Since we did so well on the last contest that we entered, I decided to have a go at a simple Domain Name giveaway by an Internet Entrepreneur by the name of Jason Berlinsky. The contest is ending today, so hopefully we’ll have enough time to draw a little bit of attention and rank.

The big news however, is the upcoming launch of a top-secret, super-stealth Project (curious, yet? that I have been working on for the past weeks. I hope to slowly roll out the service (which will be tied very closely to adgridwork) over the next couple of weeks. The service will be 100% free, and is going to take a stab at the entire Blogging Review industry established by ReviewMe and PayPerPost. I’ll keep you all posted.

Second Place Winner: Bloggingtips.com ‘Win a Mascot’ Contest

Alright…to start things off I’d like to say thanks to Kevin over at bloggingTips.com for running a great contest. As of midnight last night, adgridwork was ranked second for the term ‘win a mascot at bloggingtips.com’ and so we were rewarded $50 dollars This will of course go to our hosting fees so that we can continue to provide our free advertising pro-bono.

Bug in Referral Links

Special thanks to Stephen Welton who discovered a bug in the way that we were redirecting our referral links. It turns out that I made a slight mistake in the way that I was redirecting the ‘Advertise on This Site For FREE’ which caused an infinite 301-redirect loop. The issue has been fixed as of this morning. Thanks again to Stephen for letting us know about this.

ViralLink - A Fantastic Linkback Scheme by Andy Coates

Finally, I stumbled upon a neat advertising concept this morning that I wanted to take part in. The idea was developed by Andy Coates and is called Viralink. To participate, simply copy the following code (copy the HTML code by viewing the Page Source of this page) and add it to your site with the corresponding link. I’d be interested in seeing how well this does.

———copy and paste the Viralink and instructions below this line———

Below is a matrix of 120 stars, I have already added a link to my blog onto one of the stars, all you need to do is copy and paste the grid into your blog and add your own link to one of the other spare stars, and tell others to do the same!

Viralink

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New Addition: When I receive a ping back once you have added the Viralink to your site I will add your link to this grid, and each person who copies the grid from here will also link to your site!

———copy and paste the Viralink and instructions above this line———

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

Kevin over at bloggingTips.com (the same guy who is running the ‘win a free mascot’ competition’) just published a blog post agreeing to feature any reviews of adgridwork on his page.

Kevin writes:

So if you combine that with the Link Back Promo that Kyle and I are offering, writing a few words on our service will net you two link backs/reviews from up and coming sites (adgridwork and bloggingtips, of course :). Be sure to check out Kevin’s blog and let him know what you think of our free advertising network.

Kevin from BloggingTips.com is running a contest on his site giving away a free, custom mascot from SOSFactory. All you need to do to participate is to link to his site using the phrase win a mascot at BloggingTips.com and whomever ranks at the top of Google at the end of the contest is the winner. I wonder what an adgridwork mascot might look like?

So if you want to:

win a mascot at BloggingTips.com

be sure to visit BloggingTips.com.

win a mascot at BloggingTips.com

Nick

Wendy Piersall from Entrepreneur.com just posted a great article on Ten Free Online Advertising Opportunities for Your Business. In the article, she highlights some free advertising options for those of us who are too thrifty for Google Adwords or other paid endorsements. And to top it off, if you scroll down towards the bottom of the page, you’ll find this gem:

Wendy sure knows how to pick em

Head on over to the Entrepreneur Blog to check out the rest of the article and if you like the article be sure to digg it.

Nick

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

We had a few issues over the last couple of days with our site registration page; people were being told their domains did not match when in fact they did. We believe these issues should be taken care of, so we hope that everyone should be able to register sites smoothly again. As always though, email us with any problems you experience.
We’re been spending most of our time lately trying to promote the adgridwork and get more sites to join the network. We’ve also got some new features in the pipeline that should improve the site; we hope to get some features done soon. Feel free to send us your suggestions for the site as well.

Matt over at pseudocoder.com has posted a great review of adgridwork. Whenever one of our members takes the time to write about our service, we always like to show our appreciation by personally thanking them. You can read Matt’s article On his Blog. He specifically asks for suggestions on improving the conversion rate of his own ad, so any SEO-heads out there should help him out with some pointers.