Slacker!

Yeah Yeah… It looks like I’ve been slacking nasty on updating Futurelooks and Laptop Lifestyle. Well there’s more than meets the eye…but basically, yeah, I have been screwing the pooch a bit, but I’m still working.

I’ve been trying to develop the direct advertising selling side of the Futurelooks business. We generally just let the networks sell our advertising, but there is nothing sweeter than landing a big sale yourself. Plus, you build relationships with your advertisers so that when times are lean, you can always send out an email for some extra funds. Well, it looks like I came up in spades.

Yesterday, I sold a $6000 US campaign for Futurelooks: My Biggest Yet!. This campaign will run from Aug 1 till the end of Jan 2007 and will work with different ad creatives, placed in different areas of the site, along with anchor creatives that will stay static throughout the campaign. In english, it means that some ads will stay put, but the majority will move around, allowing me to sell more ad space as I get around to enlisting more clients. We have some other clients lined up for this Fall and Winter so we’re really looking forward to working with them as well.

This sale will allow me to spend some money on the site putting down some more infrastructure. We have been looking at purchasing one more server, so it looks like this will become a reality before the busy Xmas season. The second thing that this will help with is the elimination of some of those annoying flash ads that our networks have been running. I had a complaint a couple of weeks ago about the number of ads on our site. Though we really don’t run more than any other high traffic site that I know of, I do understand that some of our advertisers still sneak in some extremely annoying ads that piss our users off. Plus, he was from Australia so maybe our advertisers are feeding some different ads over there. He did make direct mention of the contextual highlighted ads being particularly annoying. I’ve personally noticed a fall off on the number of highlighted words based on the numbers.

Lastly, by selling this campaign, it will be basically a direct addition to the bottom line. The reason is because our network banner ads have never been a major money maker due to all the middleman fees the network takes out. By the time the advertiser passes through our network, we make maybe 40% of the original selling amount. Not to mention, the people selling your ads in the network don’t always know, or care, what works well on your own site, and they don’t always sell your inventory for what it is really worth. The only thing that is a benefit is the fact I don’t have to administer it because it is done for us.

So it looks like things are going great, even in the seeming inactivity that has been caused by wonderful weather, and a bit of Summer Vacation. Futurelooks is off to a great start for the last half of the year and we’re right on track for another record year.