Update on www.ratecards.net | mag's 'n ad's blog

.updateon www.ratecards.net*

We have been in public beta now for a bit less than five months and I just wanted to share some of the things that we have done during this time.

In the very beginning we did some AdWords advertising to get some initial visibility to our system. At some point we will do more of that.
Next we wrote and published “how-to” article, of implementing advertising to a blog/website. This article was then distributed via few article publishing sites. We hope this article will help those that are new to online advertising to get the basic details on how to implement advertising to website/blog.
As our tool is mainly developed for magazine publishers we also created a Magazine Publishing Group in LinkedIn to help all magazine publishing professionals to network among peers and share ideas. Naturally we want to actively network among publishers as well. This communication among publishers will help us to develop our service.
We have also witnessed the traffic to RateCards.net site slowly starting to build up, with small but steady growth, when the Google and other search engines have started to do their “thing”, indexing our pages. We are now starting to get OK PageRank to some of the pages and domains.
We have been registering several domain names for different regions and adding those to system. We also registered and implemented the www.magazineadnetwork.com domain, because we feel that is a good generic term that also explains the system quite well. Let’s see how that will help our traffic build via search engines.

Some bug fixes and general fine tuning of Rate Cards system has been done as well.

Changed how the advertisers registration works. Made it simpler and faster to register, with less required field. Also now advertiser registration can be done in one process (no need to verify). We will rater make it easier to register and deal with potential problem users via other means.
For advertisers, added direct option to move from ad rate card to campaign assistant and also option to contact that publishers/rate cards contact directly from the rate card (no need to go via campaign assistant if only want to contact that publisher directly)
Same features added for publishers and advertisers when contacting service providers.
Rate Cards are now shown directly in main window and not in separate pop-up window. This was creating some problems with search engine links and browsers pop-up blockers
Some message-template texts and instructions updated relating to done changes.
We have fixed the text entry fields in “My Pages” edit forms so that there is no need to use any HTML tags to do line breaks, that potentially breaks up the layout of the system for your rate card. System will now do those automatically.
The bug that did not allow to enter publishing dates have now been fixed, rate cards details can now be updated using rate card editor via “my pages”. Selecting “Publishing dates” -> link “Update Deadlines”.

We have gotten some good feedback from our users and look forward on getting even more. This feedback is the best way for us to develop the system to offer best value to our users.

For the next few monts, we have outlined a list of new features that we will be implementing, majority of these new features are going to be developed for advertisers, making it easier for them to be updated on new advertising opportunities, upcoming topics in selected publications, search agents etc.

As part of building traffic to ratecards.net, we hope that everyone could also use the “link to your rate card” feature in our system in your websites. When everyone starts doing this, it will help to increase traffic to RateCards.net and help it to be more visible in Google. In return this will bring in more users and advertisers and will start to increase the number of ad positions found for right publications to advertise.

If your publication is not yet in our free rate cards service, please let us know what’s holding you back. Is there some assistant that you would need, or is there some things missing that would convince for you to get on board with RateCards.net service?

I want to point out that publishers are in important role to help develop this service, to be appealing to advertisers and service providers. When more and more publications can easily be searched, found and contacted via Rate Cards service, it will start to attract more and more advertisers to use it.

Looking forward for your comments!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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