Online Advertising Blog – BuySellAds.com

BSA Reviews & Interviews

Comments (0) Friday, February 5 by Anca Rusu

Interview with Todd

In the interview for Freelance Review, Todd sheds a little light on how a publisher can find success on BSA. And yes, it’s something to do with quality. Publisher or not, for more advice, you can read the whole interview here. The “freelance design and business” online magazine started using BSA recently and they admit being “very happy with the results so far”. What can we say, we aim to please!

The Definitive Review

Zavose (Design. Inspire. Extend) examines the rise of the advertising networks, and takes BSA as a reliable example. It starts with the abc of BSA and then talks about the advantages (the whole process is as easy as breathing… a fully-fledged analytics program and support services a click away… you know, the usual) and the drawbacks (hmm, let me quote: “Too good to be true? You know the saying, and yup… it is. Well, sort of…”). There is also a verdict for both publishers and advertisers. And lots of arguments. Check them out here.

A Good Way To Spend on Advertising

On Daw Web Hosting Blog there’s another review about BuySellAds – A Good Way To Spend on Advertising. Got the message! There are also two sections: advantages and disadvantages. Well, the “main disadvantage” turns into an advantage by the end of the text. The commission it really is just 25%, not 50. J Thanks for clearing that out! Go here for the review.

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Types of Sites that Sell Ads Best on BuySellAds.com

Comments (4) Wednesday, February 3 by Jean-Baptiste Jung

Since I’ve started blogging here on the BSA blog, many people asked me what types of websites in our directory do well selling ads. In this article, I’m going to show you what websites and blogs works the best with BuySellAds.com and how you can improve your own site to succeed selling ads.

Put content first

Lots of websites are created with the same goal in mind: making money. While there’s nothing wrong in making money online, a site that has nothing to offer but advertisement presents no value for the end user. On the other hand, the biggest money making sites are always those who attract a quality traffic with a great and unique content.

If you’re a blogger, I guess you read very often that content is king. It is true, having quality content is a huge factor in having success with selling ads.

Blog or “classic” websites?

Many people have asked if BSA is a network for blogs only. The answer is no. As an example, the popular design social bookmarking sites DesignBump and DesignFloat are BSA members.

As blogs are a very important phenomenon of the so called “web 2.0″, it is quite normal that 70—80% of BSA members are blogs. However, that doesn’t mean that more classic websites can’t succeed.

Profitable niches

If you want to sell ads, you have to have a quality blog with nice content, as we mentioned. The next challenge is finding advertisers that have interest in the people viewing your content.
The good news is almost every niche can be monetized if you do it well. For example, let’s say you’re running a blog about wildlife and nature. Your visitors will probably love to walk in the country, so walking equipment as such as shoes or jackets can interest them. Lots of other ideas can be developed: A visitors that loves nature will probably be happy to use anything that relies on green energy, such as a Green web host.

Traffic

An old quote says that with traffic, you can get everything. In my opinion, this is quite true, especially in terms of website monetization. Advertisers are seeking visibility and if you have traffic on your site they’ll get the visibility they want for their ads. Sadly, there’s no secret technique to build traffic. You just have to be passionate, patient, and work a lot.

On the other hand, it can be surprising to see how many small traffic websites can make more money than bigger sites. You can get everything with traffic, but traffic is not compulsory to make money on the internet.

What makes a “Quality” site?

Defining what a “quality” site is not an easy task, because what quality means for me is not necessary the same for you. However, in my opinion, a quality site has the following:

Great content: This is obvious, but sadly not all sites have it.
Good design: Just like the packaging of a product matters, a great design makes a website looks professional.
Frequent updates: A good site is not a site that you visit once, it is a site you’d like to come back after a few days.
Professional way to handle ads: There’s nothing wrong with making money with your website, but seriously, ads likes popups or in-text advertising are nothing but annoying for your readers.

What about your personal experience? What do you think? Don’t hesitate to let us know in a comments!

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New Features: rebuilt ad server, smush.it integration

Comments (1) Monday, February 1 by Todd Garland

In case you missed our last three posts, we have started 2010 with a bang: a new homepage, the addition of A/B testing, and last weeks text + description ads, private zones, improved ad code styling, and some design tweaks. This week (so far, there is more to come this week) we have started out strong with two major improvements: we rebuilt the ad server and integrated Smush.it for image optimization. Here is some more info about each:

Rebuilt Ad Server

Rebuilding the ad server probably sounds boring, but this is actually pretty exciting and offers significant improvement for our user experience. One of my pet-peeves is that the response time for some normal activities within the BuySellAds.com app is really slow: approving new ads, buying new ads (it took a while to process), editing site details, editing zone details, and editing ads. Well, not anymore, it’s super-fast now. I won’t get into the specifics, but if you are a BSA user who performs any of those actions you will notice significant improvement in the app’s response time. Any time we can make something faster is a win-win for user experience.

Smush.it Integration

If you are not familiar with Smush.it, what it does is shave off unnecessary bytes of image files that don’t effect the image quality. You can learn more about Smush.it directly on their site. When it comes to performance of our ads “out in the wild” on publisher websites, optimizing images is a easy way to shave off the milliseconds and improve performance. After running some tests on the ads uploaded by advertisers, we found that we could save roughly 10-20% depending on the size of the ad and the advertiser (for some ads/advertisers, we could save over 50%!). So, for any new ads loaded into BSA, we will be running these through Smush.it. For all existing ads, we will be processing them through Smush.it gradually over the next few weeks. This will lead to faster load times and improved performance on publisher websites. Again, a win-win for both advertisers and publishers.

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New Features: text + description ads, private zones, improved ad code styling, and some design tweaks

Comments (11) Wednesday, January 27 by Todd Garland

Last week, we introduced a new feature, A/B testing. This week, we are introducing a few more new features detailed below, and have also made some small tweaks to our website’s design. One of the new features, Text + Description Ads, is especially exciting for us – it is the first time we have introduced an ad type other than the standard display (image) ads. As a company, one of our core goals is to help website owners (publishers) sell ads better. Providing publishers with the tools to sell multiple ad types is key to achieving this goal. Today’s release of the text + description ad type is milestone for us, it is a new tool for publishers to add to their monetization arsenal, and a new way for advertisers to diversify their ad campaigns. In addition, we will be adding other new ad types during this first quarter of 2010, so be sure to subscribe to this blog to keep up with what is going on at BSA.

Text + Description Ads

This ad type will be new for most advertisers and publishers. Having too many display ads on a website can make the site feel cheap, cluttered, and take away from the overall user experience. With text + description ads, advertisers have a new way of integrating their message into publisher websites, and publishers have a new way to monetize otherwise cluttered or unused space. The text + description ads will be sold at the normal fixed 30-day rate (the same way we sell display ads) and they will be served via JavaScript (i.e. we’re not selling these for SEO value). We encourage all publishers to add a text + description zone and spend some time customizing the look and feel of the ad so that it fits in with their website. To ensure that visitors to your site know that this is an ad, we have placed a small “Ads by BSA” piece of text below the ad unit. This text will link directly to your BuySellAds.com site detail page.

The look and feel of the text unit is up to you. Here is an example of what a single text ad can look like:

Private Zones

We often run into situations where we are creating a specific ad zone for an advertiser. Since we (or the publisher) are creating this zone for someone specific, we don’t want anyone else coming in and buying the zone. You would be surprised how quickly new ad zones are sold on our popular sites. So, we have added the ability to make a zone “private”. When you make a zone private, all you are doing is specifying a special passphrase that is appended to the URL that will show the private zone to anyone who has this special passphrase. It will not be shown on your site detail listing unless the passphrase is provided.

You can set a zone as private by adding a passphrase for the zone on the Add / Edit Zone page:

Improved Ad Code Styling

We have added “even” or “odd” and “ad1″, “ad2″, etc. classes to the ads displayed by our ad code. This will give publishers additional control over the styling of the ads on their website.

Here’s what the new classes look like in the ad code:

Design Tweaks

The launch of the new homepage a couple weeks ago set the foundation for more continuous improvements to our user interface. Included in this release was a slight redesign of the top nav (it’s a bit larger and more defined now) and the removal of images from our new button style (only seen on the homepage now) as well as the gradient in the header area of the website. We tip our hat’s to Google & StopDesign for their inspiring post on recreating the button element. Any time we can remove a few http requests is a win-win in our minds.

Check out the new, “crisper” looking navigation and button below. We have removed the background images from both and saved a few http requests:

As Always…

Thank you for your continued support of BSA. If you have feedback on the features above, or ideas for new features, please post below or email me personally: todd@buysellads.com

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New Feature: A/B Testing

Comments (8) Monday, January 18 by Todd Garland

We have released a new version of the BSA app this morning. Included in this release is an important new feature, A/B Testing. The addition of this feature will allow advertisers to get more value from their placements and help publishers increase retention rates, it’s a win-win. Advertisers now have an easy way to optimize placements and test out new creative’s and offerings. Publishers can now provide advertisers additional incentive to advertise on their site through BuySellAds.com – a feature most direct ad systems like BuySellAds.com do not have.

Advertisers – here’s how you can get started with A/B testing:

1. Go to the Advertiser Dashboard, select a placement you would like to upload alternate creative’s for:

step1

2. Under the graph, you will see all of the creative units you have for the placement (you should only see 1 there if you have not yet added an alternate creative). Click on the “Add New” button:
step2

3. All you need to do now is add the alternate creative, save it, and you are all set. The ads will still go through the normal ad approval process and will go live once approved. Once you have had an alternate creative running you will see the stats for each on the ad detail page. You can add as many alternate creative’s as necessary.

4. Once you have had a chance to track performance of the alternate creative, you can pause and/or unpause the ads at any time:

step3

The current release of A/B testing rotates the ads you have running for each placement evenly. We will add an auto-optimize feature in the next release.

We hope you enjoy, if you have questions or feedback about this new feature we encourage you to leave a comment below or contact us directly at info@buysellads.com.