That’s right! I have six ad spots available for free! Well, kind of. You see, I am doing some research. You will not be charged for having your ad on my blog, but in return I would like some feedback from you on if the ad was effective.

What’s in this for you:
– Free ad to your URL for two weeks.
– The possibility of getting more exposure to your site.
– The possibility of getting some sales.

“Effective”, of course, can mean different things to different people so here is what I am specifically looking for.

– Did the ad generate visitors to your site? If so, how many?
– Did the ad generate any sales of the products you offer? If so, what products and how many sales?
– Was there any interaction between new visitors and you. For example: “I saw your ad on Jeff’s blog and………”
– At the end of this two week experiment I’ll have some more questions for you, but those I just mentioned should give you an idea on the type of feedback I’m looking for.

To be eligible for the free ad you must have some form of web statistics available for your site. I highly suggest that the URL your ad links to is a specific page set up just to monitor how many visitors that page gets. In other words, it’s a page you set up and the only way for someone to view it is from clicking the ad on my blog. Doing this will give us the best indication of how effective the ad is. If that’s too much work for you then we’ll have to settle for the “referring URL” information.

I’ll be totally honest with you, I’m a little guy in the world of blogging. There are some serious pros out there getting 1,000’s of visitors* every single day. As of yesterday my blog has received 2,777 visitors for January. That’s an average of 132 visitors a day. My lowest day was January 3 with 100 visitors and the highest day was January 14 with 235. As you can see, it varies. However, I am proud to say that my daily visitors has not been below 100 for quite a while. Yeah, January 3 was a close one!

Why am I doing this?
Quite honestly, I want to be one of those “pros” getting 1,000’s of visitors a day. Eventually, I would like this blog to help out paying for diapers when our little monster arrives in July. Selling ads on here would be a great way to get some extra money coming in. Of course, if the ads aren’t effective not only would I feel guilty charging for the ad space, but people would also run their ad once and stop. That’s not the kind of relationship I want with the people that help support me. I want people to get back an equal or greater value than what they spent on an ad.

Also, I just love helping promote people and what they’re doing. I’ve had free ads on here for about the last six months.

Ok, you still with me here? If so, and you’d like to help me out by putting your ad on here and tracking it’s effectiveness please use the contact page to send me a message. Be sure to put a link to your site so I can take a look at it. It’s in both of our best interests if what you are advertising is cohesive with what my blog is about. Let’s face it, if you’re trying to sell Nascar t-shirts the people that read my “art” blog will not be interested and therefore, not click on your ad.

Happy blogging!
– Jeff

* There is a BIG difference between “visitors” and “hits”. To put it simply, a hit is a request to a web server for a file. What that means is that if your homepage has 20 jpeg images on it and one person looks at your homepage you just got 20 hits. It’s popular opinion that hits are not effective to determine the popularity of a website.