Minds Eye Web Design, Inc.

I was approached by the owner of The Progressive Politico, Lionus LaVida, with an interesting idea. He wanted to create a website that would take over the following of Politico.com during the presidential transition.

This project was new ground for me in a few different ways.

The first thing, and probably the most important thing I didn’t even realize until afterwards was how much the project depended on the outcome of the presidential election. Being that the website is a Liberal based political news source it wouldn’t have been as much of a success if the Republican party had won.

Another focus of the project that I realized from the beginning was that Lionus wanted to use the website as a source of revenue. I have had quite a bit of experience in advertising on large scale news websites such as the Atlanta Journal Constitution due to my experience at COXnet. The issue arrose when it came to finding a open source program that would be affordable, easy to use, and supply all the statistics and tracking that I needed. I co-worker turned me towards OpenX, an open source ad serving platform that can be installed on your server for no charge. See my previous post about OpenX. Due to the website being new and not having a history of statistics the only advertising that we were able to do was affiliate advertising and Google Adsense.

We launched the Beta of the site November, 1st 2008 and during that month we made a very big push to get a lot of visitors to the website. This was the third objective to the site. We made a few graphic banners with the site’s logo and slogan and put it up on the client’s blogs, myspace, facebook, as well as commenting on a few large myspace and facebook groups that were based around liberal politics.

After all was said and done we had 11,807 page views, and over 1,000 unique visitors within the first month of the site being live. We carefully tracked the statistics for the site during the first month and we noticed that the daily impressions and visits dropped tremendously during the holiday week, which suggests that if it had been a regular week we probably would have hit close to 20,000 page views and 1,500 unique visitors.

Every good web designer needs an even better web hosting company. For me the choice was easy.

Frozen Web Host is very affordable so that all of my clients, even start up businesses don’t have a reason to be hesitant. They run Linux servers which support my client’s websites since they are all running on PHP or HTML. All issues are resolved the same day, and for the most part within a matter of minutes. Also, the server is up about 99.9% of the time which is the best guarantee that even the bigger companies will give.

I have been with Frozen web host for 4 years and counting. I continue to host all of my clients with them and I continue to be amazed by their friendliness and support. If you’re looking for a web host then I strongly suggest taking a look into Frozen Web Host. Please, shop around first, you’ll see that it’s hard to beat a great company like this. When shopping for other web hosting companies, use the guidelines below to ensure a great fit.

What to look for in a web hosting company:

• Pricing - Frozen web host starts at $50/yr for the silver package.
• Support - How quickly can you get in touch with the web host if a problem arises? What methods of contact can you use to reach out to the web host?
• Reliable - How often and for how long are the servers down for maintenance?
• Compatibility - Do the servers support the programming that you will be doing? Do you need a Linux server or an Windows server? This depends on if you’re programming using ASPX or PHP, one language can not work on the other server.

Recently through one of my clients, TheProgressivePolitico.com, I’ve opened up the door of ad serving to smaller websites. As some of you know I work at COXnet and I have about 1 ½ years experience with DART as well as a couple of months experience with Yahoo! APT. Well, both of those have a yearly cost that can eat away at the revenue that you may have earned from any advertising on your website.

After some searching, I’ve found a few different solutions and after looking into the pros and cons of each of these solutions I decided to go with OpenX. OpenX allows for the standard statistics, tracking, and setup. One of the major pros to this is that it’s free, you install it on your server and the rest is up to you. It’s widely used among smaller websites and businesses. There is an active community, and support forum that others regularly help out on.

There are a few different types of advertising that you can do through your website to help earn revenue.

I think the most popular is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is when you display similar products, or services. When somebody clicks on the ad, they are taken to another website and if they buy something then you get either a percentage of that sale or a flat rate. The bonus to affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to have a lot of traffic to have ads on your website; you don’t have to stress out about under delivering impressions, not having a high click ration, finding new people to advertise on your site. There are a few sites out there that combine many different affiliate programs and show you the percentage that they offer, or the standard amount than what they will pay for leads.

Another type of advertising is what you see on the bigger websites. This would be selling ad space depending on how many page views you get each month. For example, you could tell a possible advertiser that you get 50,000 page views a month and you will sell them a spot on your website to advertise. The biggest difference is that no matter if people click on the ad, you still get paid. You could sell 10,000 impressions for say $200. You don’t have to have people click on the ad, they just have to see the ad. The reason that not as many people do this is because you have to get a lot of traffic to your site, and you also have to find advertisers to buy this ad space.