that’s a different article. Subscribe to the RSS Feed to make sure you don’t miss that one.

Feel free to join in the discussion about AdBrite on the forums.

I signed up to Kontera a while ago; they sent me the install details and code etc to install on the site a couple of days ago… If you don’t know already, Kontera is a context based advertising system.

It works like this, you install the code on your site, and based on keywords in your content, they will dynamically turn that keyword that someone has paid for into a link that pops up a little link window – see the image.

After having it running on the site for all of 3 minutes I removed it.

I’m a fan of design and useability, everything I do, I try to make easy to use and friendly on the eye.

If you can’t read the content well or there’s links and what not everywhere distracting you from trying to read something then there’s no point in having content to start with in my opinion.

After having the Kontera installed I checked out my page and their links were all over the place, which is no big deal, that’s the point, but I really didn’t like how they looked and from a reader’s point of view, it affected how I read my own content.

If I didn’t like reading my own copy with it on the site then who else would eh? So I removed it. I know other blogs have it installed but honestly I don’t read their sites, most of the time sites with good content that I want to read I find they are over monetizing it, links and ads everywhere, so I subscribe to their feed in my Outlook 2007 and I read the posts in my feed reader, never visit their site again, and no money for them.

I’ve often said less is more when it comes to advertising and that’s my case in point, in my opinion you’re better off having more readers of your site then of your feed, and then utilising your advertising space on your site more efficiently rather than saturating it with crap 90% of people won’t click on.

There’s a reason JohnChow makes the large majority of his money from affiliate sales

It’s because he recommends them in his posts etc, they don’t advertise on his site, they aren’t PPC clicks, his affiliate links are in his posts and throughout what he talks about when he shows how much he makes.

The small earners are the PPC networks he has everywhere, Google and Kontera, TZZ media and buy him a beer.

His big earners never paid for any clicks, affiliate sales, review me and text link ads.