Viral Ad Network Publisher Blog

Okay, tempting as it is for me, I’m not going to dwell on principles, abstract concepts or the meta stuff about effective promotion — you know the basics. If you don’t, go learn them!

The only fundamental I will quickly reiterate is this: please make sure your mailing list is entirely permission-based. Not only is it unethical, crass and downright nasty to be spamming the inboxes of people who didn’t ask you to do so, it’s also ineffective marketing (read the book on it if you don’t believe me). Oh, and we’ll kick you off our publisher network if we find out you’re blanket mailing non-permission-based lists.

Right, formalities addressed, here are five very practical tips to help boost your take-up of newsletter content.

1. Split test
I put this point first because all of the following points are subject to this one: if the statistics are telling you something different to what I’m telling you, listen to the statistics!

Split your mailing list in half, completely arbitrarily. Send an ‘a’ version of your newsletter to one half of the list; then change one variable and send this ‘b’ version to the other half. Track the reports/traffic analytics and see if the change you made had any significant effect. Adopt the newsletter version that works better as your ‘a’ version and then repeat the process next time with a different variable. This is simple evolutionary optimisation.

It’s important that you only change one variable at a time so that you can be confident in what it was that made the difference. If your ‘a’ version contains 20 articles each with large images and your ‘b’ version contains 3 articles with no images, you won’t know if it was the length or the use of images that primarily contributed to a difference in conversion rate. Each of the following points is an example of a variable that you can change, split test and then either adopt or discard.

2. Use directive in your calls to action and links
Like I just did there, see? Using directive means starting your link/call to action with a verb instruction: ‘get’, ‘watch’, ‘read’, ‘learn’, ‘use’.

You might think it doesn’t suit the friendly/chatty/informal/light touch tone of your newsletter to rephrase ‘Phil Collins, a gorilla and a drumkit? Surely it’ll never work!’ to ‘watch the new Cadbury’s advert that features a drumming gorilla’ but the truth is it’s just a clearer way of writing that’s easier for your readers to understand — and links using directive invariably get more click-through.

3. Pick action shots for video images
If you use images in your newsletter and are talking about a video or clip, try and pick a screenshot/still that shows some action in progress: an image of a car halfway through a spin will get more clicks than one of its hood (however pretty a car it is); an image of a guy walking down the road is more interesting than one of the front of his house. The rule of thumb is: the more movement implied in the image, the better. Also, people like looking at people. Get a person in there if you can.

4. Don’t waste ‘above the fold’ on self-aggrandisement
You might have a really awesome logo. You might have the logo that really does justify all those requests to ‘just make it a bit bigger’. You might have made the most shiny, gradiented, drop-shadowed, rounded-cornered and pastelly header banner the world has ever seen. Even if all this is true of you, you still need to get your header out of the way and let people see what they signed up for: your content!

(Remember, ‘above the fold’ in the crowded world of Outlook etc is generally a far smaller space than it is in a browser).

Try this: see how close you can put your first content headline to the top of the newsletter design before you start wincing and worrying that you’re compromising your ‘branding’. Now move it a bit higher, perhaps even a bit higher still… can I see the headline clearly in my Mail yet? The whole thing? Is it more prominent than your company logo? Good! Publish, send…

5. Tell the story your readers want to hear
Don’t settle for copy-pasting the press release schlock. Don’t be vague or hedge your bets with promises of ‘fun stuff’. Find the specific hook for your readership and articulate it to them simply. Take the Cadbury’s example again: if you’re running a mailing list for drummers, mention the drumming (’watch this clip of a drumming gorilla: does he skip a beat in the third bar?’). If it’s a list for advertisers, flag up the campaign strategy; for costume-makers, speculate about the hairy realism; for bored teenagers, promise the ‘LOL WTF?’ factor… you get the idea.

One of the most common problems with Advertising for publishers (both on and off-line) is the worry of putting off your readers with ads that get in their way.

We think that viral ad network’s ads are truly different from other ad networks, as provided you (the publisher) with viral content that is actually interesting to your readers - content that they will enjoy interacting with.

It’s a bold claim, and one that we feel needs some backing up, so I thought I would share a screenshot I took a couple of minutes ago of our youtube viral channel.

Our Youtube channel shows some of the top viral ads that we have been distributing, largely across our publisher network, and as the screenshot shows, we’re consistently in the top 25 most watched channels in the UK, and one of the top channels in the world!

We hope that running ads like this will not only increase your revenue, but actually add value to your website for your users.

Welcome to the new viral ad network publisher blog. We intend to use this blog to keep our publishers updated on how our system works, and any optimisations you can perform to increase the number of users clicking on the ads you run on your site.

To get the blog started, I’m going to talk about:

The difference between ‘unique’ and ‘total’ clicks

Some of you may be asking what the difference is between these two numbers (and why we sometimes give you an offer for the total number of unique views, and sometimes for the total number of views).

For all of our campaigns, we are interested in real, natural clicks from website visitors. To this end, we do not count certain clicks - search engines crawling the web, and what look like spam crawlers for example.

We count a “view” as a real website viewer clicking on one of the links we have provided you with because they are interested in the content that you are linking to. For example one of the readers of your blog may want to enter a competition, or watch a video that you have recommended as being really funny. If that viewer likes the content enough they may come back to your site and click on the link again, which would count as another view (Hint - to make sure that the user finds your site again, you can use our simple social bookmarking toolbar). Each time that a real person clicks on the link to view the content, it counts as another “click”.

The number of “Unique Views”, on the other hand, is the number of people that click through to view the content. Although it only counts as one “unique view” if the person returns, if that person likes your page (and our content) so much that they email a link to your page to some of their friends then you could find that what starts as a single viewer can quickly lead to a whole bunch of “unique views” as their friends email links to their friends, and so on, This is what we call Going Viral.

Occasionally we may also say that we will pay you for “Actions”, which would be carefully specified in the offer that you recieve. For example, we may say that we will pay you for every person who likes a new mini-series so much that they sign up to be told about the newest videos, or for every person who enters a competition. Although you would be paid sugnificantly more for certain “Actions”, these users are harder to get, and how many of the people that click on the link end up signing up will depend on how enthusiastic your website has got them about the link - you may find that writing slightly more text about what is being offered may increase the number of people that complete the action, and your payments!

We’ll cover detailed strategies for getting more people excited about the content right here, so check back regularly.