Sell Private Ads on Your Blog with OIOPublisher
May 16, 2008 Posted by Tyler Cruz
The following is a paid review and is completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having me review your site or product, please view my advertising page.
If you run Wordpress and sell ads on your blog, or are even considering to sell ads on your blog, then you’ll want to read this review.
OIOPublisher is an advanced plugin for Wordpress which acts as an ad management platform, allowing you to sell and manage private ads on your blog. It is no secret that I’m a huge fan of selling your ads privately, which is why over 90% of my income comes from private advertising.
Private advertising is simply the act of selling ad space on your site directly yourself, instead of using a 3rd-party ad network which takes a large commission and never fill 100% of your inventory.
Simply put, OIOPublisher is the perfect solution for anyone wanting to sell ads on their Wordpress blog, as you’ll most certainly agree by the end of this review.
OIOPublisher is not the only ad management software out there. The most reputable and notable one is OpenAds.org which is 100%-free and offers an immense amount of control and features.
However, OpenAds is extremely complicated to use. I should know; I installed it…. twice. It was so difficult to simply add a banner slot that the learning curve for it didn’t warrant the switching over of all my sites to it.
OIOPublisher is basically a simpler version of OpenAds.org, custom-built for Wordpress. While I used the term “simpler”, it does not in any way mean that there are not a lot of features. In fact, OIOPublisher offers so many features that I’ll only be able to touch on a small fraction of them in this review.
The OIOPublisher plugin has a number of additional modules that can easily be added for additional features, and while they need to be downloaded and installed separately, they are all available for free with the purchase of OIOPublisher.
The modules are:
- AdManager Module - The main module which manages the sales of ads and generally acts as the ad management software.
- Affiliates Module - Allows you to create your own affiliate system for your ads, paying others who refer advertisers that buy ads on your blog a set or percentage-based commission.
- Conversation Module - While not exactly related to ad management, allows you to participate in a type of social forum group.
- Geolocation Module - Allows you to target banners based on location. Very useful module for affiliates or gambling-related sites, as some affiliate networks and poker rooms will not sell to certain countries.
- PayPal Module - A rather essential module which allows the automation of payments via PayPal.
- Tracker Module - Essentially a reporting system which keeps track of ad slot impressions, clicks, CTR, and other stats. Does many functions including the automated e-mailing of reports to advertisers.
- ViralBlogAds Module - A recently released module which acts as a solution for setting up default ads on unsold ad inventory.
The nice thing with the modules is that it allows the developer to release an update to OIOPublisher without requiring a complete upgrade as administrators can install the individual modules. It also lets administrators choose to only install the features and functions that they will actually be using.
The amount of customization in regards to how you manage and sell your ads is far too numerous to list in detail here, so here is just a short list to give an example of the level of customization available:
- Set what currency the transactions are conducted in (USD, GPB, EUR).
- Choose to only accept family-friendly ads.
- Option of having the advertiser pay with/without your approval of the ad.
- Allow subscription/recurring payments.
- In the case of a paid review, choose to add text at the beginning (just like this review).
- Easily customize any e-mail template with a number of variables to include as well.
- In the case of a paid review, set a minimum word count requirement.
- On all ad slots, optionally set a markup percent to remove the NOFOLLOW attribute.
- Set up your own default ads.
- Choose how many ads to rotate in each slot.
- Set the queue number for ads that are pre-paid/reserved.
- Create your own custom payment purchase - perfect for selling products such as e-books!
As you can see, the level of customization is immense.
While OIOPublisher requires Wordpress, the developers are working on porting it to other systems as well. I’d personally recommend that instead of creating individual ports to other CMS’s, that they instead create a standalone-script that can function on it’s own, just like OpenAds.org. However, they should take note to continue to keep things simple and not go completely overboard and obfuscate things like OpenAds did.
If they did implement such a standalone script, I’d strongly consider switching over my entire network of sites to use OIOPublisher instead of doing everything by hand.
You may notice that I don’t use OIOPublisher myself and ask yourself why. There is actually only one reason why I’m not using it… although I was very tempted to immediately switch over after learning of all their new features when researching it for this review.
While I sell private ads on all my sites (at least the sites that have ads), I still do absolutely everything by hand, including the accounting in Excel. I keep a separate Excel file for each site I have, and each file is then separated by month. I do this mainly for accounting reasons for my taxes.
Currently, OIOPublisher does not have any accounting reporting section, which is why I am not using it. While I could look up everything in PayPal, it would be quite a pain hunting for all the past transactions, and it would never be easy to quickly forecast or analyze my earnings.
OIOPublisher does have a Stats Archive, which displays a comprehensive table which can be returned from a set time period and/or by purchase ID and gives information including: Clicks, Visits, Pageviews, CTR, etc., but I need an accounting table which displays the slots I sold, who I sold them to, when they were sold, how much they paid, where the payment came from, etc.
I’ve already spoken to the developer about this earlier today and they have already promised to implement it. They should even be creating an Export to Excel function, which is a bonus for me (and you). As soon as they have an accounting report feature, I’ll definitely be switching over to OIOPublisher. Automating the entire process of selling and managing my ads would save me a lot of time, and time is money!
OIOPublisher makes managing your ads in Wordpress ridiculously easy. I spent many hours (you don’t want to know how long…) figuring out how to add the Integrated 300×250 Banner on my blog, or Inline Ad as the plugin refers to them. I ended up doing it by installing a plugin and then having to modify the code of a vital Wordpress file.
OIOPublisher has the Inline Ad feature built-in. That’s just one example of how OIOPublisher simplifies the monetizing of your blog.
OIOPublisher has gone a long way from when I originally looked at it. While a much earlier version I looked at ages ago originally only let you sell banner slots, the latest iteration of the plugin now lets you sell Paid Reviews (optionally written by you or the advertiser), Inline Ads, and Text Links.
I’ve had the luxury of using OIOPublisher as an advertiser, so I also have the experience and perspective from the advertiser’s view. I am currently advertising on several blogs, and each of them use OIOPublisher. I find it a breeze to use as a publisher since everything is automated, and the bonus is that I get detailed weekly reports e-mailed to me.
While the report is contained in a link and not in the actual e-mail (which OIOPublisher may want to consider implementing as well), as you can see from the screenshot below, the report is very detailed and shows pretty much everything an advertiser could ask for:
You may also notice from the screenshot that the ad is running for 365 days. That’s part of the simple beauty of OIOPublisher: it’s easy for the administrator to customize their ads to cater to their advertisers. I had wanted to prepay for an ad for 1-year in advance, but the blog only had the 30-day option available. He easily sent me a link so I could prepay for a year, and it was done. Problem solved.
I highly recommend OIOPublisher to anyone running Wordpress who wants to sell their own ads.
Oh, I almost forgot the best part! Guess how much it costs? $37. That’s right. Now go buy it, you can thank me later 
In case anyone is wondering, I’m not using my referral URL in any of these links - my recommendation is honest and sincere as usual.
Identity Crisis: What Am I?
May 14, 2008 Posted by Tyler Cruz
A few days ago, I published the post: My Corporate Logo and Stationery in which I showcased the official logo for my the company Merendi Networks Inc.
While pretty much everyone seemed to love the logo, I received a number of comments addressing two issues regarding my business cards.
First, several readers felt that my having used the e-mail address tylercruz@gmail.com was very unprofessional. Let me address that issue first.
I At the time I had the business card designs done, I had not yet undergone my infamous server crash which eventually lead to a new server and the creation of e-mail accounts on all of my domains. Previously, I only had e-mail forwarding set up, and since I would have had to reply to e-mails with tylercruz@gmail.com anyway, I felt I might as well use it in the first place.
However, I now have pseudo-POP3’s set up on all my domains (I have GMail set up so I can reply from the addresses as well, but they are still actually technically forwarded to me) of which tyler@merendi.com is what I now use for generic business. For example, yesterday I set up a business account with PayPal and attached it to address.
Personally, I view GMail addresses as rather prestigious, at least as a free web-mail provider, and so I had no issues as using it on my business card. However, I can certainly understand people’s distaste for it as when I see companies use a Hotmail address, I go absolutely nuts as it screams unprofessional.
In the end though, GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail - it doesn’t matter. All that really matters is that others quickly deemed my GMail account on my business card as unprofessional, and so anything that I personally feel is unimportant. A business card identifies you and your company, and so if there is something on it that some others may find unappealing, then it needs to be addressed.
On my next batch of business cards, I’ll definitely be changing the e-mall address to tyler@merendi.com, and will change the e-mail on my stationery as well.
The next issue readers had was that I had chosen the title of Owner as my title. This choice was definitely a conscious one, unlike when I had just automatically used tylercruz@gmail.com as my e-mail address.
I can recall an episode many years ago when I was around 15 and was in the process of creating a local web design “company”. I had given myself the title of President and the partner who I was working with, the title of Vice-President. My brother, who is 4 years older than me, told me how ridiculous it sounded to use such professional titles and to just use something simple and realistic such as “Web Designer” or “Webmaster”.
I never forgot about that, and always laugh when remembering it or seeing other very small, unprofessional online sites use similar titles.
I ended up choosing the term “Owner” as I did not want to appear pompous, overconfident, or stuck-up by choosing a title such as CEO or President, especially when considering that I’m the only employee.
However, many readers did not care for this title. Below are two comments that resonated with me:
“… I too am curious about “Owner” for a Corp. Doesn’t that defeat the whole idea of a Corporate Veil? President, Vice-President or Secretary would be great titles for you. Here in California the title Owner wouldn’t fly legally, unless you wanted to have the protections of the Corp. pierced…” -
“I second this point. I have not done business in Oregon for over 10 years but that was the case there. By using the title owner or the like rather than President or the like, you defeat the liability protection of a corporation. Tyler, you had best check out Canadian law.”
– Michael
After reading those comments, I really wanted to know what I should be calling myself when referring to the corporation, (I always refer to my self as Web Entrepreneur otherwise) and so I contacted my corporate lawyer asking him for his advice.
Unfortunately, I can’t paste his response here due to the standard legal Privilege and Confidentiality notice stated at the bottom of the e-mail, but he basically told me that I should always refer to the business as the corporation’s and that defining myself as owner is technically incorrect. I own all the shares of Merendi Networks Inc. which gives me the right to elect the Director who runs the company or appoints a a CEO, President, etc. to manage and run the corporation.
He didn’t suggest what title I should use, which leaves me a man without a name: what am I?
I Googled this very question (well, not exactly - that leads to a bunch of riddle sites…) and found the following site in which somebody had the exact same question as me, as well as the same concerns of sounding pretentious by selecting a title such as CEO or President.
Unfortunately, while he received a number of responses, all of them were completely mixed and everybody had a different idea of what should be used.
So, my loyal readers, what do you suggest I use? I know that John Chow uses “Founder & CEO” for his TTZMedia corporation (one of the many corporations he owns…).
- I’m not big on Director as I feel that I should be in Hollywood directing a movie.
- Founder sounds much too passive and detached for me; to me it suggests that I created the company but may no longer run it.
- I like the sound of CEO (Chief Executive Officer), but to me suggests that there is an actual board of directors, of which obviously there is not.
- That leaves me with President. It certainly sounds like overkill, but perhaps it is the right one for me. However, I feel like I should be called Prime Minister since I am Canadian..
I really value your opinion on this, so please speak up and share what you think I should use! I’ll most likely be choosing whichever gains the most votes…
ClickConsultants: An Affiliate Marketing Blog
May 12, 2008 Posted by Tyler Cruz
The following is a paid review and is completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having me review your site or product, please view my advertising page.
ClickConsultants.com is an affiliate marketing blog run by experienced affiliate marketer Derek Salyers. The blog was started in the summer of 2007 and will soon be nearing it’s first year anniversary.
Before I continue with the review, I’d like to address an important issue (if you can call it that) that I feel could greatly benefit the blog. I’ve read every single post from the beginning, including the side pages, and I kept asking myself the same recurring questions:
- Who is this guy?
- How much does he make?
- Is he successful?
- Should I trust him? Why?
I feel that blogs in the “Make Money Online” niche, especially those in affiliate marketing, are generally run by two different types of people: those who have already been successful and those who are on their way to being successful. To put it more bluntly: those who are making a lot of money and those who aren’t.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I always take things in differently depending on who wrote it. For example, say a blog post about a new keyword analysis strategy was written. I’d personally take it a lot more seriously and give it much more credibility if it was written by Zac Johnson than if I read it on a blog I never heard of before in which I could find no information on the author.
Here’s my point: in the “Make Money Online” niche especially, if you are giving out a lot of advice and acting out the role of the first group I mentioned above, you need to establish trust.
ClickConsultants lacks an About page, and not a single post on the blog told me anything about Derek. I would highly recommend creating an About page, made linkable from the top menu, creating a short autobiography which includes some success details.
I’ve said this before: sharing detailed examples of income and profits with readers not only helps to build trust, but establishes that one really know what they’re doing.
Now, I’m sure that Derek is probably making a lot of money and is doing very well - he probably wouldn’t be attending affiliate conferences and posing in pictures with Shoemoney if he wasn’t. But nowhere on the blog does it state his success stories. Every big blogger in the Make Money Online niche I know has disclosed at least some of their success stories, and there’s a good reason for this. In addition to building trust and giving credibility to their posts, it’s a fantastic traffic booster. People love reading successful and inspirational stories, and people definitely love seeing pictures of cheques or screenshots with big numbers.
To summarize, at least for me personally, if I’m going to invest my time reading a blog on how to make money, I want to know that the author is successful. Therefore, I’d recommend for Derek to consider sharing some of his success stories. It would help his credibility as well as inspire and motivate his readers.
Getting back to the review, Derek tends to publish a new post every 5 days on average, although his post frequency has improved a lot recently and he has been posting every 1-2 days lately.
The posts aren’t the best well-written and so it would be nice if Derek spent a little time after finishing each post to go over the flow, grammar, and spelling (you’re is always mistaken for the possessive your). However, the casual writing style can usually be forgiven due to the easy-to-follow “list and notes” formatted often used.
Shoemoney is a perfect example of how an extreme casual writing style can still lead to a successful blog. However, this is only because we know that he is very successful; if Shoemoney never made a dime, nobody would read his blog. This again illustrates my point from above… knowing that the author is successful is just too important to ignore.
A Goldmine of Affiliate Marketing Tips
This review may have sounded pretty critical so far, but the truth is that ClickConsultants.com has some great posts with priceless tips. In fact, even though it’s labelled as an affiliate marketing blog, there are naturally many posts which are useful to anyone who uses PPC advertising.
Below are my favourite posts on the site. Check a few (or all) of them out, as there really is a lot of useful information:
- 6 Tips To A Better Landing Page
- Affiliate Summit Wrap-up and How To Prepare For Next Time (Simple post, but shares 5 things he learned to do for his next convention)
- Easy Tracking with Google Adwords
- Five Things You Better Be Doing!
- Split Testing Ads - The How, The Why, and The When!
- What Are You Waiting For-
- Instantly Increase Your ROI With Dayparting
- Direct Linking vs Landing Pages vs Landing Sites
- To Be or Not To Be, That is The Question!
- Split Testing Landing Pages - It’s Easy!
- Your Landing Page Sucks (here’s how to fix it)
- 8 Tips for Using Affiliate Programs on Your Blog
If you read a few of those posts, I’m sure that you’ll agree that Derek has a lot of useful information to share.
Video Posts
Something I’d like to see Derek do more of are video posts. He’s made a total of three videos so far, and while he can ramble at times (hey, I’m just as guilty!), they are quite good and he shares a lot of detailed information in the 7-10 minutes of each video.
I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing a recurring monthly “Questions & Answers” video post, where the questions came in from blog readers.
His video posts can be found at:
- Affspy - Changing the Game-
- Video Post - Questions & Answers
- Easy Keyword Grouping using Wordtracker
Private Forum
In addition to the blog, ClickConsultants.com actually contains a forum as well. However, it is not free and membership costs $29.99 a month or $279.99 for life. The forum acts as a type of “affiliate marketing school”, helping users increase their earnings and skills as an affiliate marketer.
The forum is apparently useful for affiliate marketers earning $200 or less per day. Members also gain access to 6 free landing pages each month and gain access to their learning center which contains affiliate marketing guides, articles, and video tutorials.
Here’s my tip of the day: if you ever want some landing pages, now you know where to get 6 for $30
Cheap Advertising
As I write this review, there is currently a 125×125 banner slot available on ClickConsultants.com. There are traffic statistics posted anywhere, nor an RSS feedcount to compare the price with, but the 125×125 slot is currently selling for $10 a month, which works out to only $0.33 per day.
I was going to buy the slot myself but thought I’d give you guys a chance to snatch it up first If you guys don’t, I will.
Improvement Suggestions
Derek appears to have a great passion and knack for affiliate marketing, and I think he has a lot to offer in terms of sharing his experience with others through blogging.
However, there are a lot of simple things he could do to improve his blog. Here are a bunch of quick suggestions I have in addition to the ones I discussed in the opening of this review that I hope Derek will consider implementing:
- Create an “About” Page
Exactly who is Derek Salyers? How old is he? Where does he live? Does he do affiliate marketing for a living?
These are all questions most readers will inevitably ask themselves, yet there is no mention of any personal details apart from two sentences on a page promoting the forum. It would be recommend to create an “About” page which introduces Derek and perhaps shares some of his successes as well.
The “About” page is usually the very first thing I read when visiting a new blog after quickly skimming the first post, as it quickly provides me a complete overview and history of the blog. It also lets readers connect with the authoring blogger better, knowing that it is written by a real, living, breathing, human being. Blogging, after all, is all about sharing, is it not?
- Create an “Archives” Page
While there are sections on the site listing recent and popular articles, they are no substitute for an Archives page which sort posts by date.
For example, it was a bit of a pain navigating through ClickConsultants.com when trying to review all the posts for this review, since my only option was to view the previous set of posts via a link at the bottom of the front page. I’d strongly recommend for Derek to add an Archives page to make browsing and reading easier for visitors.
I personally recommend the SRG Clean Archives v4.2 plugin - it’s what I use on my blog (check it out in action).
- Reduce Number of Posts per Page
ClickConsultants.com currently displays 10 posts per page which makes each page extend down incredibly far. I think the 10 setting might be the default setting, but this can easily be changed by going (in Wordpress 2.5.*) to: WP-Admin -> Settings -> Reading and changing the Blog pages show at most field. Five posts would probably be ideal.
- Add Images to Posts!
There is not a single image throughout the entire history of posts apart from the rare screenshot of a control panel such as AdWords.
Adding a relevant image to a post will greatly engage readers more and lure them in to read. Nothing overboard is needed - one image per post is enough, or even one image per ever second post, but definitely something.
Images help give context, lure in readers, and simply makes reading a lot more fun and interesting.
Summary
ClickConsultants.com is an affiliate marketing blog which contains great tips and strategies for both affiliate marketers and anybody who uses PPC advertising.
While Derek could certainly improve the blog by implementing a bunch of small changes here and there, these are just minor details which can easily be addressed.
In the end, a blog’s real value is always its content, and you could learn a lot by reading ClickConsultants.com.
My Corporate Logo and Stationery
May 9, 2008 Posted by Tyler Cruz
Since I now own a corporation (Merendi Networks Inc.), it’s only natural for it to have a professional logo. In addition to acting as the framework for the new site design I’m going to have done (sometime…), a logo acts as corporation’s identity: the font, the colour scheme (which is them used as the official corporate colours), and imagery are all important identifiers that help show what your company is about.
The globe represents the fact that the corporation is connected throughout the world with its network of sites. The orange emblem behind it represents community: it should resemble a person hugging, or embracing, the globe since most of the sites in the network are community-based. Together, the globe and emblem portray that Merendi Networks Inc. manages community-oriented websites worldwide.
The old logo designer I used to use for many of my past sites wasn’t responding to my e-mails, so I had to look for another logo company. Fortunately, this wasn’t too difficult since there is certainly no shortage of logo designers out there.
However, I am an extremely picky person when it comes to design, as any past designer I’ve hired will tell you. It comes from my need for perfectionism and my OCD attention to minute detail.
I ended up going with a design firm called TheLogoCompany as their portfolio had impressed me, and I was NOT disappointed. In fact, they surprised me. Since I’m an extremely fussy client when it comes to design work, I usually ask for many revisions until the end result is perfect (in my mind), or near-perfect.
mebeliRight off the bat, about 3 days after ordering, I was sent me 6 completely different logos to choose from. The nice thing about TheLogoCompany is that they have 5-6 designers, and will have each of them create a logo for you. This harnesses the creativity power, giving you completely different takes on your logo. If you had just one designer send you variations, there will always be an element of the particular designers style in the design.
After a lot of thought, I ended up going with the logo with the globe:
However, I had a number of minor revision requests for them. Believe it or not, but TheLogoCompany will give you unlimited revisions until you are 100% happy with the end result.
In fact, they offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee, which is pretty amazing (stupid?!).
I was expecting perhaps 4 or 5 different revisions to choose from, but ended up with the following:
It was extremely difficult for me to choose one, as there were many good candidates, but I finally chose one… and again asked for more small changes.
And, in response, TheLogoCompany sent me many more revisions to choose from. It’s funny, because I never thought I’d ever find a design company that could actually overwhelm me with their attention to detail.
After the final… final… final… final… logo was chosen, work proceeded onto the stationery design I ordered as well. They sent me 4 concepts, I chose one, and… as you should expect by now, asked for a few revisions.
Here are the designs for my letterhead, business card, and envelope packaging:
I also ordered 500 business cards. They are pretty nice and glossy
I’m probably going to get them to create a business card design for my blog and order 500 to give away when I go to BlogWorld in Vegas in September. Maybe I’ll give you one!
I highly recommend TheLogoCompany. In addition to the obvious examples mentioned above, they simply know what they are doing. They know their logos. If you browse through their site, you’ll realize that they are complete professionals in the design world. They will create your logos and give you formats for all the design standards and print shop formats. They instruct you on the differences between emblem-based logos, textual-based logos, and graphic-based logos. They produce all of their logos in vector format for unrestricted size usability…
Best of all, they only charge $149 per logo! It’s pretty ridiculous, I know, considering the quality and all the professional services you get (I’d have gladly paid $500+ for what I got). They explain why it is priced so low in their FAQ:
“Our logo design service makes no profit. This is called a loss leader product. We do this so that you will be confident to try us out and sample the quality. We would love to have you as a client for life and have you buy all your graphic design services and professional printing from us. This way we both benefit from the deal long term.”
I must admit, it’s a very interesting marketing tactic, as it worked on me. I’ll most definitely be returning to them for any logo and print-graphic work in the future.
Below are just a few of the logos taken from their portfolio to give you an idea as to the quality of the designs:
Here are some more perks:
-
You get a minimum of 3 unique logo design choices to choose from. I got 6.
-
Turnaround time of initial logo design choices is just 3 business days or sooner.
-
As many as 5 designers work on your initial choices for maximum creativity and choice.
-
Unlimited revisions until you are 100% satisfied with your new logo.
-
100% “Money Back Guarantee” right up to your acceptance of the final logo design.
If you’re not convinced yet, then nothing I say will convince you. For everyone else, the site is TheLogoCompany. Don’t forget them.
Anyhow, what do you guys think of my logo for Merendi Networks Inc.? Maybe I’ll get them to design the website too…
