Tags: | blog promotion | co-op advertising | digitalpoint |

2007-07-30 20:20

My Most Recent Experiment in Blog Promotion

I recently ran across the forums at digitalpoint.com and I was surprised to find a very active and large community of web developers talking about everything from domain name sales to server-side scripting. There is a blogging sub forum, and they have a very interesting revenue sharing program for active members - I am surprised this is the first time I've seen the place. Despite finding such a good community to get involved in, what excited me most was their Co-op Advertising Network. The co-op idea should be familiar to most of you, the term "co-op" could be defined as a group of people working together to benefit everyone involved, and this is exactly what the advertising network does. Once you've joined the program you are asked to put an ad script on your website, and once you start showing ads of other co-op members you are given "weight", basically the currency that allows you to show your own ads on the network. You are given weight based on the number of pages that your site has indexed in google, and you are given additional weight once your average pageviews have been calculated. There are other more complex factors in calculating weight, including page rank, but that's the general idea. So, in exchange for showing the ads of other co-op members, your ads are shown on their pages. The system allows for graphical banner ads, text ads, and text link ads - it is quite flexible. If you look on my sidebar under "UPC Tech Blog Sponsors" you will see three text links, all being served by this program. As of now my weight is much lower than other people in the network, and I am waiting for the stats on my one ad to tell me when the ad is shown, but I have great expectations.

There are also hidden benefits to this program besides the potentially increased traffic. For example, the links in the ads do not have the no follow attribute, so search engines can potentially count your ad shown on another site as a backlink if they happen to crawl a page that is showing your ad. Another cool feature is the ability to use your weight on ads for sites that aren't participating in the co-op; for example, if I was showing ads on my well established and successful blog, but wanted to promote my newest project, I could put all of the weight accumulated by the established blog behind ads for the new site. I've seen a lot of "exchanges" lately, stumble exchanges, digg exchanges, comment exchanges; this co-op exemplifies the exchange idea, and it has better organization and power behind it than any of the other ideas I've seen yet. I can envision a whole gang of bloggers who are concerned with promoting their blogs embracing this program and taking part, benefiting themselves and everyone involved. If it sounds like something you are interested in, come join me.

Beyond the benefits to traffic, I have to say that the programming involved to put this together is also impressive, and I applaud the webmaster at digitalpoint, Shawn, for such great work. What started out as, "a coding exercise" for him turned into something quite successful. If you want to read more about the history of the project check out the Co-op Ad Network History. And if you have any questions, just stop by the forum I mentioned way at the top, they have a whole sub forum devoted to the project. Hope to see your ad on my page soon!

- Kevin
Kevin (at) Upcsite (dot) Net

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