By far the most common one is the 404 “file not found” error message, which can get shown for many different reasons - removing pages from your site, or making a typo in a link for example.

Most webmasters leave these pages with their default settings, but you can actually customise them as much as you want (there are several amusing examples).

The easiest way to make extra money off this extra traffic is to place one of our content units into the page - that way you don't have to manage updating the ads that are getting shown, and you can focus attention direct onto an advertising placement.

Here is an example 404 page we've put together with one of our gadget content units in the centre of the page (Gadget content units are still in beta)

If you have our content units in your site already, then we suggest that you request a new content unit from your contact at the viral ad network, so that you can see your 404 page income separately.

How to customise your error pages:

If you're using wordpress, this page is part of your theme folder, and you can edit it in the same way you would edit another page, including using a wordpress widget to insert the unit if that is your preferred method.

If you're using Apache, or a different system behind the Apache web server, then you would create a html page somewhere on your server, and add the following line to your configuration files (either .htaccess, httpd.conf or apache.conf depending on how your server is set up):

ErrorDocument 404 /path/to/your/error-document.html

(change “/path/to/your/error-document.html” to the path to your new html file)

Tim Wintle

We’ve been running our first styles of content unit in invitation-only beta for a little while but until now the ads that have been shown have been limited to text or image links to our content.

With the launch of our gadget content units we can now offer you the chance to embed the entertaining, viral content you’ve come to expect from us directly into your site…and get paid for it.  And you get all the simplicity of our syndication system to boot.

What is a Gadget Content Unit?

A gadget unit can display any type of rich-media content securely in your website automatically. This content can include games, videos or any other rich-media.

Here’s an example gadget content unit:

How do I place a gadget ad?

It’s really easy to place a content unit on your page.  We’ll provide you with a custom embed code which you’ll just need to include in the relevant place on your page.  Then, our syndication system does the rest.  Your embed code will look something like the example below (please don’t copy and paste this example, though — we’ll provide you with your own code if you want a gadget ad!):

<mce:script type=”text/javascript”><!– var vaunit_unit_type=0; var vaunit_width=300; var vaunit_height=250; var vaunit_id=32; // –></mce:script><br /> <mce:script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://syndication1.viraladnetwork.net/getad/?style=frame” mce_src=”http://syndication1.viraladnetwork.net/getad/?style=frame” ></mce:script>

How will I get paid?

The ads we place on our network are each from different, carefully chosen campaigns and the exact amount you are paid will vary from campaign to campaign.  You can keep up to date with the number of actions you have provided, and the amount of money that you will be paid, by logging into your publisher dashboard, which is automatically updated (numbers may be a little behind due to invalid click detection).

Your earnings will be stored until you have generated over £50 of actions.  We pay monthly.

How do I get started?

We’re now accepting applications from our publishers for our closed beta.  If you want to place a gadget content unit (or one of our other content unit styles), email your contact at the Viral Ad Network.

We have some great campaigns in the pipeline, coming up before Christmas, so keep an eye out for us offering placements. There will be some funny/unuasual/ridiculous/entertaining content being pumped into the internet stratosphere by the Viral Ad Network and our wonderful publishers in the next few weeks. Exciting stuff!

We also have some other equally exciting developments and additions to the sophistication of our ad serving. This is in Beta stage, and some of you may be running paid tests for us at the moment!

Have great weekends, and don’t forget, your numbers are visible in your dashboard!

Ian

Matt will be posting on here regularly in French, Italian and English.

Welcome Matt!

We’ve been listening closely to the feedback that you’ve passed on to our team, and in response we have added functionalities and tools that will be useful to you in the future. The biggest request for inclusion in the publisher dashboards was a function that allowed you to log in and to see a breakdown of the numbers you have delivered for each viral campaign.

With this in mind, the first thing you will see when you log in is now an overview of the statistics for your account. In the top right of the page you’ll find a box that will show you (almost) live totals for the number of actions that have been tracked through the network on all “managed placements” (campaign placements you have organised direct with our network team)*.

Clicking on the link “managed placements” will take you to a page where you can get more detailed breakdowns of the actions you have provided.

Please Note that these totals will not accurately reflect actions that took place prior to the launch of the revised dashboard.

In the top half of the page you can see recent actions broken down by day - which is useful if you want to try changing the positioning of your ads to increase your revenue.

In the lower half of the page you can see a breakdown of actions by campaign, which will be especially useful if you have multiple placements running at one time.

The next most requested feature was help on using the dashboard - you can now find a help page by clicking the link marked “help” near the top of the page.

I hope that you will all find the new features useful - the rest of the development team and myself try to keep up to date with any comments passed on, so if you have any queries or requests do mention them next time you’re in contact with the team and they will be taken into consideration.

Tim Wintle

Personally I feel that this is one of the great differentiators between our advertising network and the bulk of online advertising - that our content is often so enjoyable that you can place it as the centre point of a blog post or article, and drive traffic to your site just to view it.

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.

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.

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.