I’ve found an ad network called Clickbooth CPA Network, and have signed up as a publisher. I figured I’d write up a review of the whole process as it happens, so that you can see my experience and determine if it’s a network you’d like to get into for your site or blog.

From the Clickbooth website:

Formed in September 2002, Clickbooth has developed an affordable, profitable, scalable and technologically-advanced organization over the years. Our team includes experts in the fields of advertising, publishing, technology and design.

The first step was to go to the Clickbooth site and sign up as a publisher. It’s a very simple setup, beginning with your name, address, etc. and then moving on to a verification tool that I thought was pretty neat. You enter your phone number, and the system calls you and gives you a verification PIN code which you must then enter on the site. The site follows along with the phone call so it’s very simple to do.

Next step was to enter your website/s. Here’s where I ran into something a little odd, but basically you can enter as many sites as you want (I started with three), but you can only choose one category. The problem here is that all three of the sites I entered have different topics. I don’t like the fact that you can’t select the category for each site. But I entered all three sites and chose the category for the first one, and then in the comments section made a not about that, stating what the topics were for the other two sites. Not sure if it’ll mean much, but I made the effort.

Now comes the waiting period. I get a confirmation message that one of their reviewers will get back to me within 72 hours. Not sure if it’ll be a phone call or an email, but we’ll see what happens, and I’ll finish this post then.

Update 5/1/08: It is now 5 days after I did the signup, and nothing heard back from them yet. I have only to say that this is a huge disappointment for me. I was really looking forward to being able to do this review for you all before posting, but I feel that this is an important piece of information for anyone who might be interested… It’s going to take longer than the 72 hours they tell you. Clearly a lot longer.

Should I hear back from them, I’ll be happy to update this post further at that time.

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As of right this second, you and your business have just over a month before the arrival of 2008. Businesses plan entire months worth of meetings around a new year, trying to come up with new and creative ideas for marketing their company. There are product development teams and consultants working together, press release management campaigns going on, and sales teams pushing products or services like mad in order to make the profit margin greater than it was last year.

Even small businesses are planning radio and television ads, booking up their spots in the newspapers and ad books, cleaning up their yellow pages listings, you name it.

But what about online marketing? There are budgets for everything else, but how do you know what you’re going to have to set aside for the new year in terms of the internet?

1. Take note of any recurring payments you may need to make. This means hosting and web design fees, directory listing subscriptions (some are one-time fees and some, like Yahoo’s $299 fee are annual), your SEO company’s monthly fees (and any increases that might be made for service adjustments), and so on. These are the basics of your online budget, as they are things that your business should not be online without.
2. Analyze the places your site isn’t listed, and add those fees to your budget accordingly. Not listed in Yahoo yet? Tack on that $299. What about Business.com? That’s another $199 a year. Considering playing around with Google’s AdWords? Get the lowdown on what your suggested budget might be by hiring an AdWords professional (your SEO or internet marketing company should be able to do this for you) to run a test campaign for you.
3. Set aside money for advertising on related blogs. Every one is going to have a different price, and going through text link brokers may not be such a good idea right now. Contact bloggers directly if you’re interested in advertising on their site, and see what their rates are. Pick a handful with good traffic and a fair price (and make sure your ad will appear “above the fold”) and tally up the total. You don’t have to pay for 12 months of the year on all of them, pick and choose wisely.
4. Do something for free advertising. Write some industry related articles and submit them around the web and to industry bloggers. It won’t cost you anything but time, but it might give you a good traffic boost. If you’re not already blogging for your business, there’s no better time than the present to start. Ask your designer (or find a new one) to get you started, and appropriate the time into yours or another employee’s schedule to keep up with it. Blogging (the right way) gets you noticed, period.
5. If you’re new to online marketing, hiring an agency or consultant is going to be extremely important. They’ll know what to target and how much it’s going to cost you, and will be able to help you set up a monthly and yearly budget for doing so. Relationships with online marketing firms are best made long-term, so if you’re thinking of going month-to-month with one, keep in mind that you’re likely to pay more up front for the extra advertising fees (because they’re going to want to help you as much as they can in a short amount of time) than you would if you let them make a year long plan for you. It’s easier to stretch a budget over the course of six months or a year than it is to try to get it all done in a month.

As we’ve all heard before, “It takes money to make money.” Realizing that it’s more than just tossing up a website and having the address put on your stationery is what’s going to get you somewhere with your online ventures. While that might be a costly hunk to swallow at first, it’s an important fact of online business you can’t afford to ignore.

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Okay, so I’ve let a bit of time pass by on this, but mostly because I wanted to see what everyone else was saying before I opened my yap, and I wanted to see how long the buzz lasted (for the record, less than a week). Matt Cutts has asked the internet masses to now REPORT sites that use paid advertising.

I’m a huge fan of Matt’s but this is getting a little extreme even for my tastes. While I agree that paid links should be acknowledged to the site visitors (as can be seen in the “sponsors” link on my sidebar), and that transparency and disclosure in terms of paid reviews and affiliate links is the “high road”, I think asking the masses to report sites that have paid links on them is a bit too much like encouraging tattle-taling in kindergarteners.

In fact, please go read Matt’s post about hidden links, because this is something that I’m strongly against, and have had far too many clients come to me with these types of links in their sites - without even knowing they were there. (They were likely put there by a less-than-honorable designer/SEO prior to them coming to me.) Seriously, even if you think you know what I mean by “hidden links” - go read this one. This is a relatively “new” way of doing it.

However I’m not a fan of his other posts on the topic. For one thing, it’s been mentioned already that morning radio dj’s don’t say “this was a paid review” when they talk about their latest cellphone plan or their new favorite restaurant in your local metro area, but everyone knows that the reason he said it was to get some free upgrade or an extra bottle of wine with dinner. No one ever comes out and says that Coca-Cola is a paid sponsor for TV’s “American Idol”, however you can’t miss those gigantic red cups that the judges drink from during the show.

Of course, there’s a retort to that, because that’s television/radio and not print media. Newspapers have clear, defined ad sections. Magazines that publish full page ads that are designed to look like they’re part of the ‘zine but are solely for advertising will put “ADVERTISEMENT” somewhere along the binding or bottom of the page. (Yes, it’s usually in light grey lettering, but it’s there. Oh no! Isn’t that the same as “hidden text”? For shame!)

But which side of the line does the internet fall, and why is Google trying to tell us what we can and can’t have on our websites?

As has been quoted several times already, this is directly off Google’s site (Google’s Webmaster Guidelines):

• Make pages for users, not for search engines.
• Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

• I don’t see how including paid advertising on a site can affect users negatively if it’s disclosed. I also don’t see how reporting sites that allow paid advertising TO A SEARCH ENGINE follows this guideline. I guess this one’s up for interpretation? Depends on what the Big G is trying to crank down on whether or not it matters what we do?
• Advertising for relevant companies related to your site’s niche can help your users by giving them another resource to find more information. Just because you get money for linking to a product doesn’t mean that you don’t believe in said product. In fact, I don’t allow links to anything unrelated or anything I don’t believe will help my site’s visitors. And yes, I would do it if search engines didn’t exist. I like money just like everyone else.

I think if Google wants to tackle a problem, they need to focus on the sites that trick people. Sites that use doorway pages, scripts, redirects, that sort of thing. There are SO many other, much more “heinous” tactics being used than paying for ads. (Here we go, back to TV/Radio/Magazines again… if no one advertised, the networks and publications would crumble.)

Can’t they just give us some commented code to use around the ad blocks that would signal the spiders as to what we’re doing, but not punish us for doing so? (Note: I can’t honestly say one way or the other whether I’d comply if they intended to use the commented code to punish me… that’s like telling a child to go “cut a switch” for a whippin’. But if there were a guarantee that using it would NOT punish my rankings, then I might.)

Note to Google: Not EVERYONE buys links for the purpose of getting the PR juice. Some people do think of it as another form of traditional advertising!!!! Why punish everyone for the sins of the bad seeds?

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