Leaving The Day Job

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Entrecard has made quite a splash on US-based affiliate and money making blogs but doesn’t seem to have gained much traction amongst UK bloggers. I’ve decided to give it a try.

Entrecard is yet another social networking/blog advertising widget to put in your sidebar. The twist in this case is the fact that it’s tied in to free 125×125 button advertising.

The way it works is this: you create an Entrecard in the form of a 125×125 image and place the Entrecard widget on your site. Other bloggers come along and click on your Entrecard to “drop” theirs. This is the social networking aspect of it, when you log back into Entrecard you can see all the cards that have been dropped on your site. So far, so bog standard.

The fun bit is that you gain a credit every time you go and click on someone else’s Entrecard. You can then exchange these credit for adverts on other sites within the network. Likewise people can exchange their credits for advertising on your site, in which case their 125×125 Entrecard occupies the widget space on your blog for a day.

I’ve tried a few widgets on my site along these lines before but I’m still looking for the one that brings in good traffic and preferably doesn’t slow my site’s load time down to the point that you think you’re back on dial up. The main incentive to try Entrecard is that it’s being used by some of the biggest bloggers on the planet. For example, saving up enough credits can score you a day’s advertising on the mighty John Chow’s blog.

Entrecard is free to join, free to use and easy to install on your site (just one line of Javascript cut-and-pasted). You can try it out and gauge the response yourself in no time at all.

If you decide to join up, or if you already have, drop your Entrecard in my sidebar and I’ll come visit your blog.

I’ve been experimenting with the new Facebook Ads platform. My ads have been running for a bit over 24 hours and have resulted in 20 clicks and zero sales which has cost me $1.63 (about 77p). The point of this post though isn’t about Facebook ads themselves but about my perceptions of the kind of person who would click my ad.

I’m advertising a digital photo frame which I thought of as being a geeky male gadget so I targeted males 18-35 with interests listed in photography and/or computers. Hardly anyone clicked. So out of curiosity I created a second ad, exactly the same as the first but this time targeted to females of any age who list photography as an interest. Here’s the results after one day:

Click through rate for the ad targeted at women is seven times higher. I can see four possible explanations here:

1. Women are more interested in gadgets than I thought
2. Women are more likely to click ads than men
3. Women are more inclined to “window shop”
4. My dataset is way too small to be drawing conclusions from and I should go back to doing some proper work instead of blogging about my attempts to understand women

I’ve been playing around with openads. It’s an incredibly powerful ad delivery platform which is open source and available for the princely sum of zero. The best feature for me though is the ability to target your ads depending on the geographic location of your site’s visitors.

Like most UK affiliates I’m primarily promoting UK merchants to UK customers. With PPC it’s easy to make sure that you’re only bringing in UK visitors but if your SEO is good enough or your content compelling enough you’ll soon have visitors from all over the world. These international visitors will most probably not be able to take advantage of the offers you’re promoting so you won’t be making any money from them.

I recently discovered that a long neglected site of mine was still getting a fair bit of traffic from organic search and that the majority of the visitors were US-based. I do use Adsense on the site which automatically handles showing the right ads to the right international visitors but I also have some image banner space and I wanted to target appropriate ads to those US visitors - they tend not to have much need for Sky TV in the States.

Openads is a PHP/MySQL solution. Installation is relatively straightforward with a wizard which steps you through setting up the database. If you’ve done a Wordpress installation you should probably be OK.

Once you’re logged in things can look a bit daunting. Openads is able to handle the ads for very large networks of sites and so there’s more features there than you need. Openads refers to each site as a publisher and each banner space within that site as a zone. I just set up one site and one zone within it to start with. You tell openads the size of each zone eg 468×60 so it knows which ads can fit in which space. You get a choice of “invocation codes” to paste into the appropriate place on your site as you would for Adsense or any other banner. The choice of code types is a bit confusing but I found IFRAME worked best on my sites.

On the other side of the equation you set up advertisers and the campaigns for each advertiser. I set up Amazon US as an advertiser and just created a default campaign. Then you add one or more banners within the campaign. Banners can be images, text or HTML. I pasted in the HTML that Amazon gave me.

You then assign banners to zones. As I only had one banner and one zone it was a simple case of linking the two together. If you’ve got multiple sites though there are loads of options and permutations for deciding which ads go on which sites.

After setting up a second advertiser of Amazon UK with a UK centric banner it was time do the geotargetting magic. This bit’s not very well documented. You need to download the free GeoLite Country database from Maxmind (get the binary format) and copy it into a directory on your website. Then in the openads geotargetting settings page enter the location of the data file in the ‘MaxMind GeoIP Country Database Location’ box. This should be the filesystem path eg /var/www/html/GeoIP.dat not a web address.

Finally I went back to my Amazon US banner and set a Delivery restriction by selecting ‘Geo - Country’ and picking the USA. Now my site is displaying an Amazon US banner to US visitors and an Amazon UK one to everyone else.

Now this may seem like a lot of work to achieve something relatively minor and you may wonder if its worth bothering given the appallingly low banner clickthrough rates. But openads is much more powerful than just a banner server. The ability to use HTML banners means you can effectively target any kind of content to visitors based on a number of criteria. For example, if you are building a postal mailing list you may wish only to show the sign up form to UK visitors. Or you might want to show adult offers late at night and family friendly ones during the day.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with openads. I’m sure I’ll find many more features as I play around with it some more. I also haven’t tried integrating it with this blog but I’ll have a go real soon now.