Adgitize – A critical look

Entrecard Killer, Easy Money, Cheap CPM Advertising, Brilliant Advertising  opportunity, $14 flat rate advertising!!!!

Those have been the keywords and phrases for the new company Adgitize.

I did go through the basic concept over in Update – Links – Love – 2, and since then my income has steadily gown. But I feel I did not do this great system justice.

So what I did was, I got a hold of Ken Brown the admin over at Adgitize and I put to him a few questions. Below are his answers.

1) Firstly Ken who are you? who is the team behind it all?

Well, I am a programmer by trade. I have been programming for over 15 years now. I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science with a minor in Marketing. Over the years I have played many roles, from a supervisor of 43 people in a 3 building operation of a $5 million dollar operation, to a project manager which at one time I was responsible for over $12 million dollars worth of business a year. I have started numerous businesses which has led me to the confidence to put together Adgitize. I have been involved with companies that were startups with all the problems inherent with trying to build the business to go public, sell or trying to get venture capital. Some failed badly, while others made me very happy.

The team at Adgitize is a small staff with a handful of others that I call upon for advice and counsel. I have a programmer, Mary, that keeps the programs and database in line and makes a lot of magic happen. I have worked with Mary in the past and I have known her for over 30 years. Bill runs his own consulting business and Mary and I have worked with Bill on his web site. Bill is an inspiring person and is very well grounded. Bill has written 2 books and is working on a third. Bill consults with some of the largest companies in the world. Bill consults in many countries of the world and helps managers become better managers. Theresa and her husband, Jeff will step in from time to time to help with ideas and they allow me to bounce ideas off of them. This is always great feedback, because even though they have been in business together for over 5 years, they don’t always know my industry. This allows me to get feedback from people that may not have the same background as I have.

I myself have built the You Can Learn Series web site, This was the principle driving factor in starting Adgitize. I was frustrated with advertising vehicles for Blogs and small web sites. I was really impressed with the Entrecard model, but it was missing something. It took me a long time to figure it out. But, I finally realized in the last 8 months or so, it was a, “you visit my site I will visit yours.” Not a real advertising medium per say, but it did drive traffic to your site.

2) What IS Adgitize?

Adgitize is a really simple advertiser – publisher model service. We provide publishers with ads on their blogs at a price consistent with the amount of traffic they are bringing into the blogosphere. Our advertisers are bloggers looking to find low cost traffic to their blogs. We all want to be noticed and feel that we have something important to say to the world. But, after we say it then it helps to have someone read it. Adgitize brings together publishers and advertisers for what I feel are synergistic relationships.

3) How does the points structure work?

This is the most complicated part about Adgitize. If you ask 10 members, I bet all ten would tell you something different. But, simply there are 5 categories that I felt were important aspects of blogging. If you wanted to be a successful blogger you probably should be doing 3 to 5 of these steps fairly consistently. Those 5 categories are writing articles, advertising, getting people to your blog and getting page views, visiting other blogs and probably the least important ad views shown on your blog.

Why are these important? Why did you start blogging if you don’t like to write? Do you have a message to tell the world? Are you passionate about a cause? Do you want to hone your writing skills? Bloggers blog, writers write and to be successful your blog needs articles written. So Adgitize rewards it’s publishers with up to 100 points a day for one article written on their blog a day.

I found there are a few different ways to drive traffic to your blog. You can advertise, be really good at SEO, comment on other blogs and join forums. Not everybody is good at SEO. I managed to get nearly a million page views this year for the You Can Learn Series web site with 85% of the traffic coming from SEO. It is the hardest — easy thing I have ever done. But, not everyone is good at SEO. If you have time you can comment on other blogs (well thought sticking to the conversation comments) and you can get you some traffic. Forums will also grow your readership. But, advertising has been around for ages in one form or another. And advertising works. For all the freebies that Google gives bloggers, they really are an advertising firm. Adgitize rewards advertisers and bloggers need to advertise. It’s a great relationship and advertisers earn up to 100 points a day and a bonus on the other categories.

Page views are a blog byproduct of SEO, advertising, visiting other blogs and commenting. For our group of advertisers to have success advertising they need publishers. So, we reward blogs for their page views up to 100 points a day. This is built on a sliding scale so little blogs aren’t overwhelmed by large successful blogs.

I think the equalizer though is the use of Ad Views in the Adgitize point equation. Because a large successful blog may only want a small footprint of ads on their blog. So, they have one Adgitize ad showing at a time. This gives the small blog with less traffic a chance to catch up on their Adgitize points because they can place 4 or more ads on their blog and get 4 times the bump of the big boys. This is still a sliding scale with up to 100 points to be earned a day.

Remember, I mentioned visiting other blogs? This is important for bloggers to get out into the world consistently. If you are visiting other blogs and commenting regularly with quality comments you will grow your blog. By rewarding the visiting of other blogs Adgitize helps reluctant bloggers to leave their comfort zone and see the world. We only reward you to visit 100 blogs a day – all advertisers in our network. Since we are brand new we don’t have 100 advertisers quite yet, but some day soon we will have over 1,000 advertisers and you will have the opportunity to visit many new blogs. Not the same 20 everyday like other networks, a real smorgasbord of new opportunities and new places to visit and see.

So, that’s the why of the points. A member publisher, you have to be a publisher to earn points, can earn up to a possible 500 points a day. Then each day all the points that are rewarded are added together and the percentage of what you have contributed to the Adgitize network is multiplied by the revenue earned for that day. (This is currently done by month but in January will be a daily result.)

4) What are the benefits for a publisher / advertiser / affiliate for joining it?

An advertiser can get their message to a whole network of people that have never seen their message at a price way below market value.

A publisher has a chance to earn a few dollars every month. They will earn mostly based on their actual potential as a blog. Guess what a blog that is writing everyday, doing good SEO, visiting other blogs, commenting and working forums and doing some advertising will get more traffic and probably more money in the Adgitize network compared with other bloggers not doing those little things.

An affiliate can earn a one time bonus of $5 for every advertiser they bring to Adgitize and earn an ongoing amount of $1 as long as the advertiser advertises on our network.

5) what are your views on entrecard? do you feel you are a ‘potent’ rival? could you better their business model?

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Graham and Pirate. Two young kids with a dream and lot’s of energy have produced a massive network of bloggers and I have seen bloggers in Entrecard join together to form partnerships and grow wonderful internet businesses. I think Entrecard for all their openness have a great model for helping young bloggers get started in getting traffic.

Is Adgitize a rival? Sure, I feel we are a rival for all advertising platforms, including Ad Toll, Performancing Ads, CMF, Project Wonderful and Google. I think the Entrecard and Adgitize business models are different and I feel there is a place in the market for both of us. I like to think I found an untapped niche in the Entrecard market.

6) What have you got planned for Adgitize? How do you plan its growth? do you have any incentives / promotions or contests planned?

No contests planned in the near future. We are trying to finish some holes in the programming that have come up now that the number of members is growing so fast. Something planned for late February release is a marketplace for bloggers to sell their wares. This will be totally different than the Entrecard marketplace with a totally different take on the idea. I am real excited about it and again the monies realized will be shared by the Adgitize community.

Then Bill and I have just started collaborating on an idea that will help bloggers and leaders to be more successful as people, managers, leaders, bloggers and family members. Again the monies to be shared by the Adgitize community.

Bill and I are meeting another local business person after Christmas to just talk and see where that might lead us.

Even if we don’t do any of these things, Adgitize is going to be a great community to be involved with in 2009 and I am very excited.

7) Where do you see the network in 6 months?

Well, we are growing exponentially. I am hoping the advertiser to publisher ratio continues to grow. I see us reaching a thousand members early next year and I think we can possibly have over 5,000 members before years end. The key will be making sure we have advertisers and other earning potentials for all blogs big and small. If publishers aren’t earning then they will stop publishing, so my main job is finding new revenue streams that fit our model.

8 ) How do you plan to stop any ‘abuse’ of the system? for example bots that could artificially increase page views etc.

That is one reason each of the categories are only 1 / 5th of the equation. If you want to see the foibles of human kind then watch the internet. Because every kind of person is out there and they each are looking out for number one. I have been quick to watch for abuse. It will be easy to notice because of the leaderboard. Someone that is abusing all 5 levels will quickly rise to the top. I watch the top pretty closely. I check out the articles they have written and watch for abuse and illegally copying other blog’s articles. I look at their traffic numbers comparing with Google analytics, Alexa, Compete and then a simple look at common sense. You all have seen bloggers claim they are getting 30,000 page views a day. And you look at some of the numbers and you say, “I don’t think so.” We are also setting up some programmatical watchers.

I think the leaderboard will force some people to be honest or risk exposure pretty quick. People like competition and they don’t like cheaters.

9) what is your overall ‘vision’ ?

My overall vision is there are a number of really smart and sharing people on the internet everyday. I have a desire to bring those people together helping newbies to grow their blog and find out how the great ones do it. I expect over time to have a number of these people on the Adgitize forums helping others. I see Adgitize becoming an internet household name. I wouldn’t be surprised to have people say some day, “Have you Adgitized anyone today?” Meaning have you helped another blogger and is the blog community better today than it was yesterday because you are a part of it. I expect Adgitize to become an advertising mainstay with Bloggers getting real value for their advertising dollars.

This wouldn’t be a critical review if I did not critique! Though my critique is very little:

1. Lack of affiliate bonuses for recruiting publishers.
2. The overflow of the advertisements. (ie they have an extra tag at the bottom).

I put these to Ken earlier and he responded in a positive manner and these ’small’ issues should be resolved.

So with that being said I would like to thank Ken Brown for taking his time to answer the questions and I would like to to YOU to Sign up NOW! Don’t waste this opportunity ! You see that spare 125*125 you have on your blog? you see that empty gap? Fill it now with Adgitize and earn with it!

If you’re an advertiser you are not exempt!

Don’t waste this brilliant opportunity Join Adgitize now!

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