In yesterday’s review of PerformancingAds I mentioned that I noticed some changes taking place in the ad exchange system. So I logged in to my account today to see if I could find something new - and I actually could find something new!

How the ad exchange system works

My exchange credit balance went down to 1 (from 25,300 yesterday). When I clicked on the “Advertiser” tab I found out why: My exchange ad has been booked on more than 35 different blogs! So these exchange ads don’t just get displayed randomly, but they get booked. Every time somebody else’s exchange ad gets displayed on your blog, it shows up as a booking in your account. The bookings of your own exchange ads get listed in the “Advertiser” section in your account. This allows you to check out the selected blogs and lets you even unbook your ad from unwanted blogs.

Display your own ads on your blog

If your ad section is not sold out, PerformancingAds books exchange ads into your ad section. If no exchange ads get booked into your region, your own ads get displayed instead. So payed bookings have the highest priority, followed by exchange bookings. You can define the ads which get displayed if no others are available in the advertiser section. Simply navigate to the “Advertisers” tab and click “Create a  new advertisement”.

Check out PerformancingAds

(And don’t forget to try your luck with my contest )

PerformancingAds is the ad network which serves the 125×125 ad buttons you can see on the right. I joined this network approximately two weeks after it opened its doors to the public - now, one month later, it’s time for a review.

PerformancingAds is free to join and the registration process is simple. As a publisher, you define an ad region on your blog and choose the number of ads you want to display. You can define multiple regions and set a different price for every one. PerformancingAds then tries to sell these regions to advertisers.

The ad exchange system

As a publisher you can create so-called exchange ads. As long as a region on a blog is not completely sold out, exchange ads of other blogs get displayed. So if you have some free space on your ad region, PerformancingAds displays exchange ads of another blog in your region. For every impression you generate, you earn credits which are then converted into impressions of your own exchange ad on other people’s blogs.

Because this is a very young ad network, a couple of things are still in its infancy. One of these things is the documentation of this exchange system. For example, in my account it says

Your exchange current credit balance is 25,300.

Apart from the grammar mistake, this sounds pretty cool - but honestly I have no idea what this means How many credits do I earn per impression? How many credits do I spend for every impression of my own exchange ad? Today I noticed that they made some changes in the exchange system - I think we should expect to see some improvement in the next couple of days. In this context I’d like to mention that it would be nice to have a news page or a company blog informing users of such changes.

Check out PerformancingAds

The affiliate system

In contrast to this somewhat mysterious exchange system, the affiliate system is very clear: You earn 10$ for every active user you refer - active means that

• a publisher displays ads for at least one month
• an advertiser buys an ad

Additionally, you earn a recurring 5% of all advertiser ad buys - for life.

My results

So far I generated 25,300 exchange credits (what ever this means ). I also referred a bunch of new users so I expect to get an affiliate payment soon. Because the booking-reports of my ad region is more confusing than informative, I have no idea how many bookings I had - I don’t even know if I had any at all.

Things to improve

• Documentation - some parts are well documented, other parts (such as the exchange system) need a better documentation
• Reports - the booking report is not really informative
• Communication of changes - would be nice to know what’s going on

Conclusion

A promising young network which has to overcome some teething problems. I will certainly stick with it to find out how it develops. If you are interested in selling ads or at least get some traffic from the exchange ad system, you should check out PerformancingAds. Let me know what you think about it.

Check out PerformancingAds

(And don’t forget to try your luck with my contest )

During the weekend I decided to have a little contest and give away some free stuff, simply to stimulate some action from my readers

What can you win?
I’m giving away a total of five ad spots on this blog for one full month:

• 3x one month of free banner advertising. Your 234×60px banner ad gets displayed in the site-wide ad rotator on the top of every page, right above the navigation bar.
• 2x one month of free text advertising. Your text link gets displayed site-wide in the “Top Links” section of the right sidebar.

Every ad gets displayed for one full month once the winners have been drawn (see below).

How can you participate?

Everything you must do to participate is to write a blog post about this contest. Your post must contain at least one link to this post. Make sure you send a trackback to this post or at least leave a comment including the permalink to your blog post. This gives you the first ticket in the drawing.

I’ll give you two additional tickets if you write another review about any other post from my blog. Again, make sure your post contains at least one link to the post you reviewed and send a trackback or leave a comment. This means you can get a maximum of three tickets in the drawing

This contest is open until the end of September. The five winners will be drawn on Tuesday, September 30th 2008 - good luck

And don’t forget: You can always get a free link to your website by becoming a top commentator

Now that my blog has a new theme and everything seems to be working fine, it’s time to focus on new goals One of these goals is to get more traffic, another goal is to increase the number of comments on this blog. Now these two things obviously go hand in hand. But since I already get some traffic, I decided to address the comments issue first.

The first step I have taken to encourage more comments is rather simple: I installed the Show Top Commentators plugin. This plugin counts the comments every user has written and displays the most active commentators of the last week in the sidebar. And here’s the clue: It doesn’t only display the commentators name, but also a link to his / her website without the nofollow tag. This allows readers to generate a free backlink just by commenting on this blog

The plugin is easy to install and highly configurable. For example you can set the number of commentators that get displayed or you can define the time period used for calculations. If you set this period to one week, only the comments posted during the last seven days are considered for the statistics.

So, would you like to get a free backlink from this site? Start writing comments! As you see, the numbers are still pretty low, so it takes you only a couple of comments to become a top commentator and get the free link

Yesterday morning I launched the new theme for my blog. The first big thing one usually has to do when installing a new theme is to adjust all the widgets. You have to find the right place for them and maybe even change something on how they look. In my old theme I had two sidebars, now in this theme I use only one - but a bigger one

For some widgets I just couldn’t find the right place - one of them was the MyBlogLog widget which displays some recent readers of a blog. Wherever I tried to put it, it just looked weird. So went looking for another place on this theme to display this widget. And I found it The widget’s new home is right at the bottom of this page. I increased the size of the footer, added the widget and two link sections - one contains links to some friends, the other lists some possibilities to get in touch with me. For example, you could join my community at MyBlogLog - of course I will join your community as well.

By the way, I would love to get some feedback about the new theme, so please leave a comment