Allthingsdev.com » Advertising

5 Ways to Grow Your Email Subscriber List

Jeff Purcell — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 23:23:53 +0000

A properly managed Email newsletter can be an extremely powerful tool. With some companies reporting a return on investment of over $40 for every dollar spent on Email marketing, you can see why this is an increasingly popular means of direct marketing. The only catch is, you’ve got have subscribers to send an Email to first! Here’s a few quick tips to help increase the number of email subscibers.

Make It Visible

If visitors don’t notice the sign up form, you might as well forget it. Place it near your content such as at the end of a blog post or product description. Visitors that took the time to read the entire post are more likely to be interested in signing up then the visitor who is on your home page and noticed the form just hanging out in your sidebar.

Tell Them What They’ll Get

Honesty is the best policy here. If your going to be sending an Email with every new post, tell them. Maybe you’ll be recapping all your content for the day / week / month. Whatever it is your sending, make sure your visitor understands what will be in their inbox. Don’t be afraid to put a little spin on it to make it enticing!

Reassure Them This Isn’t a Scam

It is always a good idea to reassure your visitors that their personal info is safe. Tell them up front that you won’t be sharing their info with 3rd parties. If that is your intent, tell them or consider creating a second newsletter specifically for this purpose.

Consider a Free Gift for Signing Up

It is no secret that people love free stuff. A relevant gift to what your website provides or some form of discount on your product or service is a great way to increase your newsletter subscriber count. Just don’t be surprised if they only sign up long enough to receive the gift.

Spread the Word

I think this step is often overlooked. Don’t be afraid to send an email to friends and colleagues notifying them of your newsletter and ask them to forward the message along to others they think might be interested in signing up. Whatever you do, don’t assume your friends want your newsletter and add them to the list without their permission!

Domain Parking Update

Jeff Purcell — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:42:32 +0000

A while ago, I wrote a quick blurb about my decision to park some of my domains I’ve been sitting on. I figured I’d do a quick recap and look at the money made over the past six weeks.

I’ve parked six domains:

In the month of October, all 6 domains combined for 479 views and resulted in 12 total ad clicks for a whopping (drum roll please) $1.42 in revenue. Yep, drinks are on me. November’s stats are even smaller, and therefore not worth mentioning.

I’m averaging a 2% click through rate, which is above average from my experience. Granted the entire page is an advertisement.

All in all, domain parking may be a shady business, but for those of us who have legitimate intentions to one day use these domains, it is a viable means to lower the cost of domain registration prices.

Read my previous post about domain parking.

Book Review: Mobile Web Design

Jeff Purcell — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:02:43 +0000

You’ve probably seen many reviews on Cameron Moll’s book Mobile Web Design around recently. I thought I’d add my own.

I purchased Cameron’s book on Wednesday and have been thumbing through it off and on. I find it extremely enlightening. Not only is the book well written, he provides links to some very informative pages about mobile standards and good mobile design practices. I’ve added quite a few new feeds to my reader after reading this book.

The book is 104 pages long, comes in pdf format and will set you back 19 dollars. This book is well worth the small fee. Cameron has posted a sample of the book(pdf). I suggest taking a gander, you won’t be disappointed.

FYI: If you purchase a copy of the book by September 14th, you’ll be entered into a drawing for an iPhone.

Domain Parking

Jeff Purcell — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 01:48:39 +0000

I own a ton of domains. I’m not sure how many, but I know it is a lot. I purchased the majority of them for projects that I never got around to doing. So many of my domains sit idly in my godaddy account collecing dust. Or collecting money for godaddy because their parking page is still on them. If you are unclear as to what domain parking is, there is a great Wikipedia article that will explain everything.

I was bored today and thought I’d look into this whole parking thing and see if I couldn’t at least recoup the yearly registration costs of these domains.

After a quick search, I settled on sedo.com. Don’t ask me why, they just looked trustworthy, and godaddy charged a monthly fee. Sedo offers the service for free, but takes 20% of your earnings. No big deal, I highly doubt I’ll make anything off this anyway. 20% of nothing is, well … nothing.

I’ll keep you posted, both of you. When the millions start rolling in, we’ll go to Vegas! My treat.

Here are the domains:

Tags: domains, sedo, godaddy, domain parking, squatting

Flash on Top of Flash

Jeff Purcell — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 04:02:52 +0000

At work we just implemented a ‘Corner Peel’ Flash Advertisement. You can view an example over at the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. I had a problem when putting this ‘Corner Peel’ flash ad onto the home page, you see we run a handful of advertisements of various sizes throughout our website. One of those being a leaderboard ad (728 x 90 px). When the corner peel is ‘peeled back’ it lays on top of the leaderboard.

When I saw this for the first time, the leaderboard advertisement was a flash ad and was laying on top of the corner peel ad and thus looked very funny. This little problem caused me quite the headache today. I thought I’d show you the little trick that saved me an even bigger headache.

There is a little know attribute for the object and embed tags called ‘wmode’. If you set ‘wmode’ to ‘transparent’ in both the embed tag and the as a parameter inside the object tag. It allows for transparent flash animations and also fixed my little overlay problem.

If transparency isn’t an option (i.e. you don’t want the html behind the flash file to show through), you can also set wmode to opaque. This should fix your flash on top of flash problem while still preserving you flash file’s background.

Inside the object tag:

Inside the embed tag

wmode="opaque"
or
wmode="transparent"

Now, I’m not sure if this little guy is a valid attribute or not, but I do know that it saved my ass today and I’ll risk not validating for that.

Tags: flash, adobe, wmode, transparent, leaderboard, corner peel, advertisement

Page Views or Ad Views

Jeff Purcell — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 02:42:40 +0000

What is more important, page views or ad views? You may be saying to yourself, “shouldn’t they be the same?”. Well, yes and no, Johnny. You see, you can have multipile ads on a page, therefore creating more ad views than page views. Here lies the conundrum…Is page views or ad views a better metric of your sites popularity and overall worth?

Page views, in my opinion, are a way to measure the usefulness of your site. Being that, the more page views, the more useful and sought after your site, and your site’s content is. Of course more page views means more ad views. But on the same note, more ad locations means more ad views per page view and therefore more chances for revenue.

I think it boils down to page views, although slightly smaller in size, are what makes your site meaningful not ad views. Ad views just help to support more page views? You lost yet? Me too.

I’m Part of the Cool Crowd Now

Jeff Purcell — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 00:54:36 +0000

Finally! After submitting this site to Text Link Ads almost 6 months ago, I have finally been accepted into their publisher program. If you would like to advertise on this site, you can do so here or by clicking the link in the upper right hand corner.

If you are unclear as to what Text Link Ads does, you can read their About Us page.

Tags: advertising, text link ads, affiliate programs

Split Testing Google Adwords

Jeff Purcell — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 06:03:53 +0000

I just stumbled across a method of testing your Google Adwords ads that I’d never thought of. It’s called split testing and its a simple, yet powerful method to test your ads.

The idea is to create two ads that utilize the same keyword. Each ad has its own unique title and description. Place the ads with the same bid price. Google will alternate the ads accordingly for you. Run each campaign for 24 hours. The ad with the higher CTR is the better ad. Now repeat that whole process with a new ad and the winning ad from the previous split test.

Keep competing with yourself to create better and better ads. This little activity will help your click through rate grow while also letting you lower your bid price.

When doing a split test, you need to make sure that you select only the search network and NOT the content network because the content network, Adsense, will skew your results slightly. If you are targeting Adsense specifically, create a separate split test.

Tags: google, adsense, adwords, advertising, split test, ctr

Choosing a Good Domain Name

Jeff Purcell — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 02:32:17 +0000

I own quite a few domain names, as many web entrepreneurs do. When choosing a domain name, one must take extra care to look at the domain name in question from another’s point of view. I ran across a list of the 10 unintentionally worst domains while browsing digg. You’ll laugh yourself sick. Needless to say, I’ve used a few of these site on multiple occasions and never thought twice about the domain name.

10 unintentionally worst domains from digg

Affiliate Programs are Cool

Jeff Purcell — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 21:26:07 +0000

Being a ~~wannabe~~ web entrepreneur, I’m always on the look out for new ways to monetize my websites. One of the most popular ways to monetize websites these days is by using Google Adsense, Google’s PPC text ad program (see far right column). To be honest though, I’m not a big fan of the program. It seems to me that it is far too easy to fraudulently click on ads to make money. Plus it doesn’t seem like a great deal for advertisers as they are paying just for traffic to their site and not for legitimate sales opportunities. So I’ve been testing other affiliate programs lately.

The first affiliate program I tried, after Adsense was Text-Link-Ads.com. Text-Link-Ads.com is just that, text-based link advertisements. I think Text-Link-Ads.com has a much more developed idea then Google Adsense for three main reasons. The first is that advertisers hand select which website they want their ads displayed on. This gives advertisers more control over their target demographic, which is what advertising is all about. Secondly, the ad software you install on your website generates legitimate HTML links. This is probably my favorite feature of Text-Link-Ads. Not only are you advertising on your demographic’s key websites, but you are also boosting your website’s page ranking by purchasing a link to your website from a website with related information. The third and final reason why Text-Link-Ads.com is superior to Google Adsense is advertiser’s don’t pay per click. As I stated above, a major downside to Google Adsense is the opportunity for fraudulent clicks. Text-link-ads has found an excellent alternative to this. When you set out to purchase ad space, you pay for an entire month. So regardless of how many clicks you receive, you pay one flat rate. I believe the monthly rate is determined by the Text-Link-Ads system and not by the publishers, but I can’t confirm that due to laziness.

All in all, I feel Text-Link-Ads.com has an exceptional product and offers a much more lucrative alternative to PPC advertising.

There is another form of advertising gaining popularity as of late. It’s called CPL or CPA. This, to me, seems to be the most effecient way to advertise at least from an advertiser’s stand point. The way Cost Per Lead advertising works is, ad publishers receive a percentage of every sale made that originates from their website. Advertisers dish out a portion of their sale to the referring publisher. Obviously CPL is going to yield much lower in conversion than PPC, but the payout is going to be larger than any PPC campaign.

I recently created an account with Commission Junction, a very robust CPL advertising company. The great thing about Commission Junction is that the publisher can search through their rather large list of advertisements to determine what would work best on your website. The amount of information about each ad listing is amazing. Commission Junction tells you upfront the average amount made per one hundred clicks and per one thousand ad impressions. It really is a great service.

With so many possibilities of fraud with PPC advertising, I feel it won’t be long before such services will be shut down. With such a large potential for income with CPL services, I expect to see a large movement to drop PPC and move to CPL.

Tags: CPL, CPA, PPC, Adsense, Text-Link-Ads, Commission Junction, affiliate programs, advertising