Great Ad Network for Owners of Niche Websites
I came across this ad network a couple of days ago and am impressed by how easy it is to get setup and in position to accept banner ads from larger advertisers without lifting a finger. What’s really nice is my Google ads will keep running up until the time I, or a community I’m connected with, get an advertisers to place an ad in the preset ad spot. Only upside.
Larger advertisers have a tough time reaching niches that are perfect for their products. That’s because most niches are made of small- and medium-sized websites and it’s very efficient for them to establish manage individual relationships with each of them.
This ad network solve this problem by letting Website publishers combine ad inventory through a social network-style matching system to “roll-up” their ad space into highly targeted packages that advertisers can buy across. By grouping your ad space together with a community of sites like yours, you give advertisers a way to find your site and other relevant publishers (with similar audiences) that they might not otherwise have discovered. More importantly, these advertisers can easily establish campaigns across all of these smaller sites encouraging them to do so.
The ad network is Adroll and I encourage you to check it out starting with the short video clip below. I’d also appreciate if you would check out 3 communities I’ve setup for moms and WAHMs.
The Mother Hood – Momz – WAHMs
Bloom Your Blog
Unless you blog to avoid having to spend money on therapy then you probably want more readers then you currently have. I’m no pro so I’ve been surfing around looking at other successful blogs and trying to grab some ideas.
I found some great info over at the Internet Marketing Sweetie Blog by Alice Seba. I’d summarize here, but she did such a nice job cutting to the chase it would be just as fast to give her blog a quick visit. How to Get Blog Traffic – 11 Steps to Growing Readership
You’ll also find some invaluable advise on affiliate marketing that can go a long way towards making your addiction to blogging pay for itself or perhaps even some extra gas money (albeit not much).
Blog on!
The WAHMs Toolbox – 100 Links and Resources
This site, Bootstrapper, has assembled a nice list of web resources for mompreneurs and WAHMs. They’ve organized hundreds of quality sites into sections including; ‘articles’, ‘blogs’, ‘networks’, ‘business resources for women’, ‘parenting’, ‘work at home resources and ideas’, ‘time management’ and the ever useful ‘miscellaneous’. Check it out here: The WAHMs Toolbox – 100 Links and Resources.
Earn 49 cents a day!!!
If that title got you this far I hope it’s curiosity at work and not excitement over earning 49 cents a day!
But, in the event you are looking for ways to earn a little extra like so many of us with websites here’s a little information about an advertising network that I really like:
They call themselves Project Wonderful 
and their system really is pretty wonderful. It’s the easiest ad network provider that I’ve ever used as a publisher (website owner) and it’s also the easiest from the advertisers perspective. It only takes a few minutes to get setup (adding their ad code to your site) and within minutes prospective advertisers will begin submitting their READY-TO-RUN banner ads to you for approval. If you’re ok with the ad you click a link and the ad will begin running almost immediately.
What’s really cool is the advertisers bid for placement on your site so as more advertisers line up the more they’ll bid. This competition is what I like the most about their business model. Of course it isn’t a get rich quick scheme, especially for those of us who have small websites, but as the sites grow in traffic and the ad network grows in popularity and numbers of registered advertisers, the bids will increase without the need to create a media kit, change pricing, or do anything other than tend to the site and approve ads.
It’s been a few days since I got started and the ads are generating 49 cents a day right now and rising all the time. It’s not much, but I really do believe in this and I’m already bringing in more then the Google ads were fetching for me.
You can find ad spots here on WAHM Blog and on these sites:
moms dot com and moms dot com directory
dads dot com and dads dot com directory
Check it out for yourself!
How Mompreneurs Use Elance to Find Clients
I’ve been familiar with Elance for years and although I’ve never utilized it I’m aware of many situations where entrepreneurs and clients have connected to do great things together. What is Elance you ask? Here’s how they describe themselves: “Elance is an online workplace where businesses find and hire people “on demand” to get work done quickly and cost effectively.”
Elance recently posted a series of 3 mom articles about mompreneurs that utilize Elance to keep business rolling in. The most recent article was about Sue Kristoff 
who started her business, The Kristoff Group LLC, after she had a couple of children and decided to trade in her daily commute and co-workers for her family. Her freelance technical writing business is doing well and she spends about 10 hours a week serving clients right now while her kids are young. Sounds like a great plan to me!
The other two articles offer glimpses into two other moms that have decided to take control over their time and destiny. They can be found on the Elance blog here:
Successful Recipe for Mompreneurs and How Lisa uses Elance
We salute these moms who are living the WAHM dream.
WAHM Blogs
Here is a list of some WAHM blogs worth checking out:
Internet Marketing for Mommies
Randomly Chaotic and Frequently Mundance
Using Thumbnails on Your Website
No, we’re not talking about scratching your website’s eyes out with your thumbnail… We’re talking about the small pictures of websites that you see on some sites like the Momz.com directory for example. Momz.com presents a thumbnail of every one of the 1,500 or so websites listed in the directory. This helps the visitor determine which sites are worth visiting with a quick glance.
These “thumbnails” help filter out foreign sites, offensive sites, and generally offer us a better surfing experience.
We use Thumbshots, a free tool to pull the thumbnail images from their database and present them when needed. All they ask for in return for this highly useful service is a link back to their site on your website.
To show you how easy it is I’ll explain what I did to add the thumbnails to this post:
- Register at Thumbshots
- Once registered they share the small piece of code needed to add the thumbs to any post or web page you want.
- Using WordPress you just place your cursor where you want to insert the thumbnail and press the picture icon just as you would to insert any photograph.
- This time you’ll enter the code from Thumbshots and after the “=” equal sign simply type in the URL of the website and like magic their tool pulls the thumb of the website and places it where you wanted it.
- To move the thumbnail over to the left and have the text wrap around it using WordPress you click on the
image, click on the LEFT justify icon or button and the picture is moved to left and text wraps around automatically.
Give it a try on your website. Post any questions in the comments area and we’ll try to help.
Top 100 Sites
If you sell products from your website you need to take advantage of Top 100 Sites that allow you to get your business listed with a brief description, a link, and in many cases a banner ad. The cost? Free!
WAHM Break Cafe has 3 such sites that we manage and the traffic these sites get and deliver is solid and growing all the time.
The original one online for a couple of years now is WAHM Shopping Mall.
Two newer Top 100 sites that deliver some traffic are:
Moms Top 100 and our very own WAHM Break Cafes Top 100.
Check ‘em out. They’re open to woman owned businesses. Banner ads on top are $5 per month. Banner ads and listings within the Top 100 listings are totally free, BUT you’ll need to be sure to link back to the site(s) from your site or your listing will be taken down.
Landing Page Design and Conversion
During some routine surfing of some Webmaster resource sites I came across a useful article by a search engine expert and thought I’d share it with you since so many of you sell products. The article, ‘11 Ways to Improve Landing Pages‘ on Social Patterns was written some time ago, but the recommendations continue to be solid and worth a quick read if you want to increase your conversion rates and success in selling online.
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