William Charlwood

Finally got round to submitting a new ad to the GadgetSpots network today. My first one was obviously TOO cheeky - I was advertising GadgetSpots within the GadgetSpots widget. A sort of narcissistic, iterative advertising.

Naughty boy.

Actually since I started doing that not only has my original ad been deleted but there’s also an explicit statement on the site telling people that they are not allowed to do this.

So anyway, I created a new ad today spurred on by enthusiastic reviews by various folk I trust online and I’ll be tracking the stats carefully and reporting back.

One of the things you can do with GadgetSpots ads, as you can with any traffic generating system, is to promote something that can make money for you on autopilot so you really need to have either a commercial website of some sort or to have selected a product you can sell as an affiliate. In fact that’s one of the beauties of something like GadgetSpot - you just set it up and use your own ads to drive traffic to a link that can make you money.

But what if you don’t have anything in mind? Well try this for starters. It’s a powerful ebook that you can sell. Get your own copy here.

GadgetSpots are a new type of traffic exchanging advertising. You sign up (free-ish) and you can get your ads on loads of sites. In return you agree to display a GadgetSpots ad on your own site.

At the time of writing I’ve put one on this blog.

A few thoughts: there are 2 levels of GadgetSpots membership. The free one shares out 25% of impressions. If you pay a monthly subscription you get 75% of impressions. But that’s where it all gets a bit confusing. On the GadgetSpots website the numbers don’t add up. I do think the system will deliver traffic and if it grows then paying for a small monthly subscription will make sense especially since you control the wording of your ad in the GadgetSpots widget that goes on other people’s sites.

Like all these things, you do need to write the copy of your ad carefully in order to get as many clicks as possible. Do that though, and you’ll benefit from free targeted traffic easily. If that works out for you, buy the upgrade to triple your traffic.

Ok, so that’s GadgetSpots. Here’s the issue I’m thinking about though.

It seems highly likely to me that this blog will very shortly rank very high for the word GadgetSpots on the basis of recent results. So in order to capitalise on this should I write a post now when GadgetSpots are fairly new?

Or should I postpone writing for a few weeks when knowledge of the system will be much wider spread - and so will search volumes?

It’s a difficult one: it’s good to rank first but only if people are actually searching for the keyword you rank first for. To maximise the value of a top position on Google etc. you need big volume searches AND the ability to convert those searches either directly or indirectly into dosh.

ForumKnowHow

A couple of good things are going on in the world of forums. First Robert Puddy, who lives close to me in global terms (about 50 miles away I guess) has launched a decent Internet Marketing forum that you have to pay to join. This immediately qualifies its members as serious and likely to make positive contributions.

It’s the same old story, make something free and people feel it is valueless. Make ‘em pay and they respect the product.

The forum is called “Forum Know How” and the quality of contributions so far is good and, just as importantly, the attitude of contributors is positive and helpful. If only all forums were like that….

Forum Ads Manager 

The second thing is a neat advertising system designed for phpBB forums. Many phpBB forum owners know that AdSense doesn’t always work terribly well as a revenue generator. So Harvey Segal and Adrian Ling have developed a script that effectively allows forum owners to sell and manage advertising space on their forums automatically. It processes payments with PayPal and let’s your visitors buy space and time from you without you having to do anything.

It’s a great way of boosting your automated income and it doesn’t cost anything to get it up and running either although Adrian and Harvey take a perfectly reasonable small percentage of your sales in payment for their development investment.