May 4th, 2006 by Jason Roe
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The search giant Microsoft has opened its doors for its msn advertising program adCenter. I signed up today to check out what all the talk was about and was pleasantly surprised. Some of the highlights for advertisers include Location specific adverts, specific day of the week and specific time of the day advertising.
The interface is really easy to use, however it only accessible via Internet Explorer. There is also a requirement for a €5 euro credit card verification fee to verify your credit card.
I found some of the tools quite interesting, the site allows you to Import or export ads via csv. This allows you to quickly update your campaigns. The Keyword research tools allow you to see Traffic Trends, Age and Gender, Wealth Index, Lifestyle, Geography. The only problems I can see about this feature is that it’s not location specific so you get a lot of US generic information.
As far as I can see the adverts themselves are only available on msn.com and not yet available on the localised search engines such as msn.ie. If you want to check adCenter out yourself surf over to http://adcenter.msn.com/
May 1st, 2006 by Jason Roe
It now seems that media bot is indexing content for the main Google index. Previously Google stated that this bot was designed to only pick up what ads where relevant to you website. The implications of this is that anyone that has been “optimising� content for adsense by removing non critical information will be affecting their main Google index.
The guys over at SeoRockstars gave a prime example where over 50,000 pages got dumped into the supplemental results. They also stated that this has been confirmed by a source within Google. On the plus side this also means Adsense publishers might have an advantage over normal website as new content might be picked up and indexed sooner.
Listen to the SeoRockstars podcast:
April 17th, 2006 by Jason Roe
Online advertising was something that in my mind hasn’t changed that much over the years, sure the technology has moved with the times but what has really changed? Well it seems that most companies in the area of online marketing have kept the fundamentals, publishers + advertiser = cash. It seems that every “new� technology in this area is a spin off of something that has come before it. I have to admit some of these new mediums have worked extremely well, a prefect example was the ever talked about million-dollar home page.
So with all these new fandangle mediums banging about how do you know what one is for you? After working on a re-development of an Irish site called Irish ISP Test I realised how powerful google adsense was for a publisher. Without going into specifics of the project, I realised quite quickly that google adsense advertisements could have paid for the entire re-development costs within less than one month. This could be down to the colossal amount of traffic received every month, or the fact that it was also a useful tool who knows?
The adsense experiences made me think in great depth about this whole advertising situation. From a publisher point of view the “adsense way� seems to be the ideal way to make money, however I feel that the advertiser are getting the raw end of the stick in some respects. Sure the advertisers are getting buckets of traffic that’s targeted, segmented, poked and prodded and then finally delivered but they are also missing out on other opportunities.
Lets go back to basics for a second to an old tradition called link swapping, this was a phenomenon that went on for years and still does to this date, blogs being a prime example of this. Not only does it advertise your site it also boosts your rankings and increases your PR, in some cases its not as targeted but never the less it works. So where am I going with this? I stumbled upon a service called TextLinkAds, I’m sure it’s not completely unique however it uses this kind of link swapping ideology.
TextLinkAds seems to be an interesting alternative to adsense, in some respects it resembles the “Advertise on this site� feature offered by adsense. What makes it different is the fact that TextLinkAds provides you with a full directory of publisher sites. This directory gives you relevant information that can help you choose where you would like to advertise. The advantage of this system is that you pay a flat fee per month (no pay per click) for each site you advertise on, for this fee you get a direct link on the website meaning that not only are you advertising you are also boosting your organic search engine rankings.
So to conclude there are many options for advertiser and publishers alike its best to shop around and get the best all round deal. Try new things explore new services and pick the ones that suit you. Id welcome peoples comments on online marketing and advertising services.
February 1st, 2006 by Jason Roe
I was recently asked to design a new logo for Search.ie as you may know this site is maintained by Michele Neylon. The previous logo was also designed by me however I always found it lacking something. The rework was a fairly simple one, a crisp clean logo that had the same theme as the old one.
This is what I came up with:
January 30th, 2006 by Jason Roe
As the popularity of mobile phones grows it seems that SMS marketing is going to be “the next big thing‿. As such a lot of the Irish mobile phone providers seem to be allowing the SME market to take full advantage of this marketing medium. Many smaller Irish companies have come onboard to be the middle man allowing themselves to be used as a “message gateway‿ of sorts.
This has allowed the operators to offer reduced rates for bulk messaging, some recent quotes for 100k + of messages range from €4000 to €7000. Best estimates being that an average text would cost as little as 4c. This opens up huge marketing opportunities for many SME’s.
