Introduction:

It is not easy when you start out with OpenX to get used to the interface and “learn the ropes”, so I went about the business of creating a complete campaign from scratch. Watch the introduction video below and keep going all the way to video n°10 where I conclude the series. It is a complete and free tutorial series, enjoy!

The idea is to use OpenX to serve the products you want to promote, as in this case, for example, the products that are included on a bonus thank-you page that the customer gets to see when he has downloaded his purchase item.

In the example that I use, I show the product page, which is a coin collecting ebook and its thank-you page.

I had found a very interesting complementary offer to pitch the customer who bought the coin collecting ebook via LinkShare, in this case , a 57% cut in price offer on a coins magazine, which was redundant a couple of weeks after I had set up the page.

Another problem, was that I was perfectly able to tell if the page received visits via Google Analytics, but I did not have a clue if anyone had ever clicked on the ad. To find out, I would have to go into deep research mode in the LinkShare interface and lose unwarranted amounts of time.

Continuity series video 1 of 10: Introduction

I started out with a plan that I changed a bit along the way and this is what I ended up with:

How to set up a LinkShare banner campaign from scratch in OpenX

Videos:

1. Introduction
2. Create the Account – Set up an advertiser
3. Create An Advertiser – Which website?
4. Create The Campaign
5. Add A Banner
6. A Neat Feature in OpenX
7. Link Zones
8. Get the iFrame Code
9. Troubleshooting
10. Final Thoughts – advantages

Continuity series video 2 of 10: Create the Account – Set up an advertiser

Once you know how, OpenX becomes easy to use to set up anything you want to serve via a website. I start by setting up an advertiser account. I’m not very happy with the quality of my video editing here, but what you need to see is shown and I keep it as brief as possible.

CPAeye.com - Advertising, CPA and Banner Management With OpenX with OpenX: CPAeye.com

When you create a blog, it is wise to provide your RSS feed with some banner advertising and it is even better if you create a rotating banner campaign.

There is an increasing amount of people who use an RSS reader to keep up with the news items they want to keep an eye on. Using an RSS reader has a number of advantages, one of them being that it becomes a lot easier to do research and take in-depth looks at the content of websites and blogs. When you are hunting for good content, for example, or when you want to automate content posting via feeds, it is always handy to have a feed reader installed.

I use RSS Owl which you can download free here: RSSOwl

Next, I use two plugins on WordPress blogs that make tracking the number of readers easier as well as adding that banner campaign.

The first is Feedstats which is also free and wich you can download here: Feedstsats

The second is RSSFooter which is free and which you can download here: RSSFooter

To download the plugins faster, you can do a plugins search from your WordPress plugins interface as well.

It is easy to download both plugins and upload them to the plugins folder of your blog, after which you activate them.

The video shows you how to do the rest.

If you want to see the large version of the video, here is the link:

How To Create A RSS Feed Rotating Banner Campaign With OpenX

CPAeye.com - Advertising, CPA and Banner Management With OpenX with OpenX: CPAeye.com

This video shows how I add a banner to an advertising campaign in OpenX

If you respect the basic structure, it is easy to do, even though in the beginning, working in OpenX might seem a bit overwhelming.

1. Always start out by adding a website
2. Then add a campaign
3. Then add a zone
4. Then add a banner
5. Then link banner to the zone

This way, you will not create the wrong invocation code.

In this specific example, I link to a banner that is hosted elsewhere.

That is quite convenient when you want to set up a CPA banner and add it to a landing page.

If you want the big comfortable video, this is the link:

Add A Banner To An OpenX Campaign

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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.

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