Today is our second birthday, so we decided to take a break from back end work and keep people up to date with where we are at, give an insight into our experience with entrecard, our first opportunity to advertise on this site and thanks to the guys over at http://www.adspheres.com/ who have donated 20 free sphere's to first to claim the offers. (OK for those in a hurry here is what you need) http://www.adspheres.com/ and the coupon code 24fa0749 good luck and hope your in the top 20 people.
Over the last few months we have worked hard on a main goal of having the ability to allow people to start to use the site and where possible finish all major works that would allow us to complete the site to a full operating status, well with all the fun and games that go with building your own site we have to be very happy with our outcome.
There are still a few small updates needed but other than we have almost all parts in place to complete the site and bring it fully up to spec within a short time frame.
Today we would like to cover a few of the new additions to the site that first cover the one subject we all know well, traffic and also touch on our first of many choices to advertise list on the site.
Traffic - Is something we all need to survive on the net, up until this point on purpose we have refrained from even trying to source traffic, we were happy from day one to have our site public and for people to visit during this development stage but did not want masses until we feel 100% comfortable with all systems within the directory portal.
Part of the set up stage did involve a group we have become to love and that is the entrecard team and it's many bloggers, for some reason the blogger group of people are chilled out and relaxed and the whole experience setting up with entrecard is pleasant and enjoyable.
But lets look at what has happened with our visitor numbers / stats since being with entrecard for a short time and with no other promotion happening for the site in any way.
When we first checked our Alexia rank we we sitting at around the 4,000,000 + mark. My thoughts were we have some work to do here then, but as above that will need to wait. The net result of just the bloggers and the support from entrecard has taken us from those dizzy heights to 800,000. Those figures speak for themselves in real terms 75% + has been wiped from our Alexia count by just implementing one system and letting it run.
In recognition and appreciation of the all entrecard blogger's we have decided to repay in a small way to all blogger's who decide to advertise on the site. Rather that retype what has been written you can follow this link to read more about this offer. TRYINHERE/ENTRECARD
The second part of this post is how we implemented the AdBrite to work as a way people could ad a text ad to zones within our directory portal and may or may not be of some use to blogger's and or other directory owners.
We have set this system to work in exactly the same way as OIO system that many entrecard bloggers now use to allow others to advertise their 125 PX images on their blogs, but adapted the text option for this.
Like many may have done I had seen this group before but had not realised what could be done with it. On a closer look we found it was already being used by some high quality directories / blogs and it had a text ad option that can can be booked by the intending advertiser for a 1, 7 or 30 day period. This opened up a new view to system as when its not booked you are able to bring in ads from the AdBrite site giving you a win win outcome.
To explain quickly how we set this up is we selected the text option only, then set that option to show only 1 ad per zone, set our pricing (you can all set these to your liking) then with the code you are able to adjust and suit your site's look and feel.
In our case we have set zones for each category and will be expanding this to all levels of the directory allowing for very targeted ads. For directories this really does open up secondary options for submission to your directory, and for bloggers it extends your opportunity to place an ad zone onto your blog.
Some cautions for the first timers, put your ads on family friendly / auto or select the manual approval option to avoid some embarrassing or wrongly placed ads. You may also choose to vary the number of ads you bring in, apply banners if you want them, in-line text ads, full page ads, in picture ads (which would suit some blogs) along with several other options.
If you would like to look closer at what we have done you can view our page here TRYINHERE/ADBRITE and we are happy for all to copy (in your own way) our work and hope that it can be of help to you in the optimisation of your blog / web directory.
For those setting up a directory the base category / sub category settings are Technology > Online Directories and for blogs News > Chat Forums & Weblogs
You can follow this link to get to ADBRITE (It is our referral link) this costs you nothing but is a way of saying thanks if you like our work / idea's. If you have any questions drop us a message below. Wishing your continued success
tryinhere.com