New AdVolcano Coming Soon - Jason Rodriguez Speaks

A Special Insider Story with AdVolcano VP Jason Rodriguez

I have been a member with AdVolcano since May of 2007. Initially when I joined I came with high hopes and a very positive feeling about their advertisement system and business model. All in all, it looked great and appeared to be something that could work.

What is Advolcano?

As provided on their website they say, “AdVolcano was founded in 2004 by several aspiring entrepreneurs that shared an innate desire for success. AdVolcano’s model allows publishers to create innovative ad placements without the restraints of a traditional network.” And what that means is that AdVolcano is one of the first agencies that allow publishers to create their own campaigns for their blogs or sites. If you want to create a sidebar campaign, top page campaign or even a footer section campaign… AdVolcano gives you the tools to do so. Second aspect that captured my interest in their system was the fact that I can set my own prices and advertisement terms. I can create a home page only campaign and offer advertisers to join a 1 day only display, a 7 day only display, 30 day display, etc… Advolcano allows you to build your own ads the way you want and how you want; from there, they will help sell them.

This all sounds amazing, doesn’t it? It sounded great to me when I signed up. But as the months have gone by I have seen a complete different story unfold. The truth of the matter has been the fact that I haven’t generated any income from AdVolcao since May. Yet, my blog is one of the leading blogs that advertise and promote their service. As covered in a previously written article, my blog lead the way for the entire business category:

advolcano-business

A few days ago, I decided to finally pull out and drop their program. Prior to dropping out, I gave the Advolcano team many opportunities to come forward and talk with me. On Sept. 9th I sent in an email with a very simple and legitimate question:

advolcano-first-email

I never received a response from them, but I was patient and still continued to broadcast their Advolcano name and display a beautifully designed custom campaign on my sidebar:

cancel-bidvertiser-advolcano

My email never got returned and I on Sept. 27th I attempted to contact them again by email:

advolcano-second-email

Along the way, I had made numerous attempts to contact them by phone. A few hours later, I decided to go ahead and go live with an article that I had been preparing for a few weeks. Sure enough, just two days after publishing the story, Jason Rodriguez paid a visit to my blog and dropped me a comment:

advolcano-comment-response

In an article I found after doing a Google search, it is claimed that Jason Rodriguez is the vice president of business development for AdVolcano, but I wasn’t able to find any information about him on this page. So, as it stands I really don’t know who he is, other than the fact that I finally have the attention I have been requesting for about three weeks. Overall, I wanted to learn more about AdVolcano and their future business plans. A few hours after Jason left the comment on my previously written article, he took the time to write me a personal email. In the email it shared quite a bit of information about a “New AdVolcano” that they have in the works. He addressed one of my more important questions regarding how bloggers can find success using AdVolcano. Jason Rodriguez says, “Some of the new features in our system align directly with the question you asked in your last email.” He then continues to explain to me about what we all as bloggers, advertisers and publishers can expect to see that will help us all find success using their “New AdVolcano” service. “We will be introducing several major updates that do just that.” Jason also wanted to make it known that they do value the importance providing superior levels of customer support. Even though didn’t witness an example of that first hand, he replies, “I’d like to apologize for our lack of communication. Customer support is something our team takes very seriously.” he then adds, “but rest assured this won’t be a problem when we go live with the new AdVolcano.”

I really hope to see all of these positives happen for AdVolcano and Jason Rodriguez. He continues on by giving me an inside scoop on some of the new things we can expect to see from AdVolcano:

Default CPC Ads, where publishers will now have the option to run CPC ads to backfill any unsold ad inventory. Jason mentions, “This will help publishers generate revenue during transitional periods where ads are unsold.”.

Jason further mentions that they will have a new Offer Platform where advertisers will have the ability to negotiate prices directly with publishers. His comment about this is as follows, “One of the problems I often encounter is the difficulty publishers have in pricing their own ads. If the price is too high the advertiser is deterred and opportunities hit a dead-end.”

I must add here that I ran a $1.00 campaign for three months and never made one sale. So, this new “Offer Platform” I hope that works… but as it stands, I don’t know how much cheaper I am willing to advertise people on my blog!

But, keeping things in perspective here, Jason continues on by saying that by opening the negotiation process advertisers will be able to produce value where it lacked previously, influencing more sales. I really hope that works out and I can find that being very useful. But I just can’t help but to be reminded about my $1.00 campaign.

Jason reiterates his point by adding, “Let me put it this way… if a publisher has five ad placements available, and continues to sell three spots month after month at $100 he will gross $300/month. Although, if the publisher allows advertisers to place lower offers he has the chance of generating more interest and possibly selling the remaining two ad placements for a lesser price, such as $75. In the end, more ads go sold and publishers see a healthy boost in their bottom-line revenue.”

In closing of the email Jason was very professional and invited me to join back and bring my business once again to AdVolcano, “These are all tools we have built specifically to influence more revenue opportunities for publishers. I hope that you can look past our foul-ups so that we can reopen business relations in the future.”

In an email back to Jason, I asked him for permission to cover the story and he agreed, but stated that I wasn’t allowed to mention on specific part of their “New AdVolcano” that he mentioned to me… you guys will just have to wait and see.

Overall, I totally respect Jason Rodriguez and his AdVolcano team. I have to remind myself that in the business world of the Internet, its a lot different than the regular corporate world of America. Businesses like AdVolcano comprise of teams of people that are just like me. AdVolcano was founded in 2004 by several aspiring entrepreneurs. And in my book, that deserves a lot of respect and support. I think I can accept the previously made mistakes by AdVolcano and I am totally willing to give them a second chance. You should too! I will re-open my account with them once they have made a public announcement of their release of the “New AdVolcano”.

For more questions, comments and suggestions, I would almost guarantee that the lines of communication have been re-opened between the public and AdVolcano. You can find their contact info here.

I really look forward to the release of the “New Advolcano” in the near future and I want to thank Jason Rodriguez for finally taking the time to contact me back and answer a few of my questions.

GarryConn

Posted on September 29th, 2007. 4 Comments

WordPress Search Page Oozes Free Money

Everyone who wants to make money online wants easy tricks in the business. Well, really there isn’t any magic tricks to speak of but there are some thing that you can do to help… what’s the right word, ah “Tweak things“. Yeah.. tweak, that’s a good word!

WordPress comes built in with a really neat feature… Now hang on, this is a mouthful!

Search Engine Friendly Search Results Permalink Structure

What does that mean?

It means that, in a WordPress Blog you link up random words in your blog post to go direct to a search engine friendly keyword driven url.

Follow those links above and you will see how I have turned this:

… into this:

Social blogs are touchy… every social blogger wants to make money off their blog, but they don’t want to piss their readers off in the process. So, why not make special pages for monetization and keep your social blog free and clear for your readers?

For one, most social blogger in my niche crowd are people just like me… We are a huge group of bloggers that blog about making money online to each other… bla, bla, bla, blog, blog, blog.

If you read my blog, chances are that you already know about Adsense and chances are (and its been proven) you are not going to click my Adsense ads. However, I can use the link power of my social blog to purposely create pages that will target the type of people that will click the ads.

The search results page is perfect for this.

Here is how to monetize your WordPress search results page… first thing is to open your search.php page. Use FTP or use the WordPress theme editor.

Look for this line of code on the top of the page:

<h2 class=”pagetitle”>Search Results</h2>

Replace it with this:

<h2 class=”pagetitle”><?php the_search_query(); ?> - <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></h2>
<p>Here is a list of articles related to <?php the_search_query(); ?>.</p>

In most cases, you will also see this directly below it:

just get rid of that completely. You don’t want to give away too many options for the visitors. The goal here is to create a very search engine friendly page that leads visitors to great relevant references. Adsense ads as well as your own results being show below the ads.

After removing the page navigation code, replace it with this:

<p>Here is a list of articles related to <?php the_search_query(); ?>.</p>

Directly below that link is where you will want to add your Adsense code. I am using three 336×380s.

Congratulations! You have now monetized your search result pages using Google Adsense! Save your page and upload it back to your server.

Continue blogging like your normally would. After you are done writing your post, quickly skim over the context before publishing and hyperlink a few good keyword phrases that would return some really nice looking search result pages.

The URL structure will always be the same:

http://www.yourname.com/search/Keyword+Phrase/

The big picture of things is that you are building indexable and search engine friendly pages for the purpose of monetization. These pages help you make money but allow you an option towards doing it without taking away from the quality of your blog and creating an eye sore for your readers. This is a great way to make money with your social blog but not create a huge eye sore for your regular readers.

GarryConn

Posted on September 29th, 2007. 11 Comments

Garry’s Long Lost Blogging Brother

Ok, so I am sure a lot of people know that I have a lot of blogs, right? Man, I never realized that I had a long lost blogging brother. No wonder I never met him, because we are both always blogging…

Well… anyway, enjoy the video, I have to get back to blogging.

Posted on September 29th, 2007. 3 Comments

Make Money With Next Internet Millionaire

Ok… so if you have been reading by blog for the last few days, you might know that I had a little spat with Joel Comm. Its a pretty interesting story that I will be sharing with you in a later post. I can tell you this, Joel Comm is actually a very cool and down to earth guy. We spoke this afternoon on the phone for about an hour and he shared with me a lot of information about himself and how he got to where he is today. His story is amazingly interesting as it truly reflects a mirror image of my life today as his life was only ten short years ago. It was absolutely an amazing opportunity to have with him and so as it stands for the record: I am a big horses ass! with a big mouth! lol

However, my rant was totally legitimate but now it is time for me to back up my bark with my bite. My main complaint about the show was that I felt there was no awareness about the show. All in all there was no system in place for helping bloggers create a buzz.

Well… either it was coincidence or a miracle or a mixture of both… all in all, I call it great timing! I have now been given all the tools I need to help promote the show and even make money online doing it! Revver has developed a WordPress plugin that give WordPress bloggers an easy way to include embedded Revver videos on your blog posts. I can now make money by showing embedded Revver videos on my blogs. Totally amazing!

The great thing is… you can do this too! Any blogger who as a self hosted WordPress blog can install this simple widget and instantly provide video for their readers. With The Next Internet Millionaire being shown, this is a perfect opportunity for you to syndicate the show on your blog and make some money doing it.

So many people struggle with Google Adsense, so many people struggle with capturing the attention of readers and gaining traffic to their blogs. Well, I think I have a great solution for you. I really do! This is amazing…

How would you like to be one of the first few pioneer bloggers to be able to deliver the highest level of quality online videos on your blog? Secondly, what if I told you that you can do this and also get paid money for it? Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well… this is not a dream, this is not a fluke.

Mark my words, “Syndicating video on your blog is the next hottest way to monetize your blog!”

And name one better way to start, than syndicating The Next Internet Millionaire from your blog?

This post serves as an intro post to this brand new technology that is instantly available to WordPress bloggers, that is instantly going to change and re-map how you make money online. The problem that most bloggers discover with making money online is the simple fact that, one: it takes content, and two: it takes traffic in order to succeed.

With this brand new technology available, writing content on your blog should come easy and second nature to you. Being realistic here, all you have to do is sit back, grab some popcorn and a drink and watch videos and then automatically upload the video to your blog and provide some really cool juicy commentary about the video. I am personally going to have so much fun with this, I am almost drooling! My heart is racing… and I already have plans to execute this technology on a few of my video specific blogs. Do you want a reference? Check out Celebrity Videos Blog dot Com… this will be my first blog that I totally dedicate to this new money making technology. I am going to have so much fun posting videos, writing some great content related to the videos and making money online doing it.

For a long time, I have always had to control myself and maintain my time because of how addictive online videos are. Seriously, if I am not careful, I can look up at the clock and discover that I have been watching online videos for hours without doing any productive work! Today, I am no longer going to kick myself in the butt for slacking off by watching online videos. Why? Simple, because I can have fun and watch the videos and then click a button and instantly have it uploaded to my WordPress blog. From there, while the video is fresh on my mind, I can invest about 10 minutes into writing a post about it which will then thrust my post into the search engines giving me tons of traffic.

I can’t wait to share more information about this with you. I am so excited… I have no doubt in my mind that this will be my next move in the business of making money online.

In the mean time, I want to leave you with Episode Six of The Next Internet Millionaire. After you watch the video, click the share button, from there you will see how easy it is to share this video with all your readers on your own blog. Also, check out Google and see which blog is listed not only once but twice for episode six. {hint hint}

Enjoy watching the video, and be sure to share it with all your friends. In my next few posts I am going to share some vital information with you that will show you how to be successful with making money online by sharing online videos. But in the mean time, you’ll have to excuse me while I go out and capitalize on this on about 10 of my video related blogs. This will be such a success, not only can I smell the money, I can taste it too… and once you know what money tastes like, you’ll always crave more! This technology is a huge breakthrough and its brand new! I have instantly thrown all my plans away for the day, week and possibly the month… I am going to be going full force with this and I would advice you to do the same.

What amazing timing! Right now… we have at our disposal the very first Internet reality TV show happening right now as we speak! Couple that with this brand new WordPress video embedding technology… that equals money! and a lot of it…

Garry Conn

Footnote: Here is an example post on my celebrity videos blog. My good friend David Cooley was quick to start using the Plugin, you can check out his post here.

Posted on September 28th, 2007. 4 Comments

Say Bye Bye To Bidvertiser and AdVolcano

I have been messing around a little bit for about a month with BidVertiser and Advolcano on my blog. Actually I have messed around with both programs on many of my blogs.

bidvertiser

With the type of blog I have here on Garry Conn dot Com, running Bidvertiser really isn’t optimal. It takes up a lot of valuable real estate and it conflicts with many of the other successful programs I have running such as the newly updated ReviewMe.com, Text-Link-Ads, Google Adsense (displayed below the posts) and my very own highly successful Top Page Ads program.

Don’t get me wrong, I think BidVertiser is a great program and an excellent alternative to those who choose to not run Google Adsense or other pay per click programs. But I don’t think that it is right for Garry Conn dot Com. It does, however, perform well on other sites of mine, but with Garry Conn dot Com, it takes up too much valuable real estate for the amount it compensates me for.

Having that said… say, “Bye Bye, BidVertiser!”

Poor, poor, poor AdVolcano. I just don’t think they are doing well. I have tried many times to make contact with them and I have never had any responses back. I can not do business with anyone who doesn’t return my emails or phone calls. It’s sad too, because I have many sites that offer up some really great campaigns for their advertisers. AdVolcano is failing to deliver business. I am more than doing my part and lead in many top result listings by reporting the highest traffic stats.

I rank #2 for their entire business category and haven’t received a single sale. I have freely advertised their business by giving them over a countless number of free page impressions. I have done more than most people would be willing to do to help another business out.

I can’t help but noticed that they have shady business practices as well. For the hundreds of blogs who I am personally friends with who are also advertising AdVolcao on their blogs for free, AdVolcano chooses to make a few select blogs as “Featured Blogs” while they don’t even actively do their part and display the banner on their site. Let’s not mention any names:

Because of their shady business practices, because they don’t return my emails or phone calls and because hundreds of my own personal blogging friends have worked hard to give them free advertising and free traffic without giving us anything in return…

… Garry Conn says, “Bye Bye AdVolcano, and I hope your volcano goes bank ‘erupt‘.

Within the next week I will be completely removing all my campaigns and deleting my AdVolcano account.

The removal of BidVertiser and AdVolcano will free up a lot of wasted space on my sidebar and also allow me to more closely study traffic trends and study which areas of my blog are hot and which are not.

All in all, I went well beyond the average effort taken to help these two companies. I even created a custom campaign and designed custom graphics to match and compliment my current theme. As far as Advolcano is concerned, if that doesn’t deserve a phone call back, then I don’t know what does. Again, with BidVertiser, the poor performance is accepted and expected. BidVertiser works fine on other blogs of mine.

GarryConn