Announcing Easy Ads – Dynamic, Simple Blog Advertising
Many of us don’t have killer Photoshop skills. We have been hearing from Partners Advertisers that they need an easy way to put an ad together without having to hire a designer, with an emphasis on “ease” and “speed”. Taking this feedback on board we have built a new system for Performancing Partners; “Easy Ads“.
The launch of Easy Ads also marks the official opening of Performancing Partners to advertisers. We’ve been open to publishers for a couple of weeks, and have even been taking orders from advanced advertisers, but now we feel we’ve got all the advertiser features and tools in place and are ready to start pushing that side Partners.
Easy Ads has one mission, and that is to create a text based graphic to draw attention and click throughs. Because of this simple goal there is just enough flexibility to do that, and only that. While there are considerable branding benefits possible with graphical ads (and it’s always been possible to upload 125×125 ads on the system), what you are aiming for is to get attention enough that the visitor will roll over the ad, see the hover box and click.
To create an ad you simply type your text in the first box and use the formatting tools just like a word processor or PFF, setting the colours, alignment, border, font and font size. The live preview will show you exactly what the finished product will look like. When you are happy you can move on to the next screen where you choose your rollover text and destination URL, etc.
As a first stab at this we think it works pretty well. Feedback from beta testers was positive but of course we need to know what advertisers make of it. It is after all there to be useful! Please do take it for a test drive and tell us what you think?
Please take Easy Ads for a test drive and tell us what you think!
Trimming Startup Fat
Over the last year of Performancing, we’ve built some cool tools, posted some killer tutorials and built a community of over 26,000 professional bloggers. Not bad for a company started from virtually nothing.
It’s not been a year without lessons though, and of all the many lessons we’ve learned running a transparent community based company, the biggest is “get your business model sorted early”. We’re just starting to bring in money as a company, and this is good, but to survive, and mature as a startup we need to look at areas that are draining resources while not producing income.
Killing Metrics
The biggest pull on company resources is Metrics. Our pro-grade blog analytics service. It currently has around 16,000 registered blogs using it, and though it’s cool, it’s not producing.
There is no other blog analytics program out there that can scale as Metrics was built to. I remember MeasureMap showing signs of buckling under just a few hundred users but it takes a lot of bandwidth, and 3 very high grade servers to run the current system.
At this stage, and in the current climate of “free” everything, I’m neither prepared to put ads on it nor charge for it — What’d I’d like to do, is to give Metrics to the community by making it Open Source, or sell Metrics to a company with more financial resources that could continue to develop it, and benefit from the usebase.
We’ll decide for sure in the next week or so, but our current hosting agreement ends mid december and the decision has been taken to not move Metrics over to the new servers in it’s current state.
I will let you know more about this when the details are finalized. If anyone has ideas of what to do with Metrics, then please post here, or contact me privately ast nick@performancing.com
Monetizing Archives
With two major feature releases that will see Partners, our up and coming blog advertising network become more useful to publishers without ads yet, and easier to use for advertisers, our focus is tuned to giving that service the time it needs to mature, and to grow — We’ve no doubt it will become a great source of income for us as a company, and the bloggers who particpate in it, but it will take a little time.
One of the things we can do is to monetize our archives. We’ve always said that that’s where the money is anyway right? 
So, over the next few days I’ll be working on putting a contextual ad service on posts, aswell as show our own Partners ads on all pages of the website — showing our own ads will put us in the same boat as our publishers and will hopefully provide us with some valuable learning experiences from your side of the equation aswell as produce income for the company.
Moving forward in 2007
The tighter, leaner and more profitable Performancing will consist of the Partners network, and our #1 blogging editor Performancing Firefox (which by the way, now has around 350,000 downloads!).
I hope you, the Performancing community, will understand the need to trim and streamline our services, and that you’ll support us and help us by making suggestions and letting the blogosphere know that we’re looking for help.
Comments and thoughts welcomed as always.
Performancing for Firefox 1.3.5 released!
Hello everyone, I’m pleased to announce the release of
Performancing for Firefox 1.3.5.
Not to long ago we talked about the Roadmap for the 1.4 release, and what we have in store. However with recent changes in the Blogger.com service, we thought it would be a good idea to have an intermediate release with bugfixes and better Blogger.com support. So here we are with 1.3.5!
Additions and Fixes:
1) Better Spell-check support in Firefox 2.0. Both Rich and normal editing now have spell-check, along with bug fixes and you can now switch easily between different languages provided you have more
than one dictionary installed
2) Fixed Blogger support. This release now works with both normal and Beta blogger accounts.
3) Added Label (tag) support to blogger. Note this only works with Blogger Beta accounts at this moment. You can add labels to your post via the ‘Categs’ tab. You will see a new button called “Add Category” at the bottom where you can add posts to your account. You can also see what your history items have and change their categories.
4) Improved Account manager. Better auto-detect and added ability to select what blogs
you want added to your list. i.e. if you have more than on blog under
the same API and username, before PFF would add them all, now you can
de-select (while holding down the ctrl key) the ones you don’t want to add.
5) Fixed a Master Password issue. If you have a master password set in Firefox, PFF should now only ask you for your password once.
6) Draft support for Blogger
7) Window Icon for windows and Linux (when opening PFF in a window).
Prevent duplicate tag and ‘powered by …’ insertion in posts.
9) Experimental newMediaObject image and file uploading. For blog systems that support image uploads (MT, wordpress, Drupal, etc.) You can now try the ‘Upload Via API’ button in the image uploading window. Please note this is experimental, if you have issues or it works for you, please let us know so we can improve it.
10) MacOSX Rich Edit view corruption fixed. The cursor should no longer get lost in long posts on MacOSX
Know Issues:
1) Bookmarking to delicious on blogger accounts only works with blogger beta for the time being.
2) Embedding Flash and other Media in a blogger post doesn’t always work. I’ve written an article on on how to embed videos, etc. in blogger here.
3) Long titles in Blogger posts get cut off in history mode. For some reason the history atom feeds we get from blogger only allow an X amount (50 chars I think). So if you edit a post with a long title in PFF, PFF will only load the first 50 chars of it. To fix this for now until Blogger changes this on their side is to copy your original long title and paste it back into pff for post you are editing. This is a know issue by the Blogger devs and should be fixed soon without any needed changes to PFF.
Thank you all who helped us test it in the multiple beta releases, and a thank you to the Blogger team at Google for the great improvements in the latest API and being very responsive to our questions.
For those interested in what will be version 1.4. Head over to the PFF 1.4 Roadmap post and make yourself heard!
As always, if you have any support questions or problems, head to the PFF Forums and we will be sure to help you out!
Technorati Tags: performancing, firefox, blogger, blogging
[Closed] Looking for a few beta testers
Added: We now have enough beta testers so no more beta testers are being accepted. Thanks!
We’re looking to launch a new feature for advertisers next week, and I was hoping we might get a few Performancing guys to beta test it before we launch. If you’re interested in trying out the new service, you dont have to be an advertiser, just a member of Performancing.
We’ve been working hard on a way to allow people to create simple text ads instead of having to upload a created 125×125px ad – not a real text ad, but a created image. It needs some testing as we need to make sure there are no platform dependency bugs before it’s made available generally.
How to Help
Please comment here, or send me a private message and I’ll add you to the group, and will email you to let you know what to do.
Thanks everyone
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Partners Blog Spotlight: Gadgets
You will notice our Performancing Partners network is continuing to grow nicely so we thought it was time to dive into the list and take a look at the blogs that are available to advertisers. Today, seeing as I am a complete geek, I am going to look at Gadget blogs.
One of the tough things about the more techy blog topics is the need to know a great deal of details about a wide range of product categories, otherwise your blog ends up reading like an endless stream of press-release puffery. Is that keychain really revolutionary or did you just copy and paste some more BS Mr Blogger, hmm?
One way to avoid having to know everything about everything is to focus on a “niche of a niche” as Mobile Mentalism and RIMarkable have done. The main benefit to this is you can completely cover your topic extremely well and become an authority (or *the* authority).
RIMarkable
RIMarkable is about the much loved (and addicting) Blackberry device. You could say RIMarkable is in a niche, of a niche, of a niche! If you want to keep abreast of this gadgets news and rumours then this is place. Talk about blogs that own their niche, if you wanted to link to a Blackberry blog would you point to Engadget or RIMarkable?
While it took a second glance to realise what I thought was navigation were in fact sponsored links the template is crisp and clean and the content light hearted and certainly works for the audience.
Mobile Mentalism
Phone fans are known for their appetite for both specs and pictures. Mobile phones are now both a serious multimedia / productivity gadget AND a fashion accessory. Mobile Mentalism manages to offer both in spades. The pictures are BIG so the blog will probably appeal to broadband users rather than being read ON a phone but this does mean you get to see every little detail.
Red Ferret Journal
Of course it doesn’t all have to be serious, earnest, hard core tech, the gadget niche is fun too. This is the area covered by the funkily named Red Ferret Journal which reminds me of a gadget-focused BoingBoing. Best of all the Partners ad is displayed well above the fold, heh.
Fosfor Gadgets
As the gadget crowd are almost certainly going to be web savvy (being classic early adopters) design as well as content does matter and you need your RSS button right in your face. The blog needs to work well in Firefox but also probably Safari and obscure PDAs too. I can’t speak for if this works in other browsers and devices but something about Fosfor Gadgets design appeals to me, go take a look.
I particularly like the little box in the top right of the page that tells you what the blog is about. It’s a good little tip for any blog, make sure within seconds your visitor knows where they are, what they can see and why they should stay. As well as the RSS feed link it is sometimes good to link to your top content in an area such as this.
Summary
For anyone with an electronic product to sell Gadget blogs are a perfect place to advertise. The people who read these types of blogs tend to go with their wallets half open. Unlike some niches, it doesn’t matter that they already just bought a gadget, gadget fans are always ready to upgrade. In fact just browsing the blogs today could work out quite expensive for me unless my wife intervenes.
The trick with the gadget category is to not just be a mirror for the “name” gadget blogs and actually produce original or at least uncommon content. This is especially tricky as these blogs thrive on product reviews, doubly hard for those on a budget. It’s good to see Partners gadget blogs managing to inform, entertain, and look good.
First Performancing Partners Payments sent
Some of you lucky Partners members got paid today. Well, I say “lucky” but as partners members you are obviously smart (and probably good-looking too), heh.
Detailed reporting is coming in time for next months payments, for this month we had to prioritise just getting the payments out.
You will have been paid via PayPal to the email address in your Performancing user account (in “my account” menu option over in right hand column). If your usual PayPal address is different to the one we sent money to you can go into your normal PayPal account and add the other address to pick up your money.
The money paid is either for ads bought on your blog or for referring a blogger who has had a paid ad, or a paying advertiser. I hope this helps explain things if you are feeling confused why you got paid today.
Don’t worry if it wasn’t your turn this month, just remind visitors to your blog that ad spots are available and to double your chance of earning also point out where to join if they are not already a member!
Making Partners ads more useful to publishers
There have been some small discussion points and requests surrounding unused slots with Partners blog ads, and we’ve also had a few thoughts in this regard, so wanted to open up discussion with publishers and find out what ideas are out there.
Let me explain what i mean first: If you have chosen to show a maximum of 6 ads in your Partners ad block, but have not yet filled your available slots, what could we help you do with them?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. We all know that finding a set of advertisers for your blog can take time, but that doesnt necessarily mean that your ad spots should go to waste right?
Tell me what you think, and let’s get the discussion rolling…
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