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

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

First off, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who has been actively sharing and participating in the adgridwork Advertising Network. We’ve been going strong for about 6 months now and already have almost 3,000 sites. It’s because of all our users that we continue to thrive and promote one anothers content and products.


Secondly, I wanted to tell you all about a brand new service that we have just launched: www.reviewback.com . Many of you may have heard of ReviewMe and PayPerPost, two services that allow you to pay to have another blogger link to and review your product or website. While, this is an excellent way of gaining exposure, paying for publicity is certainly not the adgridwork/reviewback way Thus, we have attempted to apply the adgridwork model to Blogging Reviews: You submit your blog to reviewback and can instantly begin browse the network and find other bloggers to trade reviews and links with. As always, the service is 100% free and is super easy and user-friendly.

Right now, we have very few blogs on the network and are looking to build a steady user base over the next couple of days. So if you are interested in increasing your brand and exposure via Blog Reviews, give www.reviewback.com a try and let us know what you think.

In just two days, the win a mascot at bloggingtips.com competition over at bloggingTips.com will be wrapping up, and as it stands, the adgridwork blog is currently in second place for the search term:

win a mascot at bloggingtips.com

Hopefully, in the next day or so we can manage to squeeze up to the number one spot and win the custom mascot from the guy’s at SOSfactory.net.

Also, I wanted to give a quick plug to Stephen Welton over at stephenwelton.com for a fantastic review of our free advertising service. Usually when one of our users writes a review or posts a link to adgridwork, we’ll feature their site on our top navigation bar and drop a link on our Press Page. However, Stephen’s Review deserves extra attention. Stephen took the time to document each step of the registration, submission and installation process, as well as take screenshots of each of the pages along the way. He gives feedback of particular elements that he likes, things that he dislikes and things that he wants to see added. Not only that, but he even summarizes our Terms of Service, something that 99% of our users don’t even bother reading! All in all, Stephen’s review was definitely attention grabbing, and I strongly suggest that he set up an account on ReviewMe to monetize some of his efforts. I, for one, would recommend any of our visitors to purchase a review from Stephen if he chooses to take this route

Nick
www.adgridwork.com

Well, Kyle was doing a little websurfing this morning and stumbled upon an interesting article by Robin Good. The article profiles a large list of AdSense Alternatives and although Robin forgot to include adgridwork in the list, the most interesting aspect of the story reads:

Adsense lifts ban on Adsense alternatives

Where before it was impossible to run Adsense alternatives alongside Adsense advertising, there has been a recent change of heart on the part of Google. It is now possible to do so, as Jennifer Slegg of JenSense notes. Jennifer quotes Google executive Brian Axe, who writes that:

”When it comes to enforcing policies on third-party contextual ads, we’ll be following the updated program policies instead of the T&Cs on this point. That is to say, publishers may now display other contextual ads on the same site or page as Google ads as long as they don’t have the same look and feel as our ads”

Thus it turns out that adgridwork is compatible with AdSense by default since our ads are distinguishable from theirs in several ways (the fonts, borders, number of characters permitted, etc). So effective immediately, we will turn on contextual advertising for all sites on the network to ensure that more targeted traffic finds its way to all of our sites. Please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns regarding this issue. Thanks.

Nick & Kyle

As you can see, Kyle and I just rolled out a fresh redesign of our free advertising service. We felt that the old design was a little on the boring side plus I needed an excuse to try out some of the tips that I picked up in CSS Mastery. Not all the changes were cosmetic though. I overhauled the Campaign pages and allow you to your Ad Campaigns in a more intuitive fashion. You can now see complete summaries of how all your campaigns are performing in addition to the detailed metrics that we previously provided.

Also, we are now offering a link-back/review incentive program. Any sites that provide a static link to our page, or write up a review on our new redesign, tools or service, will have their site featured on the front page of our site (kinda like what digg just initiated with their refer-a-friend campaign). We’ll leave a link to your page up there for a week or so and hopefully provide you with some additional traffic. Also, we’ll add your site to the growing list of blog/site mentions over at our press page.

Finally, Kyle has been hard at work revamping our Ad Code as well as experimenting with some automated spidering software to help further target your ad campaigns. The new Ad Code should be rolled out in the next couple of days so for those of you who wish to upgrade. The upgrade won’t be mandatory, however, and we will still fully support the old Code as well. And the spidering software is still a work in progress and will hopefully be released in the near future.

So let us know what you think of the new site and enjoy .

Nick
1/2 of the Best Free Advertising Network on the Web

That’s right folks. We woke up this morning to an extraodinary ammount of traffic and, sure enough, we were on the Digg Homepage! Well be in the Help Chat Room all day answering your questions, comments and concerns and making sure our servers don’t buckle under the high load.

Update: Also, expect to see some updates over the weekend. We plan on introducting a few more categories, adding some different sized ad blocks (per your requests), adding a filter for adult content (adult content will be allowed, it will just be its own ‘network’), and changing the location of the Advertise on this Site for Free! link in the ad blocks.

We’re going to wait for the traffic to subside a little before we implement these changes, but look for these rollouts in the next day or so

Digg On!

Today we are pleased to announce the pre-release launch of adgridwork!

….so what does that mean?

Well, we’ve been doing some extensive testing in a closed environment and realized that in order to see whether our service works or not, we are going to have to open it up and see what the public thinks. The service is 100% fully functional but there may be a few minor bugs that we haven’t accounted for, but hey, thats why we’re in beta (ya, we know how cliche it is to post a ‘beta’ label on a website, but we figured what the heck). Our goal for this stage of testing is to ’seed’ the Network with some early sites, optimize our ranking algorithms, and accomodate the requests and concerns of our first users.

With that said, here is a quick rundown of what we do:

This brand new service attempts to redefine traditional pay-per-click/CPM advertising. Our goal is to create a free community of advertisers that serve ads and promotions for one another. Our service is based entirely on the notion of sharing and community, therefore you only need to actively participate to be a member. No Pay-per-clicks, No CPMs, No Payments, EVER!. Just 100%, uncensored, free promotion for your website, product, business or blog. Period.

And remember…

In order to make it so your advertisement reaches a larger audience, we need more websites to join the Network. So help us spread the word. Post this site to digg. Comment about it on a blog. The more people join, the more exposure your advertisement receives!

Thanks and we hope you enjoy our service!