We are excited to announce that adgridwork is now easier to use for WordPress users. Martin Fitzpatrick, the author of the AdSense Manager plugin for WordPress, has added support for adgridwork is the latest version (3.1.x) of the plugin. We are thrilled Martin thought to include us in his work, and we hope this makes life easier for WordPress bloggers who are interested in advertising with adgridwork. This is just another sign that adgridwork is slowly approaching its goal of total advertising domination… Ok not quite, but it is a sign we’re slightly more popular

Just to be explicit, Martin took complete initiative on our inclusion in the plugin; he did absolutely all of the work involved, so he deserves all the credit for this one. Again, we thank him for including us. If you like the plugin, check out what else Martin is working on. If you have any questions specific to the plugin, they are probably better directed to Martin, but as always feel free to send us any questions you may have regarding adgridwork.

The adgridwork team

2008 Gameplan - Promote those Websites!

First off, I want to apologize (yet again) for the lack of updates. Both Kyle and myself have been extrememly busy with our offline lives and haven’t had a chance to make any significant blog posts. We have, however, been working to increase the quality of our Free Advertising Network:

1. By performing manual reviews of new sites to ensure proper contextual targeting and compliance with our TOS.
2. Taking better steps to weed out adult and NSFW content and placing it in its own network.
3. Constantly tweaking our ad-serving algorithm to ensure that sites contributing more to the network (in terms of clicks, impressions and referrals) are getting the most traffic and benefit from our service.

Some of you may have noticed that we have slowly begun rolling out a few complimentary products to help you further increase your traffic, marketing campaigns and site promotions. These products are all outlined below:

The AdGridwork Free Web Directory

We launched our Free Web Directory back in December 2007 as a way to allow webmasters and site owners to easily get a backlink from AdGridwork. Since launching, over 500 sites have taken advantage of this opportunity and submitted their links into the Free Directory. We include a Free Advertising link back to AdGridwork with our Ad Code, so we hope to return the favor with this directory

The AdGridwork Free Advertising Newsletter

Many of you have gotten the recent opt-in email that we sent out regarding the new Free Advertising and Marketing Newsletter that we are starting. This newsletter will contain exclusive info, promotions and tips for AdGridwork member’s that will allow you to take your Advertising and Marketing efforts to the next level. The newsletter format is great for breaking news and information as it will allow us to instantly communicate and share ideas with the community. As of today, we have already sent out a handful of mailings and have seen a very positive reaction from our members. If you want to check out the newsletter and take advantage of this information, simply use the subscription form at the top right of this blog. And as always, we will never sell or spam your personal information.

The AdGridwork Free Advertising Blog

Last but not least, we plan on completely revamping this blog. Our plan is to become THE Free Advertising Portal and Resource on the web. Aside from the new redesign (Nick would love to hear your thoughts on the look), we plan on offering the following:

• Weekly reviews of top AdGridwork users. This section will highlight sites that have been performing especially well on the AdGridwork network and help say ‘Thanks’ for the traffic that they have generated for others.
• Free advertising ideas / Marketing tactics / Tools. There are hundreds of ways to get free traffic and visitors to your site (on of the very best being the AdGridwork Free Advertising Network). We want to create a community of users interested in collaborating and sharing ideas. This will include reviewing new web services, traffic generation techniques and out of the box marketing tips. We also plan on sharing some of the ideas that have worked for us when developing AdGridwork so that you can apply them to your own business.
• Guest Posts & Interviews. As mentioned earlier, both Kyle and myself get caught up tweaking what goes on behind the scenes at AdGridwork. Thus we want to open our blog up to our readers and fellow marketers. Have an exciting service launching that will help our members drive traffic? Know of a good method to leverage social networks to increase blog readership? Share it on our blog! As of today, over 400 people have subscribed to our RSS Feed so your product, content and links (which you’ll be able to include in every guest post) will be read and seen by a large number of fellow bloggers and marketers. If you are interested in writing a guest post, feel free to Contact Us Here.

So there you have it … AdGridwork’s 2008 Gameplan … a month and a half late. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on these ideas and look forward to creating the predominant Free Advertising Network and Resource center on the web

Nick Mazza & Kyle Johnson
AdGridwork.com

First off, Kyle and I want to wish all our members a Happy and Safe Holidays. We have seen a tremendous growth of our service this past year and are looking forward to helping thousands of webmasters and bloggers continue to freely and easily promote their content and services in 2008. We plan on continuing to being the premiere Free Advertising Network on the web.

Also, with all of the hustle and bustle of the holidays, we didn’t notice that the AdGridwork.com domain was down for the past 2 days. The reason for this was that we initiated a domain transfer to a new registrar and apparently the updates to the new DNS servers didn’t propagate as smoothly as we would have liked. But as you can see we are back up and running: New servers and new name servers for 2008. It’s also important to note that our Ad Server (mediagridwork.com) did not go down yesterday as it is hosted independently of the AdGridwork front end. Therefore all of your impressions, clicks and conversions were correctly recorded and your ads were served as usual

Anyways, thanks again to everyone who has participated in our great service over the past year and we hope to continue to grow and thrive into the new year.

Nick & Kyle
AdGridwork.com

Hey everyone, sorry for the delay in posting, but hopefully people have noticed that adgridwork is functioning smoothly as before. We finishing switching our web host on Friday, and so far we’ve been with the performance. Hopefully this change will make the server problems a thing of the past. Please email us if there are any outstanding site performance issues. Otherwise we will focus on working on new features instead of worrying about servers

As many of you have probably noticed, adgridwork has been experiencing some major technical difficulties recently. Our current web host has been failing repeatedly, so we have decided to switch hosts. We have purchased new hosting and are in the process of migrating the adgridwork website to its new home. Also, it is ONLY the adgridwork website which is effected by these failures. Our ads are hosted separately and have not been effected. We will post again as soon as we complete the transition. We would like to apologize to our users for this inconvenience, we hope to have this resolved within a couple of days.

We are happy to introduce the latest new feature to the adgridwork service, campaign languages. Now, when you submit your site to the adgridwork network, you can select the language of your site. This way, you can further target your campaign. Your ad will be shown on other sites of your language, and the ads shown on your site will be mostly other sites of your language. Initially, we are testing this new feature for just English and Spanish; we will expand to other languages as demand and quantity dictate.

As with all our new features, we do our best to test that everything is working smoothly, but there could always be small issues here and there. If you notice anything that doesn’t seem right, have any questions, or you just have some feedback on the language feature, please contact us.

The adgridwork team

Today Nick and I got a wonderful opportunity to talk about adgridwork live on the radio! The guys from Uniqueness is Power were kind enough to invite us on for a segment to discuss both adgridwork and reviewback. Uniqueness is Power, an Atlanta based weekly radio program hosted by Andy Greider and Lee Kantor, is, in their words, a “marketing, business growth solutions show, centered around the idea that businesses can thrive and expand if they are given fresh ideas of how to market themselves, and shown ways to save bottom line cash each month.” Each week they discuss ways small- and medium-business owners can improve their web presence, effectively market their product, and grow their business. In addition to their own expertise, Andy and Lee also feature different guests from within the marketing community each week. This show is a really good way for the aspiring entrepreneur to get some good ideas before diving headlong into a doomed project. It’s also perfect for the established business that could be doing even better.

If you want to listen to our interview with Andy and Lee (this was our first interview, and live at that, so give us a break people!), you can find the complete show here (we come on 23:38 into the show :). Andy are Lee are great hosts, so make sure to check out all their other shows as well. The show runs on Thursdays, 6-7pm EST, and is broadcast live. You can also check out their podcast and their RSS feed. Make sure to catch up on their sister blog as well, www.saveyourbottomline.com, for great tips on saving your marketing budget.

Kyle

It’s been a little while since we here at adgridwork have released any new features, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been working hard. To prove it, we have a new visualization feature to announce. AdSpy allows you to see the last 20 ads shown across the adgridwork network in real time! There is a link to AdSpy in the header, or you can visit it directly here. There are a lot of cool extensions to AdSpy that we have in mind for future upgrades, but if you have any ideas for the new tool feel free to shoot us an email.

In addition to the new AdSpy feature, we have tweaked our ad display algorithm as well. In addition to increasing the influence of keywords in selecting ads to display, we also have made several changes which we hope will help balance the metrics for sites that had more site requests than impressions. We will keep an eye on some of the statistics for awhile and make the appropriate tweaks, but we cannot keep on top of every site with just the two of us. So if you have any concerns or comments about your site’s metrics or just some general suggestions for the site, don’t hesitate to email us.

Many thanks to adgridwork user Lourdes Sitges, who pointed out a problem with our new keywords that messed with the site submission process in certain browsers. The problem should be fixed now and the submission process should run smoothly; we would like to apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused our users. If anyone experiences any further troubles, please let us know.

Hey there adgridwork users. Summer is in full swing, and we here at adgridwork are busy developing new functionality for the service. Tonight we’re announcing all new keyword functionality. When submitting or editing a site, you now have the option of using an autocomplete keyword field. Hopefully, this will help our users find keywords already in our system and improve the normalization of our keyword data. We also provide a small keyword suggest feature that shows some popular keywords in your selected category. Click on any of these suggested keywords to see other commonly affiliated keywords.

One note, in developing these new features, we also revamped our keyword storage system. We believe we have transferred over all the existing keywords for all sites in our network, but it is possible that some keywords were lost in the transfer. If you happen to notice any of your keywords are missing or mangled, we’re sorry for the inconvenience, but we hope this new system will vastly improve the relevance of our ads in the future.

We have a lot more ideas for improvements to the site, as well as some cool things that we’re holding on to for awhile, but we would also love to hear any ideas our users have for adgridwork. Send us your thoughts, ideas, or suggestions for adgridwork, and we’ll do our best to incorporate as much new stuff as we can. And, of course, if anybody discovers any problems with the new keywords, please let us know that as well. Until next time, we hope everyone enjoys the new keywords.

Cheers,

Kyle & Nick
The AGW team