Whether you are an Internet marketers or a successful blogger, you will often operate on several fronts at the same time because you are compelled to take advantage of rising opportunities as they present themselves.
You create new products and services and these are launched daily on the Internet by others as well. Many among you systematically look for joint ventures (JV), list sharing opportunities and product launches to promote.
It is a thriving and lucrative business for those who manage to get in the loop, which is not an easy thing to achieve because it is a small closed world. There are a number of conditions that need to be met and when you know what they are, they are only obvious.
Often, it will boil down to “who” you know, how well you are organized, having a marketable product and a solid reputation for providing “interesting returns” when you reach out. In short: time and timing are crucial.
So when it comes down to managing your offers, your banners and your advertising space, you do not have the luxury of beating about the bush. You need a centralized platform from which you can do just about everything.
OpenX is such a platform and it has been evolving for a number of years. It allows you to centralize all your advertising needs, whether they are your own banners or those of third party products you have decided to promote.
If you take a look at the banners displayed to your right and “mouse over” them, you will see the link appear in the footer of your browser. They invariably start with “http://www.cpaeye.com/openx/…” because they are being served by the OpenX server hosted on our own website.
You can choose to register with OpenX directly or you can choose to download a version of the program to your own server, which is what we did here at CPAeye.com, so that we can offer this service to members of actionbully.com, which is a private membership site catering to CPA arbitrageurs.
OpenX allows one to manage all advertising needs, yes, even adsense, for any number of websites. You can upload your own banners or link to hosted banners and you can decide where and when they will appear on your web pages.
To quote OpenX:
OpenX Community lets you organize and manage all of your ad inventory under one easy-to-use interface no matter how many websites you have. It works with all kinds of ad formats, ranging from banners to rich media to ad network ads (such as AdSense). And it’s designed to deliver your ads as fast as possible, regardless of the number of ads on each page.
So far, our experience is that this is no exaggeration and that it works like a charm. If you are a total control freak or if you need an easy intuitive “hands off” tool, this is it.
You can also sell your available space to the OpenX community of advertisers, there are more than 50 000 of them so far, among which you will find a number of big players such as Orange or Microsoft, just to name some impressive references and the price you will get is set by way of open auction.
This means, for example, that you can set a “zone” on the banner server to display an ad of your choice -this might be a product you want to promote- but that you can also decide that you wish to receive ads from the open community if your price is met.
In other words, you can often get a lot more advertising revenue by allowing the bidding system to use your ad space instead of trying to get contracts of your own. It is fast (how about immediate?) efficient (how about detailed reporting?) fair and free to implement. Does it get any better?
Well, now that you mention it, it actually does all the time! OpenX is a huge community of publishers and advertisers where one can learn an awful lot about Internet advertising via webinars, forums and an extensive developers network who add improvements all the time.
More on this subject in following posts, as a matter of fact, this blog will be dedicated to this vast subject, so stay tuned and check back in on a regular basis, or subscribe either to our blog or twitter feed.
