The AdStart Homepage

AdStart is so easy to use that your campaigns basically create themselves. But there are a few steps you can take to increase the effectiveness of your ads. Here are some tips:

• Create multiple versions of each ad, and monitor your results to see which ones perform the best. Small changes in the wording of your ads can make a huge difference in their success.
• Add conversion tracking to find out how your clicks are translating to leads, sales, signups, etc. You can easily add tracking pixels to any page of your website, from the homepage to the checkout page.
• Target specific locations and categories. If your ad is relevant in every country except Australia, then you can exclude all Australian sites. If your ad is only relevant for automotive and men's interest, then you include only automotive and men's interest sites. Taking just a couple minutes to choose locations and categories will dramatically improve your results by always showing your ads to the right people.

Target specific locations and categories on the Create Campaign page.

• Use frequency capping to restrict the number of times a specific user views your ad in a specific period of time. This decreases ad fatigue and overexposure to avoid a drop in response rate.
• Increase the CPC rate. Raising your CPC rate above the minimum will increase the priority of you ads, putting you ahead of the lower-bidding advertisers.
• Modify your ad scheduling based on your audience. For example, Christmas tree ads won't be as effective in the middle of the summer, and office supply ads won't be as effective on weekends.

Follow those simple steps and you'll start seeing results in no time! Have you tried AdStart yet? Do you have any tips that we didn't mention?

Open Source t-shirt courtesy of Flickr user AnalogJunkie

Exciting news! A Joomla developer named AJ recently created an extension that places the Image Space Media script on Joomla sites. We're big proponents of using extensions and plug-ins to place ISM ads on your site, so this is another great addition to our extension family! Thanks, AJ!

AJ was able to create an ISM extension for Joomla, and we created an ISM plug-in for WordPress because both platforms are to a certain extent open source, so that users can improve upon and change the existing software. The great thing about AJ's new ISM extension is that it is very real proof that open source platforms like Joomla encourage collaboration and a sense of community.

It is often the case that open source organizations like Joomla believe very strongly in the social implications of being open. For example, here's Joomla's vision:

• People publishing and collaborating in their communities and around the world
• Software that is free, secure, and high-quality
• A community that is enjoyable and rewarding to participate in
• People around the world using their preferred languages
• A project that acts autonomously
• A project that is socially responsible
• A project dedicated to maintaining the trust of its users

In Joomla's developers' minds, the fact that the software is free and the community is open to participation and collaboration means that the end-product will be more valuable, useful, and responsible.

More and more open source organizations have emerged recently using a similar model - Wikipedia has an impressive list of the many collaborative software applications. And as reported last week in TechCrunch, the open source ideology is now considered a sound business investment: Talend, the provider of open source data solutions, raised $8 million in investments in their latest round of funding, bringing their total secured funding to $28 million. Impressive!

The new ISM extension for Joomla is proof that open source software can encourage collaboration between parties to everyone's benefit. Now who feel's like singing with me?

"Good Advice on a Monday Morning" by Flickr user Aaardvaark

This week in What's Happening Around the Web, we're going to talk about some great advice we've read recently.

To start with, here's some meta-advice that we've been trying to follow on the ISM blog: How to write good blog posts. Chris Brogan, social media expert and ISM crush, details how to deliver great content while accomplishing the goals you've set out for your blog.

Here's a sampling of his words of wisdom:

Always Write With Service In Mind

For every idea you share with people, be it a blog post about a suitcase, or an embed of a YouTube video by your favorite band, take a few extra moments to think about how this post will bring value to your audience. See if you can’t give them a takeaway or a next action.

On the ISM blog, we try to make each post meaningful and interesting, and we definitely try to include takeaways. For example, Joy's recent post about ISM's referral program is informative, in that it explains our recently-implemented referral program. And in my mind, the takeaway is that ISM rewards its publishers for spreading the word, and readers of the blog can then choose to sign up with us to become publishers. If you're already a publisher, our blog post helps you get started with the referral program. Good things all around.

Another collection of fantastic advice that we came across recently was this post on Daily Blog Tips on how to deal with criticism. Nothing hurts more than someone dissing your hard work. What should we keep in mind when someone gets all up in your grill?

Just because you fall short doesn’t mean you failed.

Easy to say, but not necessarily easy to live with. No one likes criticism. No one likes to admit that there’s a better solution, but the fact is, there are always better solutions. Criticism is a tool. It provides different perspectives. It identifies steps that you missed during the first round.

Become a stakeholder but don’t drive your stake through the heart.

Become a stakeholder in any project or undertaking but don’t cling to your POV with your last breath. There are a million ways to get it right and listening to some constructive criticism from a client, a co-worker, family member or friend may actually move that undertaking in another direction. A better direction.

I like that last piece of advice a lot because it hits pretty close to home. You know those sentences or paragraphs that you write and then think, "Good lord that's good"? I once had a professor in college (the ISM College of Hard Knocks) who told me to immediately delete those sentences. You can always create a beautiful turn of phrase. What matters is the content, and you should be ready to try a number of different ways to express that content. That's something I'm working on.

And finally, the best piece of advice we've read this week comes not from a blog, but from a blogger's friend. Boonsri Dickinson of TechStartups recently wrote about the Library of Congress archiving all the world's tweets, to which her non-tweeting friend responded...

Interesting piece, but interesting because of how unmoored and utterly clueless we’ve become as a society. What’s next, recordings of all our farts?

This is so the Emperor’s New Clothes it’s mind boggling! What utter nonsense! It’s like saying we could really understand a culture and a moment in time by keeping a record of everyone’s conversations, or letters and postcards. And school reports and traffic and parking citations.

So? We could tell where everyone ever went too, if we could keep the impressions of every footprint made since, say, March 2006.

A staging of The Emperor's New Clothes, courtesy of the Northfield School of Arts and Technology. Adorable.

I tend to disagree about the Emperor's New Clothes allegation because I do think the Archive of Tweets will be an amazing cultural artifact however-many-years down the line... but I also have the sense of humor of a five year-old. And I think that recording farts would be AWESOME. Let's get it started, y'all.

So, let's follow Chris Brogan's advice. What are the takeaways of this post?

Takeaway one: Carly is immature.

Takeaway two: There's an endless number of smart people writing on the internet, and we have so much to learn from them. Chris Brogan and the editors of sites like Daily Blog Tips and TechStartups are just a small sampling of them.

We're a young group of bloggers so we're still learning, but you can rest assured that the best pieces of advice that we receive, we'll be sharing with you all. What have you learned recently that you'd like to share with the class?

Earn some extra dough (and get brownie points from ISM HQ) when you refer sites to our network! It’s pretty simple, you can email your fellow bloggers and web producers through pubStop. A short and sweet message is sent out explaining Image Space Media's in-image advertising platform and the benefits of in-image ads.

If you want to promote us right on your site, we also have awesome referral banners you can embed right into your HTML.

So long as the site you’ve referred isn’t already a part of our publisher network we can begin our verification process and activate the referred account.

Once approved, you'll be cruising down Referral Road, picking up checks along the way. It's that easy!

Oh, and here’s the best part:

• For each referral that earns $5 within 180 days of sign-up, you’ll receive $5.
• When that referral earns $100 within 180 days of sign-up, you’ll receive and additional $250.
• If you can refer 25 publishers who can earn more than $100 within the first 180 days you can sign-up, you’ll receive a $2,000 bonus!

Courtesy of Flickr user Vanessa_Yvonne

The idea for this post started in, we won't lie, a kind of ISM-centric way. Image Space Media was reviewed on the site Software Critics this past week - for which we are very grateful! Mathdelane, the author of the post, called our in-image ad technology a "truly intelligent approach" to generating revenue. Thanks, mathdelane! You da, you da best.

But what caught our eye about the Software Critics site is that they include, on top of each post, how long it will take the read the article. For our review, for example, the reading time is 2-4 minutes. This is a pretty novel idea, in my mind. I've definitely had the experience in the past of starting in on an interesting article online, only to get to the bottom and realize I'm on page 1 of 14, New Yorker style. The New Yorker is awesome, but sometimes I just can't spend that much time reading one article.

Given the crazy amount of information on the web, and given how much new content is added everyday, what kind of management tools exist to help online news consumers keep track of it all efficiently?

Software Critics provides a micro-solution: you know how long each article will take you to read, generally, so you can skim the longer ones or the ones you're less interested in, and fully jump into the articles you know you have time for. Pretty cool.

But that's just one site. How do you  manage all of the trillions of blogs you read?

If you're like many many many people, you could use Google Reader to aggregate all of the RSS feeds of the sites you most enjoy. And if you're (like me) obsessed with making sure your email inbox number is at 0, the fact that each new item is numbered means that you'll end up looking at all the new content just to get rid of the number beside the All Items link.

There's also Twitter, of course. By following a combination of your favorite content producers and content curators you'll get a real-time view of what's happening around the web. Yammer provides a similar service (mixed with a little bit of Facebook's layout), but limits it to your network of co-workers.

Google Reader, Twitter, Yammer... these are all great solutions for how to keep track of your favorite sites. But the question of time management still remains. Speaking personally, it would be pretty easy for me to spend about half the day on non-work-specific tasks. During that time, I certainly learn a lot--but it's not a particularly smart use of my time in terms of work efficiency.

I think the answer, as with most things in adulthood, requires some form of organizational system. My co-worker Joy recommends setting aside half an hour to an hour each morning to surfing whatever form of web community you're into. I personally love a mid-day stroll around the internet, so I try to time the delay the desire to wander to my lunchtime. Eating and reading! Two of my favorite activities.

What about you? How do you make sure you don't spend the whole day on Perez Hilton/TechCrunch/BoingBoing?

Stay updated with your website's progress by using the Image Reporting tool on your Pubstop account, and check each individual image's impressions, clicks, earnings, and other performance metrics. Which images are generating the most income? Highest click through rates? eCPM? Search? It's easy to find out!

To control your image inventory for ads, use the Image Manager tool.  Search for images, choose which images have ads, and suggest keywords to help us do a better job. Finally, take advantage of our fantastic Referral Program and make money by submitting your referrals on homepage of your PubStop account!

Don't forget to join our Publisher Community Forum, where you can share an idea, ask  us a question, report a problem, or give praise. Send us a message through your Pubstop account by clicking the "Feedback" widget on the left-hand side of the page, and submit a topic for discussion on our forum. We'll be sure to have it answered right away.

Happy exploring! We look forward to hearing from you. Please be sure to visit our twitter page (@imagespacemedia), we look forward to your tweets!

via Jakob Nielsen for Useit.com

At Image Space Media headquarters, we're all pretty big proponents of online advertising (Cash Rules Everything Around Us, after all). We think it's a great way for publishers to financially support their passions and their expressiveness. And, of course, we believe we provide a unique and game-changing way for publishers to use their unique images to get paid.

But not all online advertising is effective online advertising. And it's not just you, getting sick of seeing the same banner ads above the sites you visit every day - it's a proven phenomenon called Banner Burnout, and it has very real implications for publishers and advertisers.

Let the stats do the talking: A study by DoubleClick found that after the fourth impression, CTR rates for banner ads go from 2.7 percent to less than 1 percent. That's pretty abysmal!

Photo via Flickr user jamescastle3

But before you can even worry about click through rates, there is the critical problem of Banner Blindness to deal with. As you can see from the amazing eyetracking studies shown above, created by Jakob Nielsen, the eye is automatically drawn to areas not dominated by ads. As Nielsen writes, "If users are looking for a quick fact, they want to get done and aren't diverted by banners; and if users are engrossed in a story, they're not going to look away from the content."

To combat the Banner B-problems, advertising experts suggest placing banners with animation, flashing bright colors, and cryptic messages at the top of your site. But what if that's not exactly the style you have in mind for your site? Remember, banner ads are not the only ad solution. These are many great advertising strategies to generate revenue - banner ads, Google AdSense and AdWords, in-text ads, Image Space media ads... Given the number of options in your arsenal, it's important to be tactical about your advertising solutions. How do you want your site to appear visually? Check out our online advertising tag for all of our past coverage of the various ways you can make ads work for your site.

Photo by Sureash Kumar via stock.xchng

Don't lie, you've done it before: started a blog with the best of intentions, had the drive to write a few stellar posts... and then fizzled out. I am certainly guilty of creating at least two blogs that are now abandoned, floating out in the blogosphere, and I will never tell anyone their names because they are too embarrassing.

So how can you avoid the flash-in-the-pan blogging phenomenon? ProBlogging and Chris Brogan's site are fantastic resources for would-be bloggers, written by industry veterans who have years of experience forming their own strategies for building successful blogs.

We have done you the service of aggregating the most helpful advice for the two hardest tasks of blogging: starting a great blog that will attract readers and, importantly, maintain your interest, and then keeping it going with posts that don't feel like a chore to write.

Nathan Hangen of Making it Social provides great tips for the first task of starting a blog in his article 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started. Here are some choice pieces of advice:

Narrow Your Niche

This is something that took me a long time to understand. I thought that by covering a bunch of topics, casting a wider net so to speak, that I would attract more people to my blog. The problem with that strategy is that when you do attract new visitors, you throw them off if your content isn’t consistent. They’ll wind up leaving and you’ll have to recruit new readers for every single post. So, try fishing with a spear instead.

When You Have a Blog, You are the Authority

Own It! – We blog from behind a desk and see our lives as imperfect or incomplete. However, to a customer or new reader, you have an incredible amount of authority. If you have gone through the work of publishing content, then you need to step up to the plate and own that content. Take the authority and use it. You might be a 6 or 7 (on a 10 point scale), but to that new person, you are a leader.

Start Networking Early!

I cannot emphasize this enough. Use Twitter, comments, and guest posting as a tool to meet new people. The wider your reach, the easier it is to get noticed. Don’t wait for people to come to you…get out and network. People love personal connections! Go to conferences and shake hands with other bloggers. You never know which contact could turn into a great guest posting opportunity, a JV deal, or a new devoted fan

But what happens if you start a blog you love and then lose that loving feeling? David Turnbull of Adventures of a Barefoot Geek wrote an awesome post on How to Ease the Pressure of Blogging, the highlights of which are after the jump:

Set smaller goals

When you sit down to write tell yourself this magical phrase: I’ll be satisified when I’ve written X words. Replace X with the smallest amount of words you can be realistically satisfied with. Once you’ve made this decision and are no longer constricted by outrageous word counts or time frames there’s no anxiety as you work and I expect you’ll find yourself greatly surpassing the “satisfactory metrics” you set for yourself.

Clarify and simplify

What do you want to get out of blogging? Answer that question at least once a month for as long as you own or write for a blog. I imagine most people will respond “to make money” and that’s fine, but there has to be a motivation higher than that, because blogging isn’t exactly the most effective approach to generating an income.

Become a “what matters” blogger

This is something I lifted from Tina of ThinkSimpleNow.com who is well known for taking multiple months away from her blog. I doubt everyone could be met with success using that approach, but the lesson still holds true: to ease the pressure of writing and heighten the respect from your readership only write and publish content that truly matters.

What “matters” is a subjective gauge of course, but at its core it’s your own highest inner standard that you must hold yourself too. Through this approach you will end up spending more time writing individual posts, but:

• Each post will provide you and your readers with lasting fulfillment.
• There’ll be less of a frantic rush to publish content.
• Freeing yourself from a strict deadline and schedule is incredibly liberating.

Now that your blog is set up and you have clear goals for how you will continue to post great content that is exciting to you and your readers, check out Chris Brogan's 50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the Next Level. Brogan's post provides more in-debth explorations of how to segment your audience and turn your blog into a viable business. I found the following to be pretty compelling:

Building Business From Your Blog

You might be trying to make money from your blog directly, perhaps through advertising or affiliate marketing. Or you might be seeking to establish thought leadership and promote consulting opportunities. You might be simply looking to drive even better awareness of a social cause or have a nonprofit or educational motive in mind. In any case, think of “business” to mean “value beyond the blogging itself.”

• Build conversion opportunities. If you’re selling something directly, think of clever ways to post about it that educate, inform, and encourage a call to action.
• Ask for the sale. If you’re selling something, don’t be shy. Ask for it. Do so in a blog post, or in an ad of your own creation. Be direct and honest about this.
• Mix free value and additional opportunities. If you’re selling something that’s not unlike what’s available on your blog for free, demonstrate the dividing line. Even consider giving a hint of what’s on the other side.
• Make it easy to opt in. Like asking for the sale, make sure you help your prospective customers/clients/partners know how to get into your sales funnel, should they be interested.

Now that you've got the basics covered, remember--you can do it. Take these experts' advice and make it your own, successfully avoiding the blog-disillusionment that we all know lurks around the corner. Harness your drive and your expertise and start writing! If you start a blog using any of this advice, let us know and post it in the comments! You can even add ads to your images.

Now get busy and tell us what other great blogging tips you have found helpful.

Photo by Carlos Zaragoza via stock.xchg

In light of this, we'd like to help publishers like you demystify these terms so you can make the best advertising revenue decisions for your blog. Here are some of the most commonly used terms in online marketing:

Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is a web-based revenue sharing practice between advertisers/merchants (affiliate merchants) and online publishers, whereby compensation is based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks, registrations, or a hybrid model. In a traditional affiliate network the merchant usually has a direct relationship with the publisher.

CPA -- cost-per-action. Also known as pay for performance, CPA is an effective way for merchants to select how they want to pay for their advertising -- by click, impression, sale or other variable. Like traditional affiliate marketing, CPA payouts are based on cost-per-action, where you get paid for leads you generate to their site that perform a specific action.

In a CPA network, the merchant communicates to publishers through the network and does not have direct contact with their affiliates. They also tend to have very transparent metrics with extensive lists of CPCs for search terms.

CPC -- cost-per-click. CPC programs are mostly successful in content-rich websites and blogs. The model is based on the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines and other Internet publishers for a single click on its advertisements that brings one one visitor to its website.

CPC and CPM advertising is typically viewed as being about brand awareness. Brand conscious advertisers only interested in getting exposure will pay a high profile publisher for impressions or clicks with little regard for their return or investment.

CPM -- cost-per-thousand-impression. An impression is a single instance of an ad appearing on a website. In CPM ad networks, advertisers pay for the amount of traffic that simply view a web page with an advertisement or a pop-up or pop under ad. While CPM does not pay as well as other types of monetization strategies it fits large publishers needs quite well. If you're running a highly trafficked site, the bulk of impressions can easily translate low-paying CPM ads into a profitable revenue stream.

PPC -- pay-per-click, Also known as, pay-per lead or pay-per-sale. PPC implements the affiliate model, offering financial incentives (in the form of a percentage of revenue) to affiliated partner sites.

Have any other online marketing terms that need explaining? Let us know in the comments!