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

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

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

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.

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

Today we are releasing new ad code that does not rely on iframes. This update has been a long time coming, but we believe we have finally nailed down all the bugs in the new code. We hope the new code will be much simpler and much easier to use. Obviously, we cannot force our users to upgrade ad code, so the old ad code WILL CONTINUE to work and be supported. We hope, however, that our users will agree the new code is an improvement. We still allow our users to customize the colors of their ad blocks via the JavaScript variables, though we have done away with the body_color variable. That was used to blend the background of the iframe with the background of the user’s page, and since we no longer use iframes, the body_color variable is unnecessary.

We have spent a long time checking and re-checking the code in many different browsers, but if anyone discovers any bugs or has any comments about the new code, please use our contact page to let us know. Also, I hope to have some more cool updates to roll in the very near future. Now that school’s out for the summer, I hope to be able to devote some real time and energy to adgridwork.

Kyle
www.adgridwork.com

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.

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

To kick off the new year, we have developed a new look. Over the weekend we released version two of adgridwork. In addition to a whole new look for the site (feedback is always appreciated), we also have a whole new ranking system. Instead of a number, we now provide two ranking percentiles. The first is your percentile relative to your general category (i.e. if your site is under Blogging: Technology, Blogging is your general category, and your rank is relative to all sites under Blogging). The second percentile is across all sites in the network. The new rank has more factors involved; your rank is now dependent on conversions/impressions (or ctr), clicks/requests, total clicks/second, and total requests/second. All these factors are weighted relative to the average values across all sites (general and adult sites are weighted only against the general and adult networks, respectively). We’re always looking for ways to improve the service, and hopefully this new ranking is a step in the right direction. Any feedback is always appreciated; we hope everyone likes the new look and has been having a great new year.

Nick and Kyle