How to Display Your Own Ads on Your Websites Network with OpenX
Posted by Marty Dickinson on Mar 31, 2010
In my family of full-time Internet marketers, there seems to be a hot trend to make as many websites as we can and build traffic from those sites in order to feed our main sites. But, how exactly does one manage the “feeding” part?
About a year ago, I looked at a free product called OpenX. Last week I heard about it again and all day today I’ve been playing around with getting it installed. Essentially I can create an image add (or video or text among others) and then have that ad automatically display to any website I add the code to. I can have multiple ads rotating out on hundreds or even thousands of websites…promoting my own products and services.
Here’s how it works:
1. I had to install the software to my web hosting account. Visit OpenX.org to get the free download files or just contact your hosting company to see if it’s already installed on your server.
2. Watch the video on the OpenX.org website to get a quick tutorial and then setup your campaign and sites so that ads will display.
3. Copy and paste the code provided by OpenX to your website. In my case it was (openx:1) and here’s what displays within this post:
{openx:1}
4. Add the code to your sidebar. OpenX made a free plug-in for WordPress so you can just download that and add it to your sidebar as a widget and you’re good to go!
5. Create more ads and add them to your OpenX campaign. You can have as many ads rotating as you’d like!
6. Watch your visitation stats and click-through’s from within your OpenX account. You can even assign CPM and CPC prices
7. Take it all to the next level and open up your websites for others to post to and have them pay you for the traffic you’re bringing to them. I’ll get there…but, for right now, I’m just building these out on my other sites.
Give OpenX a try. It’s free and it’s probably already loaded on your web server. Just ask support how to implement it. Maybe I’ll do a setup video on it once I’ve figured it out myself 
Copywriting Tips: Writing Features and Benefits of a Product
Posted by Marty Dickinson on Mar 15, 2010
My most challenging part of copywriting has always been writing features and benefits of a product. I could come up with stories, headlines, price offers in minutes and all the fancy Buy Now! buttons you’d need to fill a sales page. But, it was the benefits list that always drove me crazy; until I discovered an important point about benefits lists. People don’t care about the features nearly as much as they want to know the benefits.
Then I started to take a closer look at what benefits really are. They’re action items, right? You “save” money or “stop” wasting time, for example. So, why not start out all benefit statements with verbs?
A few days ago, I had to come up with a benefits list for a coordinated Amazon book launch we’re involved with. I knew I needed at least 10 benefits for the sales page where we hope to inspire the authors of the book to pay my team a package deal special to help plan their bonus giveaways. So, when someone buys a book during the booklaunch period, the purchaser will get access to bonuses.
Within only 20 minutes, I came up with 20 benefits of having a bonus during an Amazon campaign. Here are five of them just so you get an idea:
- Clarify what exactly a “bonus†is and what people expect from it
- Discover what your market or audience really needs and why YOU are the best person to provide the solution
- Conceive a bonus idea that will be of essential value to your audience
- Define the objective and purpose of your bonus
- Regulate the information you can give away versus up-selling for more
Notice how each benefit statement starts out with an action verb. This is the secret to writing benefits lists in under 20 minutes. Now all you need is a good list of verbs to use in your writing. That list, I use several times per week. Bookmark it so that you can refer to it often and enjoy your newly found method for writing action verb benefits lists.
