On the one hand, this means we a have greater ability to get our messages (and links) in front of people but on the other hand, it means our messages and links are quickly lost in the stream and are just as quickly and easily forgotten.

It’s always been important to stand out if you want to have your message heard, but it’s even more vital now than ever before. So what can we do in this “new age” of social media to stand out from the crowd?

I think we need to combine a bit of our new online tech with a bit of old offline marketing to make an impression. Let me tell you a little story to illustrate.

The last conference I attended was large and tech-oriented. The vendor showroom was huge and packed with both vendors and attendees. Of course, as is always the case, each vendor had some sort of promotional product that they were giving away for free – hoping to make a lasting impression. Promo products have been used for years as a way to stand out from the crowd, and keep a company and its products within a prospect’s memory far into the future. I imagine the promotional products business will be secure for a long, long time, as this kind of item will always be a popular way of keeping a brand in front of customers long after the customer disappear’s from the brand’s office or venue booth.

Anyway, back to my story. There I was, in a swarm of people, wondering which booth I should check out next. As I walked by one vendor’s booth, I saw these little shrinkwrapped “things” shaped like tiny computers, all lined up on the booth’s countertop. Curiosity got me. I touched one of the little things (which was about the size of my hand). It felt soft and squishy inside, but I still didn’t know what it was. Even though the booth rep was speaking with someone else, my curiosity was peaked enough to keep me waiting until I could get the rep’s attention.

That ability to hold my attention for a few minutes while a stream of activity was all around me is equivalent to being able to hold someone’s attention online today.

Eventually, the rep focused on me and I was able to ask what the little doodads were. He told me they were t-shirts. I was flabbergasted. How could a shirt fit inside that little squishy computer-shaped shrink-wrapped package? Well, the fact is they do, once all the air is squished out, and when he told me I could have one for free, I was ecstatic.

Now don’t go making fun of me for getting excited about such a goofy thing. Swag is loved by conference attendees everywhere, and the better the swag, the happier the attendee. In my mind, a t-shirt is the best swag ever, and to get one bundled in a little compressed, shaped format is just extra-special. Yeah, I know how silly that sounds, but hey, it’s not just me. Those little t-shirt gizmos were the hit of that conference, and I’ll never forget that particular company booth.

Want to have your website stand out in the crowd? Use the same technique to make a lasting impression as the online stream washes over your network. Use an old form of marketing such as free promo products, shrink-wrap it into a cool memorable shape, and then give them to key people within your online network.

If you are about to launch a new site, or want to hype your site’s latest feature, the first thing you’re going to do is let your network know about it. You’ll tweet it. You’ll set up a Facebook page for it. You’ll do all the smart social media things you’ve been advised to do. But I think you should take the extra step of giving out some promo items to the people whose attention matters the most. Those people may not actually be the A-list bloggers in your network. A-listers get inundated with swag all the time, so you sending them a cool tee probably won’t impress them much. But if you send those same tees to the B-list bloggers in your network, you’ll be remembered. And talked about. And linked to. (Probably).

Ok, so where do you get such things? One company that makes these little shrink-wrapped items is TeeCompressed.com. You can get a sample compressed t-shirt sent to you if you want to see one for yourself before investing in this kind of promotion. In the meantime, I’ve taken some photos of the sample I got from them, so you can at least get an idea of what they are like.

As you can see, this sample tee is compressed into the shape of a guitar (which is one of many different stock shapes you can choose from). It’s a 100% cotton shirt, screen printed with your logo/design, and then shrink-wrapped with a paper insert on top and bottom (again with your design).

That’s what the tee looks like once it’s decompressed. It’s more wrinkled than a shar-pei puppy, but that’s ok. Just wash the shirt, and the wrinkles all come out.

Now obviously, as with any promo product order, there’s a minimum number you have to purchase (144 in this case). So, unless you’ve got a big budget, you aren’t going to be using this method to stand out on a regular basis. You’ll want to reserve this kind of promotion for those times when it’s really, really important to make a big splash in the social media stream. But when it matters most, the last thing you want to do is get lost in the social stream.

That’s when it’s time to go back to some old-school marketing. Compressed tees just might be what will make your site stand out in the flowing stream.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: promotional product, social media
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Luckily for us, online advertising is generally a lot more affordable than offline advertising is. Still, it pays to be as frugal as we possibly can, so I wanted to give a few thoughts on making the most of our advertising budgets (no matter how meager they may be).

Of course, text ads are one of the first things that come to mind when discussing online advertising, and I’m not going to throw you any surprises here. Just as you would expect, I would recommend starting out with a Google Adwords account, and testing the waters with a small budget. I do recommend that you read as much as you can about the process however, so that you don’t accidentally shoot yourself in the foot and overspend (sometimes significantly) without even realizing it.

Next, spend some time creating some banner ads (or having them created if you aren’t graphically inclined). I recommend creating a minimum of 4 ad sizes, but 9 sizes is ideal. You can see all the standard IAB recommend ad unit sizes here, but my recommendations are as follows:

Four Sizes To Always Have Available

• 125×125
• 468×60
• 160×600
• 728×90

Five Additional Ad Sizes If Possible

• 120×240
• 120×600
• 300×250
• 180×250
• 336×250

Sites will very likely have ad spots available in one of the above sizes, so if you have ads already created and ready to go for any of those sizes, it will be easy to get your ad up and running quickly.

The next thing I would consider is having 2 or 3 variations of ads in each of those sizes. This will allow you to test each ad so that you know which works better. I recommend reading an interview that the Wildfire Marketing Group did, in which they explain when and how often to run the same ads versus testing different ads.

Once you have all of your ad banners created, your next task is finding available spots to place them. My favorite place to advertise is on blogs. Many blogs are set up to run 125×125 ad blocks, so if you have that size handy, it will be easy to arrange. You can either approach bloggers directly via email or Twitter, and arrange for an ad spot, or you can go through one of the many networks (such as buysellads.com) to find them. Most blogs will display ads for a month term at a fixed price (which is usually fairly low).

Finally, run your ads, run your tests, and track the results. Once you have some initial stats to look at, you can plan for the long term.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: advertising budgets, Google, offline advertising, online advertising, Twitter, WildFire Marketing Group
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

For an ad marketplace to be most effective, it needs to be large on both sides. If a marketplace has lots of publishers wanting to sell ads, but very few advertisers looking to buy ads, many publishers ad spots will go unsold. On the other hand, if a large group of advertisers only have a few ad spots to choose from because the publisher base is low, the advertisers will drift away to find another marketplace and the whole system breaks down.

I’ve tried many ad networks, and have been satisfied by relativey few of them. In some cases, an ad network requires publishers meet a set of stringent requirements, such as a volume of traffic that most publishers can never meet. In other cases, despite the network’s potential benefits and ease of use, the population of either advertisers or publishers was just too small to make it profitable for everyone.

I’ve been waiting for that perfect marketplace to come along – one that is open to everyone, without traffic restrictions, and has the volume of both publishers and advertisers to make the system vibrant for everyone. It’s possible that one has finally come along.

I’m tentatively excited that OpenX has created a marketplace. I won’t know for sure if it’s *the one* until I’ve tested it for a while, but the mere fact that it has a large base of users already could be the tipping point that is needed.

So what is OpenX? OpenX used to be called OpenAds and it’s been around quite a while. It is an ad management system that allows you to easily manage your ad inventory, delivering the right ads at the right time, and letting you measure the performance of the ads.

OpenX Ad Server lets you organize and manage all of your ad inventory under one easy to use interface no matter how many websites you have. It works with all kinds of ad formats, ranging from simple banners to rich media. And it’s designed to deliver your ads as fast as possible, regardless of the number of ads on each page.

You can either run OpenX Server on your own server as a free installed application, or you can choose a hosted package that lets you serve ads using OpenX’s hardware and back-end infrastructure. The hosted version is free for sites that have up to 100 million ad impressions per month, so that covers most of the readers who are likely to read this post.

The fact that OpenX is widely used makes it a natural fit for having a marketplace tied into the system. Now that OpenX has finally released its OpenX Market, we might finally have the perfect system.

OpenX Market is designed to help publishers maximize revenue and to help advertisers much more easily reach their target audiences across large numbers of publishers. Publishers can easily route any or all of their ad impressions into the OpenX Market through tools now completely integrated into OpenX Ad Server. Publishers define a minimum “floor” price for their ad impressions. OpenX Market then runs a real-time auction for each impression. If the winning bid from the auction is higher than the publisher-set minimum price, the higher paying ad is served and the publisher makes more money. If the winning bid is less, the publisher’s original ad runs. The entire approach is designed to maximize publisher revenue with zero risk. Advertisers benefit by having a simple way to buy across the potentially enormous pool of primary inventory available from OpenX’s publisher base.

“Historically, the online advertising market has been fractured, opaque, hard to participate in and therefore inefficient. In particular, mid-sized and smaller publishers lack the ability to reach a broad set of advertisers. Conversely, advertisers see lots of value in niche sites and audiences, but find it very hard to discover and buy those sites and audiences.” said Tim Cadogan, chief executive officer, OpenX. “The OpenX Market is all about making these connections simple, seamless and scalable. We have listened extensively to our very large global community of publishers and have developed the Market specifically to overcome these inefficiencies by providing all classes of publishers and ad buyers with a unique monetization platform that we believe will create enormous value for both.”

I’ll be testing OpenX Market over the next few months, and I’ll be sure to let everyone know what I think after using it for a while. Hey, folks, it’s free for publishers to participate, so I recommend everyone consider trying it out and then letting us all know what you think. This may prove to be the perfect way to sell ads on our sites. We’ll see.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ad network, ad networks, back-end infrastructure, chief executive officer, online advertising market, online advertising marketplace, OpenX, Tim Cadogan
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

So, I’ve created the free Ad Rate Calculator for everyone to use. It doesn’t matter whether you are selling ad spots on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. The time period doesn’t make a difference. You just need to determine the average amount of ad impressions the ad will receive during whatever time period you’re charging for. If you have the ad in your blog’s sidebar, that probably means it will appear on every page and post, so you just need to know the number of page views you average for each time period. Use your stats program (like Google Analytics or Clicky) to determine this information.

That’s the only piece of information you have to supply. The tool uses a default CPM rate*, but you can certainly change it to whatever you think is appropriate. If you are selling 300×250 ads instead of 125×125 ads for instance, you can charge roughly 4 times the rate because it is roughly 4 times the size, so adjust the CPM rate however you wish.

This calculator is only a tool. There is no standard rate out there. You can charge whatever the market will bear. However, for many of us, we don’t have an inkling of where to even begin. I designed this calculator as an easy starting point for you. I hope you like it. If you do, be sure to let others know about it as well. You can link to it, use it on your own site by using the popup code provided at the bottom of the calculator, or just let others know about it via Twitter, etc. Hopefully, by spreading the word, we can make everyone’s ad rate decisions a little easier.

Try the Ad Rate Calculator now.

*Definition of CPM rate here.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | 14 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Google, Twitter
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

Obviously, getting a good return on your advertising investment is something everyone wants to achieve. Once in a blue moon, however, I don’t even think about the ROI. Sometimes, an advertising opportunity is good no matter how well it ends up paying off. How is that possible?

When you purchase advertising, and all of the money is donated to charity, that’s a good return on your investment already. Never underestimate the power of good will. Donating to worthy charities is good ROI all on its own, and if you get the added bonus of attracting users to your web site, that’s great!

In case you were unaware, I am a staff columnist for Personal Branding Magazine. All proceeds of the magazine are donated to the American Cancer Society. That’s 100% of the proceeds, including all of the advertising revenue. The magazine still has some ad spots available for its next issue which is being published on November 1, 2007, and the prices are incredibly reasonable. You can contact Adam Salamon at aasalamon@gmail.com to arrange for your own ad spot.

If you are interested in getting a great ad spot for a good price, and donating to charity as well, please consider an ad in Personal Branding Magazine. Sure, that sounds like a sales pitch, but it’s actually just good advice.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Adam, Adam Salamon, advertise, advertising revenue, American Cancer Society, charity, Personal Branding Magazine, staff columnist
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.