Like many of you I run blogs in different niches like twinks, bears, bodybuilders, etc. and I would like to advertise sponsors (via banners in the sidebar) on those sites that are related to the niche. No sense advertising a twink site on a bear site, right?
In the past I just inserted banners manually in a random manner on most blogs. Whenever possible I would customize the banner/sponsor to the niche of the blog, but sometimes I didn’t have time so I let it slide.
Now with so many blogs it has been tough to keep track of which banners are where, especially when a site closed or a sponsor changed the link code. Yes, I know I could use a jump script for the link changes but I still need to remember where the banners are in case I need to delete a closed program.
So today I was working with an iFrame from a sponsor and a light bulb went off over my head… why not create my own iFrames for the various niches of my blogs? For example, I created a twinks.html file with all the banners and links of my twink sponsors and then I just inserted these banners into my blog sidebar with an iFrame. The twinks.html file can reside in one place on my server and be used on several blogs, and now whenever I need to find my twink banners I can go to one file to make changes.
I’ll bet that some of you who have already been using iFrames like this for years are probably thinking I’m some kind of noob. All I can say is that every now and then I learn something I probably should have known already, so please don’t piss on my epiphany moment!
In researching this more I haven’t been able to find any downside in using iFrames as I describe in regards to slowing down site performance, impacting SEO, etc.
So I just wanted to ask here if anyone else knows of a reason not to do this.
I don’t do a lot with blog type sites msm, but I have used iFrames in the same manner and can’t offer up any downfalls to using them. While I prefer using include tags instead, I still use the iFrames in some cases for the very same reason. I looked up OpenX that abostonboy suggested… I really don’t have the time to do any research on it, but worth looking at. From first glance at the search results on Google, it looked like 3rd party however.
If you set it up properly, with a few clicks you can change everything - say for example a sponsor is having a $50PPS bonus day - you can immediately change ads across all sites to that sponsor for the day.
OpenX is great! If I recall, it’s fairly easy to get up and running.
Running it when you have more than 250K uniques a day requires some renovating, but as a centralized ads management solution it really has everything one could ask for. Its great for promos and the like because it allows you to create and schedule campaigns and assign them priority based on the calendar / geo region / time of day.
RocketTube and JustUsBoys have always used OpenX. It’s enterprise level delivery and opensource. Its extremely robust easily handling hundreds of millions of ad impressions per month.
I heard of OpenX in the past but generally I try to avoid installing scripts like that due to a bad experience I had in my early blogging days, but I’ll have to look into this again. I wonder how much the paid version costs… or if the free version would work for me. And I guess this would work the same way as my iFrame idea, where I just insert iFrames in my blogs that contain the OpenX ads?
Also, I have blogs on several web hosts. Would I need to install OpenX on each hosts server or can I just install it once and have it feed my entire blog network?
[QUOTE=msm;107021]I heard of OpenX in the past but generally I try to avoid installing scripts like that due to a bad experience I had in my early blogging days, but I’ll have to look into this again. I wonder how much the paid version costs… or if the free version would work for me. And I guess this would work the same way as my iFrame idea, where I just insert iFrames in my blogs that contain the OpenX ads?
Also, I have blogs on several web hosts. Would I need to install OpenX on each hosts server or can I just install it once and have it feed my entire blog network?[/QUOTE]
The free version will be fine unless you are getting over 250k or so unique visitors per day. You just need one install for all your sites. I see you use the word ‘hosts’ - it is generally against the TOS on shared hosting to run banner ad scripts - you would need a VPS or dedicated server.
Essentially there are two sides to it. The ad spots and the ads.
This is a very simplistic explanation - you create ‘zones’ - these are different places where you want adverts to appear. For example ‘under header’, ‘sidebar’, ‘footer’ etc. You then create a ‘campaign’ - and add your adverts to it - the image and the link you want the advert to go to. You then match the appropriate campaigns to the appropriate zones. You insert the code it generates for the zone into your website, and an advert from the campaign (or campaigns) you assign to the zone is displayed.
Like I said this is a very simple explanation of what it can do. Obviously you have different zones on different websites and different campaigns for different sites too. Send me a message if you want to have a look around my install of it.
Thanks! I checked into it this afternoon and I didn’t realize OpenX had their own free hosting option so I signed up with that to get my feet wet. So far I think its really interesting and I may have to kick myself for not trying it sooner. I have some questions for those of you who use it so I think I’ll start a new thread for that.