I’ve been business online for quite a few years now and have tried many types of advertising online. I’ve lost my shirt and a bundle of money using Google Adwords and other PPC services. There’s one little known paid advertising service I’ve used with amazing results … and without going broke. I submitted several campaigns to StumbleUpon Ads and the results are nothing short of fantastic. Of course, your results will depend on the type of content you submit to SU. Read the rest of this entry »

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The coupon code for $17 off OioPublisher is about to expire. You have just a few days left to take advantage of this offer. OioPublisher is the Wordpress Plugin that allows you to, and automates selling reviews, links and ads on your site completely commission free. I use it here and it’s already paid for itself, and I paid full price for it. I wrote about it earlier. Here’s an excerpt from my previous post.

If you are selling text ads, ad space or reviews on your blog, this great little plugin (for wordpress) cuts the middle man right out. I recently spoke of my disappointment in the services offered to bloggers to monetize their blogs through paid reviews and ad space. You have to bend over backwards to get accepted to a marketplace that is either very sparse with offers or full of real crapola. The prices that advertisers in their marketplace are willing to pay are insulting and when you take out the commission that the “service” charges … well, you are providing a paid review on your site to these cheapos for practically nothing. When word really spreads about this plugin, you can kiss those services good-bye. Instead of taking commissions from your earnings, OIOpublisher charges a one-time fee of $37 for the plugin.

Once the plugin is activated, all you need to do is approve an ad or a text link and it goes live and expires when it is supposed to. Not only that, but you keep the money you make instead of paying commission to money-sucking middlemen. To get this plugin for $17 Off, Click Here and use this coupon code

$17 off code: QWERTY-17 (expires May 5th)

$5 off code: QWERTY-5 (expires May 20th)

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The idea behind a good direct marketing campaign is to acquire happy, repeat customers that purchase again and again and have a high lifetime value. Then there’s your scam artists who are out for the quick buck and lure you in with deceptive advertising. Some of them so deceptive that you’re credit card is charged month after month for a product you never agreed to purchase.

Such is the case with the company Intelligent Beauty, LLC, marketing a product called IQ Derma. As you can see from the ad above, we have a photo of the Bride of Godzilla who appears to have been magically transformed into a princess by using their skin care products. If these claims were actually substantiated, it would put plastic surgeons out of business. Take a closer look at the blue smudgy print to the right of the photo where it says Simulated Imagery … meaning … fake results. Take another look at this landing page from IQ Derma to see even more of their before and afters that say “Dramatization: Not Actual Results”. At least the print is more visible on the website than on the ads they have placed all over the Internet.

Now notice at the bottom of the photo to the left where the ad says Try it FREE. You might take that to mean that you actually get to try it for free. I’m not usually one to fall for scams or even try free trials, but it must have caught me at the right time because for the first time in my life, I sent away for their FREE trial. You have to give them your credit card number and $3.95 shipping to receive the free trial.

I received my free trial and thought great … that’s the end of that. I used it for awhile and wasn’t impressed in any way with the product and thought … well, glad it was a free trial since it is crap and doesn’t really do what it claims to do. Two months later, I receive an identical box to the first box. I opened it and scratched my head and said wtf? Why are they sending me another free trial? I just put the box in a closet since the first product had not been used. Two months later … yep … another box. This one I investigated more thoroughly. Hidden under wrapping and under a catalog was an invoice for $95.70. I was shocked to find that I had already been charged $95.70 for this box, the second box and the original “free trial” box for a total of nearly $300 charged to my credit card. Read the rest of this entry »

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First it was PayPerPlay and now it’s PayPerPopup … both insidious in-your-face type of advertising that the majority of visitors absolutely hate. If you want to piss off your visitors, then I highly recommend force feeding advertisements to them in the form of audio that they have to listen to or insidious popups that they have to close before seeing your blog.

Obviously, I am not anti-advertising and I use several methods to monetize blogging, but in my view, advertising should be persuasive. It should generate interest and incite curiosity or even be funny. It should never force the visitor to do something to get rid of it, such as close the window or turn your speakers down. It just pisses people off and the last thing you should want to do with a visitor to your blog is piss them off right off the bat.

Take PayPerPlay as an example. Is Taco Bell the only company that has purchased ads? So far, they’re the only ones I hear on sites utilizing PayPerPlay and it pisses me off every time I hear it. I used to be a Taco Bell fan and I will probably eat there at some point again, but I think their PayPerPlay ad has harmed their brand. The name Taco Bell is now associated with anger … in my mind, and being a 5-second ad, there is really absolutely nothing in the ad that entices me to go out and buy some Taco Bell. I just want the ad to end and usually just close the browser on that site to get rid of it.

Now the PayPerPopup has my panties all in a bunch. Just as I do with PayPerPlay, when I encounter one of the ads shown above that you have to close before even seeing the site, I just ditch the site. Maybe I’m the only one who is irritated by that type of ad, but I doubt it. Do you want to take the chance that I’m not?

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I recently ran across a new ad service very similar to Entrecard. The main difference is that you earn credits by page views rather than by dropping or visiting other sites. You can add the code to as many qualifying pages as you have to receive credits for page views. When you sign up, they give you 1,000 credits to start you off. 1,000 credits - 1,000 page views. Entrecard actually increases traffic to your sites and improves your Alexa rating, blog comments, rss readers, and Technorati stats. AdsFlip won’t do any of this except for the traffic generated by actual click-throughs of your ad on other people’s site in the network. I see Entrecard and AdsFlip as a good partnership.

Entrecard’s traffic will increase the page views that you earn in AdsFlip, thereby giving you a lot more ad exposure if you use both networks. I just signed up for AdsFlip about an hour ago and have already generated 59 credits in addition to the 1,000 that I got from signing up, the bulk of that being Entrecard traffic. It’s in beta right now, brand new, but is functioning fully and taking signups.

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With more than 64 million active users and around 250,000 new users joining every day, you can tap into the social networking revolution with a free page on Facebook for your blog or business … yes, I said free.

Previously you had to be BIG business with a BIG marketing budget to create a corporate or company Facebook account. Blockbuster Inc., CBS Corp., The Coca-Cola Co., Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., are examples of well known companies that have a corporate presence on Facebook. Facebook members could then become “fans” by adding your company as a friend.

Now, this option is open to any business. Businesses can add any content they want, including photos, videos and music. Facebook users can share information about a business directly with the company by adding reviews or other information to that business’ page. Small businesses now have the advantage that only Fortune 500 companies could afford previously. It’s simple: here’s how you do it:

Creating A Facebook Business Page

1. Visit this URL

2. Choose the best category for your business.

3. Just enter your business name and then click “Create Page”.

4. Now you can add a description of your business and a website address. You can also add a photo or logo. There are sections to add more photos, video

5. Then click on your hyperlinked business name in the top left corner and click “publish this page.”

6. Finally, from your new profile page, become a fan of your business. This is important as all of your “friends” will now be able to see your page when they visit your profile and it will be shown in the news feed that “Suzanne is a fan of Dot Com Mogul”. With some social networking, some of your Facebook friends will also add your business as a friend and then their friends will see a message… and on and on.

To the left is a screenshot of your admin panel. You can send updates to fans of the business and there’s a link to Promote Page with an Ad. You can also use the pages’ discussion board to start topics, list events, or write on “the wall”. I’ve just added a page for my blog, Dot Com Mogul. You can see it here. (While you’re there, add it as a friend I plan to add more interesting info and a video to it, but this is the beginning page with minimal information. If you’re wondering why you should do this, just check out the Facebook statistics below, and did I mention …. it’s free.
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I’m a bit disappointed in the services that are available to help bloggers sell their “real estate.” When I first began blogging, I ran across all the paid review services and applied to them. In the beginning, I was promptly told that my blog did not meet their rigorous quality criteria. Well, now it does and I’ve been accepted into all of them. However, the problem I am now finding is that their advertisers don’t meet my rigorous quality criteria … with my main gripe being … they are cheapos.

Going to PayPerPost to the available opportunities for a blog that hasn’t acquired A-list status yet, I find review after review for $5-$10. The graphic to the left is today’s “Featured” opportunities. The $35 one requires that your blog be at least a pagerank 5 — ha ha ha —. Are they not aware of the Google slap that stripped some of the top blogs of a lot of their pagerank? And do they think that an A-list blog will review them for $35? Not likely. Quite simply, I’m not going to do an in-depth review of someone else’s product or website for 5 bucks. That isn’t the way I want to position this blog. I spend a lot of time writing content and a paid review is not exception. My last paid review was 450 words with two graphics and numerous backlinks to pages within the site. It is well written and I had to research the site and company before writing about it. It’s on another blog I write, but I was paid $25 for it and that is acceptable to me. I can live with that at this time, but if these companies think they’ll get that level of attention for a measly 5 bucks, it won’t be here. You also cannot list more than one blog until you’ve accepted and completed 10 reviews. I’m also limited to 10 reviews per month …. hahahahahahahahahahahah … I seriously doubt that I’ll find ten reviews a month that I’m interested in. Read the rest of this entry »

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Advertising online just got totally awesome cheap.

I did an earlier review about Project Wonderful. I’ve been using it to place an ad on Entrecard and it has been very cheap to advertise through them. I applied to have ads on my site too … I must say that the application acceptance was a bit long, but finally they accepted me and within minutes I had an Ad Box configured and up and running on the site sidebar. You can configure them any way you want to that best fits in with your site and your available ad space. Bids are wide open and start at 30 cents per day.

I’m serious …. 30 cents per day.

Check it out and grab one. The cheapest advertising you’ll find anywhere.

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I’m a bit disappointed in the services that are available to help bloggers sell their “real estate.” I’ll be honest .. I started this blog when I was a newbie at Internet Marketing and it’s early life was nothing more than a splog at best. Not really knowing what made a great blog or even the best way to push products, I went with the highly overused “review” blog. Throw a few banners up and talk about products and people would come in droves to buy them … right? Wrong. I’ve since deleted all of the original posts and started over some time ago. My goal now is to publish content that people actually want to read … and if they buy some products while they’re here or a paid review or ad space … so much the better.

So when I first began this blog, I ran across all those paid review sites and applied to them. I was promptly told that my blog did not meet their rigorous quality criteria. Well, now it does and I’ve been accepted into all of them. However, the problem I am now finding is that their advertisers don’t meet my rigorous quality criteria … with my main gripe being … they are cheapos. Read the rest of this entry »

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You probably know that I am testing out the benefits of Entrecard. I was at the Campaign screen a couple of nights ago and all of a sudden, on the right hand side, I noticed these blog ads being displayed. I wondered … now how do you get so lucky as to get a spot there? Underneath the ads is a little bidding link. I clicked it and it took me to Project Wonderful. It’s a great new service where you can not only place bids on ad spots, but you can also list your own ad spots to be bid on. I immediately bid on a spot for Entrecard. My next step is going to be to check out placing one of my own ad spots there to bid on. Highest bidder’s gets their ad displayed … simple as that. The bids you place are based on CPD (cost per day) rather than a PPC (pay per click) model. You can bid for as little as one day or as much as a year. Read the rest of this entry »

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