Oxygen Media has become the first cable network to have secured an ad sold through eBay’s Media Exchange platform, reports AdAge.

Adotas says:

Being the first successful seller on the advertising exchange, Oxygen has sold a schedule for the third quarter to Intel for a reported six-figure sum. Previous to this, Intel had not advertised on the network.

Some were skeptical of this idea stating that it will commoditize Internet ad space. It possible that this industry will have no other choice given nature of the Internet.

Read more about facebook

Eventually, it hopes to refine the system to allow it to predict what products and services users might be interested in even before they have specifically mentioned an area.

Sounds like a familiar concept (Adwords).

Cnet writes:

This hazy new advertising model would let marketers take advantage of the fact that members of the social-networking site share not only basic data like their date of birth, gender, and ZIP code; but also more targeted data like favorite bands, notable quotations, and occupation

Small Business owners can now place bids for ad space in local or national newspapers directly through the AdWords interface. No more calling newspapers by phone asking for a specific person or persons, or visiting the local ads office and finally, an alternative to the fixed pricing for ad space in print.

Some advertisers have seen good returns:

For example, Covad, a provider of T1 Internet connection services and one of the initial testers of the Print Ads system, saw a marked increase in ad response rates for specific geographies where it ran online and offline newspaper ads, he said.

“They saw a roughly 20 percent increase in the quality of leads and in sales, as compared to control markets where they didn’t run newspaper ads,” said Spinnell. “Online plus print actually gives a multiplier effect to a marketer’s bottom line.”

This announcement brings Google one step closer to becoming a new advertising company by reaching into traditional advertising channels.

Click the pick below to see where print ads are located within Adwords.

An articles on How to setup Google Print Ads

Google Print Ads New paper partners list

Read more about advertising in a 411directory

If I remember correctly it went something like the following. I got an advertisement first, followed by the prompt for city, state and listing name. After which, I was given the choice of receiving the number by operator or by text message to the number I was calling from. I elected the operator.

After speaking to the operator, I got another advertisement saying “this number is being brought to you by company name” and was asked again if I wanted to receive the number by text following the calls conclusion. I selected to receive the text message and was then connected to the listing I had requested. After the call ended I received the number via text message along with another advertisement.

In summary, this service served my purpose and I did not mind listening to a few ads for free information. Besides the fact that the operator answered the phone laughing, the experience was good. It would have cost me .75 if Id used my cellular provider.

This appears to be an interesting way to advertise a business.

Google offers the same 411 service without the ads (at least it was when we tested it) for free.

There is also an option to add advertising to the image. This service may be more useful for some campaigns than others. I suppose one could find a photo to express a lot of different products or services.

Although the examples that are provided by AdBrite, did display any direct relationship between the image and the advertisement.

This quote taken from AdBrites Help page says that it can be done.

britepic_keywords

accepts: strings up to 1000 characters, each keyword/keyphrase separated by a comma.
If you choose to sell ads, AdBrite will use these keywords to help match your image to the most relevant and appropriate advertisers.

AdBrite also offers a similar service for Video instead of images, called BriteFlic.

Overall, with the growth of high speed internet access subscribers allowing more Internet users to enjoy images and videos (things that were often unpleasant over dial-up Internet access), I beleive that this service should be very successful and is an alternative to Google AdWords, which also offers Image and Video ads.

An example of emails are as follows and graded (given this website as the business):

• kyle_1234@gmail.com
  • Bad (has nothing to do with my business even though my name is in it or, is it really my name or some other person with that name?)
• adwords-articlescom@gmail.com
  • Better (Contains a website reference but there’s no way to insure I can get this address plus, it still belongs to gmail and not me)
• kyle@adwords-articles.com
  • Best (contains my name and my website address, very personalized and professional, anyone who see’s this knows my name, the name of my business or website and has a means to contact me)

Which one of these does your company email address look like?
Every time someone sees this on my website, on a business card, flyer, brochure, or I say it to someone in person, Im branding myself and my small business.

Id much rather brand myself and my business and not someone elses business. Why would I want to do that. Im not building a business for them, im building it for me.

The same rule applies to MLM (multi-level-marketing) and affiliate program providers that provide you with a website and or email address. For example; SuperDupperTravelCompany.com allows you to resell their travel products and will reward you with a tiny percentage of the profits (maybe). They tell you they will allow you to use “yourbusinessname@supperduppertravelcompany.com.” To go along with the website that they are giving you “www.supperduppertravelcompany.com/yourbusinessname.”

They may also tell you its a huge reason to sign-up and resell their product. The fact is this is likely costing them very little, especially considering that every time you promote your business, you are also promoting their business since the email is branded with their companies name. Nice trade huh, in fact, some would say your a marketing tool for these companies and whatever you keep on a sale equates to a very low advertising cost for them.

One response that I often here from small business owners is, “we don’t have the money for this type of email address so we use a free one.” Or I hear “I do not know how to get it done and don’t have the time to do it.” Consider the amount of time you could save if you could communicate with multiple customers at the same time with email instead of one at a time by fax or phone.

Read about a real life example here

*Solution to the problem

Cost -

At the time of this writing, GoDaddy was selling domain name registration for $9 a year and web hosting with 500 email accounts for under $50 a year. Total cost of less than $60 a year . Im not one to count another small businesses money or analyze their budget but if a small business cant afford $60 a year for branded email accounts then they should probably close the books and sell the company after reading this.

What you need -

To get a branded email for your business you need 2 1/2 things:

• Domain Name – get it at GoDaddy
• Web Hosting with POP3 email – GoDaddy
  • If you feel that you need someone to implement and configure these 2 items for you contact us. Most companies that sell these services will help you with configuring and using them at no additional charge either with online documentation or by phone.

How to do it -

1. Decide on a domain name for your company. Take your time and consider whether it is a good representation of your company or not. Try to choose a domain name that is easy to remember. Make sure its not to long. Use hyphens if the name you want is not available (i.e. your-company-name.com). Remember all of the email addresses that you create will include this domain name, (yourname@yourcompanyname.com). Many business owners assume their domain is available because they have not registered it. Often this not the case. See if your desired domain name is available by searching here.
2. Contact a domain registrar and register the domain.
3. Thats it! From there you either access and configure the email address using the a web interface (most companies will provide this type of access) OR configure Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Mail for VISTA users. for access on your desktop or laptop.

• If you have a domain (i.e. yourcompanyname.com) currently registered you likely have email accounts included. In this case your 75% of the way there. Contact the Registrar (company you registered your domain with) about email configuration and set up you email account/s. If email is not included ask the company about adding email accounts to the service.

Read about advanced set-up and use of email ( like cell phone and multiple PC email) here

*NOTE: I do not use any of the GoDaddy services mentioned here nor do I promote their services for reward, I mentioned them because they have a well known brand off of the internet and most folks have heard of them. I am not aware of any unusual problems with their services.

The cost is $250, $50 of which is credited to your AdWords account. The seminars are 4 hours long. AdWords Seminars.

The first problem I had with this guy was that he didn’t even ask me if I was currently advertising before he started with his pitch and how great it would work for me. He was so sure of himself and his product that he did not even mention that fact that he was doing business with my company because of a word of mouth referral which had not costed me a dime.

He went on to mention how important logo design and branding were a company. I agreed but that was probably the last thing we agreed on during the conversation. After he told me that Direct Mail and Print Ads were the best and only ways to advertise, I asked him what he knew about advertising on the Internet.

He told me that pop-up ads were not effective because of pop-up blockers and that no one paid attention to banner ads any more, therefore the Internet was not an effective place to advertise, period. Now, there was some truth to what he was saying but pop-up ads and banners are not the only way to advertise on the Internet.

The fact is, he was uninformed about his own industry. He sounded as if he had been spoon feed what information he had and turns out he had never even tried these techniques, although he told me that they were ineffective. I have a great dislike for people that want to sell me anything based on their words. No results, no proof, just take my word for it cause Im a good talker. Yeah right.

At this point I had heard enough of the conversation, I’d allowed him to speak his mind, although I disagreed. Ive learned in business that listening can be one of your most valuable tools, especially when you don’t agree with the someone. They’ll usually give you all of the information you need to make your point strong.

I asked him about cost of these methods, although I already knew the cost, since I had literally thrown money out of the window for print advertising in the past but thats another story. My next question was tracking, Id like to know how effective my ads are or whether there working at all. Also, I asked, whats the ROI (Return on Investment) of these forms of advertisement. Any business owner, especially a small business with a limited budget, should know what is being returned for the dollars being spent on advertising.

His answers were “well its pretty hard to track the print ads but you will be getting your name out there”. HUH? The response to the ROI question was and I quote “Well theres really no way to track that but I can tell you how much you spent” WHAT!? Those answers were completely and totally laughable and unacceptable.

Needless to say my company never did any advertising with this guys company and the development work we did further informed me of the mans shady character and lack of knowledge of his industry. I’m certainly not going to pay someone for a service if there not aware of changes and innovations in their own industry. The fact is I knew more about advertising from previous bad experiences and self teaching via the Internet than he did with his 15 years in the industry.

I beleive print advertising and Direct Mail will always have a place. Every scenario will be different and some forms of advertising may work better than others. However, the Internet provides new more effective medium to advertise for your small business. Pay Per Click advertising, blogging newsletter campaigns are just a few of the biggest forms of advertising on the Internet. Every one of these are cost effective, provides trackable results, and trackable and often predictable ROI.

Read more about Small Business Marketing with PPC
There are other PPC advertises, however, AdWords is the most popular, widely used PPC program at this time and will probably continue to be for sometime (Read more about Googles reach here). I beleive Yahoo Search Engine Marketing is the second most commonly used.

One of the biggest benefits of PPC through these search engines is the level of targeting available to advertisers. By displaying advertisements that only appear when specific search terms are used or on websites that have a specific type of content, advertisers can market directly to reasonably well matched customers in their industry and bring through quality traffic / visitors that are more likely to be interested in what they offer.

All of the data used in the marketing campaign (clicks, cost, etc) is housed in a relatively easy to use interface for most every PPC system, including the two mentioned in this article.

Note: PPC advertising is not something that is point and click for the beginner. It is like anything else and requires time and experience to learn techniques that work for you and your business. Read more about AdWords and Yahoo advertising at the URL’s above or these AdWords articles.

Even a small business needs web hosting. Ideally they are more suited for hostgator instead of the expensive midphase.

Recently I noticed lots of hyphens being used in URLs, mostly by SEO or techie types of websites or businesses that are completely online like Amazon.com. The last few years Ive been focusing on search engines and SEO.

Read more on hyphens or underscore

It Immediately put this together. It makes so much sense that the search engine written by programmers would by smart enough to find these little details.

Ive never programmed a search engine but there are certain programming etiquette that is visible all over the web and if you’ve ever programmed, you will notice it. Examples are the hyphen versus the underscore. When writing code the computer will interpret this (FTP_Binary) a one word or phrase but it will interpret this is two words (FTP-Binary). They will NOT be understood the same way by the PC.

The underscore is read as a connector of the two words making them one word, where as the dash-hyphen is used to separate the words.

Another example of programmer syntax translating into the real world is words that start with lowercase letters and follow with a uppercase letters, like eBay. If your not a programmer and don’t know what im talking about, a good example can be seen here. Scroll down the page and you will see many code references that start with lowercase words and meet with uppercase letters pr words.

Often when declaring variables, classes and such the syntax will require names that are usually named in this manner. Other times the syntax will have names that are built in with this syntax.