How Project Wonderful Worked
Last week when I redesigned I’m Blogging That I decided that I’d explore the idea of 125 banner ads from Project Wonderful on my site.
Before actually creating banner spots on my blog I really took my time to do research on a little of different advertising websites. I wanted to make sure that I had explored all options before I started testing the waters with any of them.
After much reading, I decided to simply try Project Wonderful first. Notice my word there: try. I’m not setting anything with advertising in stone so I’m trying out different services.
There are things that I like and things that I did not like about Project Wonderful so I thought that I’d itemize my experience for easy comparison if you’re ad shopping.
Auction Style
This is the ‘icing on the cake’ for me to pick Project Wonderful first. The concept of auction style bidding to ad spots on different websites seemed interesting. I didn’t like that the price of your ad spots could be displayed on your site under your available ad boxes but that price was easily removed at ad block setup time.
Minimum Bid
Knowing the value of your website is half the battle. Even though Project Wonderful has an auction style system, you can set a minimum price for your bidders. My minimum bid was $1.00 USD per day.
Follow Option
When setting up ad blocks the option was given to have your banners displayed with or without the no follow tag. I thought this was useful for those that are concerned about the quality of websites they’re linking to and PageRank.
Stat Reporting
Page views and ad block views/clicks are tracked with the Java script code that is placed on your website. Problem is, my site’s page views were grossly under reported. Huge difference between what’s actually happening on my blog and what Project Wonderful reported. The consequence of this is even bigger. If advertisers on Project Wonderful trust the page views that they’re reporting, you’re not going to get the bids on the ad blocks for amounts that actually deserved for the kind of traffic your site has. I’d have to place this as the number one downfall.
No Relevance
I believe that advertisements on your blog should be related to your blog’s niche. This doesn’t mean advertising your biggest competitor. However, the majority of the blogs and advertisers in the system are comic sites. This is something that clearly doesn’t fit with a blog resources blog. Thus, a large amount of the bids for advertising I rejected due to poor fit with my blog’s niche.
Know It All
The final straw for me to pull the ad block from Project Wonderful was a private message by a visitor to my blog. Someone who believed that the stats he viewed for my site were accurate and thus decided to let me know that my minimum bid was entirely too high. “Take or leave my advice but you should lower your minimum bid.” Thanks but no thanks, I know my site’s value and that would be for me to decide, not a visitor from my site to decide.
I was dropping my card and I noticed your PJW ads…
I found that I get more bids if I don’t have a minimum bid. I saw yours were at $1.00 and empty. I’m not sure how long they have been up (few days?), but you may want to try having no minimum and seeing what happens. You may not get $1.00, but you’ll get something. If you were getting thousands of hits a day, a minimum might work, but in the hundreds I don’t think it will, at least not that high.
Just a suggestion, take it or leave it.
Conclusion
If your site doesn’t have a specific niche, I can see Project Wonderful working. It’d also be more helpful if you weren’t as picky as I am about the kind of ads that you want displayed on my site. It’s not just about earning money with my blog, it’s providing value… to my readers and the advertiser. In the end, if I can’t do either (and I can’t with Project Wonderful) it’s time to move on to the next site to test the waters with.
Technorati Tags: Advertising, Blog Advertising, Project Wonderful, Auction Advertising, 125 Advertising
February 2nd, 2008 at 9:05 am
$1 to get ad space on here? Cheap, IMO. Just commenting here gets me quite a few hits on my blog (that and the MyBlogLog thing, etc), so this person has no clue what they’re talking about o.O I make, on average, $8 a month on text-link-ads (that I’ve yet to see, but are supposedly there), and that’s for 4, I think, which is $2. I know I don’t get anywhere NEAR the traffic you do.
February 2nd, 2008 at 9:50 am
I’ve seen this around as well and have even won some ad spots at a SUPER cheap price. I use the OIO publisher plugin on my blogs and it’s been working great so far. It practically does everything for you! I look forward to hearing the update on this though. I am curious about it.
February 2nd, 2008 at 9:57 am
LOL…Sorry about the last part. I was reading two different articles and the other part was meant for the other article…GEEZ, you’d think I’d only read one at a time!
February 2nd, 2008 at 4:18 pm
I really like the new design … keep up the good work! However, the page is loading extremely slow for me; anyone else experiencing the same ..?
February 3rd, 2008 at 9:02 am
Sarah » Thanks and I’m happy to hear that comments here bring you some hits. With MyBlogLog, I need to do more networking and sending messages to visitors. I’ve tried to be on it but I’m slackin’ off.
Lori » One of the better things about Project Wonderful is that you can get cheap advertising on some blogs that are worth advertising on. There are some bigger bloggers in there as well that have a minimum price and I spent time advertising on those blogs. In the end, I don’t feel that the ROI was great but I’d do it again just make sure that I have advertised correctly and gave it a fair amount of time.
Wettanbieter » Thanks for the compliment. I’d have to say this is the best and most clean design I’ve ever had here. I’ll check into the slow loading time as well and see if there’s something I can do to fix that and if others are having the same problem. Thanks for letting me know.
February 3rd, 2008 at 10:30 am
That’s something I definitely have to try out. Would love to read a review on how to go about it and your experience so far.
Do check out my long long overdue blog review.
February 3rd, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Adam » I’ll post more information at another time about Project Wonderful.
Also, thank you for the review. I do appreciate you taking the time to catch up with that and for the nice words about my blog.
February 4th, 2008 at 5:24 am
Hi katy what is your daily website traffic?
February 4th, 2008 at 9:03 am
GL3nn » Depends on if I wrote a post that brought mad traffic from StumbleUpon. But on normal days, I average about 3,500 page views from about 650 unique visitors.
February 4th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Holy crap, Katy!! That’s a lot of visitors. And I get so excited when I get over 40 in a day, LOL.
February 4th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Sarah » If it makes you feel any better, I was in the same boat when I was blogging about my personal life here. Since I’ve given myself a new direction, it’s had significant changes to my visitors.
Likewise, I’m in the same boat on Raise It, Clean It, Blog It but I’m OK with that. That blog is my personal life, sometimes too personal… it’s out there just so that it’s not on me anymore. It works. :D
February 4th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Well, since I went 100% personal, with only doing one paid post a month (if that, I think I’ve only done one in 3 months, LOL), the visitor count has definitely gone up, but I think that’s more to do with networking with other bloggers who are doing more personal blogs.
Honestly, I’m happy with my visitor count. If I got up too high, I’d have to make the choice between getting rid of a domain or two, or get more hosting, LOL. Not a choice I want to make. Plus, I seriously cannot keep up with more than one blog. I’ve already proven that to myself plenty of times over (proof positive with my writing site, and my “random” site, LOL). You deserve props for being able to maintain at least THREE, and making it look easy.
February 4th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Project Wonderful is wonderful; to many people are complaining about having no success because they put too high a price. Nothing personal but 30$ a month here is pricey now that PW is out. Basically it’s making a market for micropayments which is GREAT NEWS for advertisers and bad news for publishers. Too many inflated unrealistic prices back then; now it’s more reasonable.
As a publisher it’s better to have 1 box then man many I think because whatever your site is worth you’ll get if it’s 3 boxes you just waste 3 times the real estate. I have to change mine! :D
February 4th, 2008 at 11:24 am
good stuff, ill bet youll eventually bring him the bacon with ur blogs with all of your research and implementation :o
February 4th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Sarah » You know, as long as you are happy, that is what matters. If a blogger is not happy with their progress it shows. It doesn’t with you and that’s good news.
Your certainly right about hosting, I recently moved off our hosting servers because of my traffic. Not that I mind the $5 a month but at least when I was on my own server, my hosting was paid for.
Rob » Project Wonderful is good for those who are happy with a few cents per day. I want advertisers that are relevant and are going to stick around. And not because of my profit but because of what their advertisement can do for my visitors. Unlike a lot of bloggers, I’m not just looking at the cash aspect. I’m looking to increase resources for my visitors through advertisements. I want them to click when they find it useful…
For you $30 may be too much to advertise here. For someone looking for clicks (and my visitors have proven that they will click), it’s the perfect price. Ask Band In My Hand (the green ad) if the sales that I’m Blogging That brought them was worth it. Being that it’s my business partners website, I can tell you that it was.
February 6th, 2008 at 1:17 am
I think that all this information will help me a lot. Keep posting these kinds of blogs.
February 7th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
I tested PW from the other side by BUYING ads. The thing I really didn’t like was that they were all comic sites.
Not terribly relevant for me. Maybe in the future they will have a more varied list of sites, but for now, I’m done with PW.
February 7th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Brian » I tried PW for advertising this site as well. The majority of the sites were indeed comic sites (and I heard once that they started as a site only for comics but I don’t know if that’s true), and turned little response. Exactly 4 visits from the ads I purchased.
I’d have to agree with you, until there’s more growth within their site to bring on quality advertisers, not much can be done to keep me around.
February 14th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Thanks for the great article. I’ve just started experimenting with PW, and was horrified this morning when I realized I had an inappropriate ad (graphic) up on my blog because I had pre-approved an alternate ad from this one site previously…not good, and certainly not worth the .01 they were paying me!
I’m doing a test, trying a new configuration, and we’ll see. Ultimately, I may forgo this type of advertising, and go direct once my readership is up, because in my mind it may not be worth the hassle.
February 14th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Meredith » You’ve brought up another thing I didn’t really touch on. There are a significant amount of blogs I have seen with very inappropriate ads on them. I’d image that most of them ended up with them because of the same situation you’ve mentioned.
After ditching PW, I kept my ad spots in place and did a lot of private talks with potential advertisers and got some great feedback. Ultimately, no one needs to control the content that goes on my site but me. Private advertising have given me that control and I’m that much more happy for it.
Good luck with advertising and be sure to come back and let us know your final decision about Project Wonderful.
February 20th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
I have been researching Project Wonderful for about a week and found a balance of opinions both good and bad. We may give it a try soon to replace an adsense banner at the top of my site which only hast hits every other day.
February 21st, 2008 at 10:46 am
Terry » Project Wonderful seems to work good for different types of blogs with different niche topics. While it may be good for one blog, it isn’t for the next.
I have found that my best resource is me, selling my own advertising space has been a good fix for me. :D