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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Advertising
A Big Deal For Detailed Image
Today we’re really excited to be the featured partner for the launch of Car and Driver Magazine’s Dashboard Deals as well as Road and Track Magazine’s First Look Rewards, their new Groupon-like daily deal programs. I’m traveling this week. More to come on this when I return.
LockerPulse Ads Up & Running, Version 0.0.0.1
OK so we really don’t version our projects like that. The point is that this is a really early stage project. From the very beginning, prior to even deciding whether or not to have a paid version, we recognized that there was a lot of opportunity in targeting ads to sports fans. SportsLizard does this in a very basic way. On our Price Guide we target eBay ads based upon what card/collectible the user is valuing. Search for a Michael Jordan card, and we’ll show you a banner ad of Michael Jordan cards. It’s worked really well for us over … Continue reading
Dynamic Banner Ads With PHP and Javascript
Last month we struck a deal for Detailed Image to sponsor Autopia.org, definitively the largest online community of auto detailers. Clearly our target market for DI – a community that can exponentially increase our foothold in the detailing community. The potential is very large. Part of the sponsorship agreement included a 120 x 600 banner ad thrown into the rotation on the homepage. George came up with the idea of having the banner show our automated Daily Special. Autopia (like most sites) will pull your ad from an image or from Javascript. So he approached me and asked me … Continue reading
Does This Happen to Anyone Else?
This is driving me nuts. So I’m on browsing stories on Digg, which I am now officially obsessed with and fascinated by from a user perspective, a community perspective, and a business perspective. I click on a story in Firefox (3.0, but also happened previously in versions 2.xx) and about 1/10th of the time a page that should have a banner ad that looks like this: Has a banner ad that looks like this: With the javascript actually typed out: Am I the only one that this happens to? Wtf Digg. If this happens to anyone other than me, you’re … Continue reading
Thank You Very Much Microsoft
A few weeks back I read about Microsoft’s new Live.com Cashback program where users actually get “cash back” (catchy huh) if they make purchases on items of participating partners found through Live searches. Intrigued, I looked a bit more into it and realized that advertising partners get charged on a CPA basis, not a CPC basis. Paying by “action” is the holy grail for all advertisers. If I can only pay when someone makes a purchase I take all of the guesswork out of click through rates and conversion rates for ad programs. It’s virtually impossible to lose money as … Continue reading
Starting on Tastefully Driven Pre-Marketing
OK, so it’s happening about 2 weeks later than I had hoped, but I’m finally at the point where I can spend an hour or two a day on some pre-launch hype for Tastefully Driven – the goal obviously being to collect as many email addresses as possible on our splash page. I don’t have a set goal (yet), but having a list of 10,000 to start with can jumpstart a site a lot quicker than a list of 100 so it behooves us to get as many as we freaking can. Today we did two things to get us … Continue reading
Download My Marketing eBook for FREE
We’ve made the decision to make my Faceup Web Marketing eBook available for free download. After filling out the form on the eBook page you’ll be emailed a link to download the book directly. I updated the book last week, and it now includes updated information on keyword research tools, link building, Google AdWords, and more…in addition to all of the topics outlined on the eBook page. I’m hoping this: Helps spread what I’ve learned in SEO/web marketing in the past few years to all web entrepreneurs. Now that it’s free, everyone can afford it Creates new business for Faceup … Continue reading
Bartering Advertising to Your Advantage
I think in previous posts I’ve proven my point that advertising should never be the sole source of revenue for an online business. In addition to all of the reasons I mentioned previously, there’s another one that’s often overlooked: bartering advertising. If your only source of income is ad revenue, you guard each impression as if your life depends on it…you won’t dare trade it because you need to get top dollar for it. However, if you’ve got another source of revenue (or two or three other sources of revenue) you can barter said advertising to drive more qualified traffic … Continue reading
My Problem Online Advertising – Part 2
I got quite a response from my previous post about my issues with online advertising. I was actually quite surprised at people rushing to the defense of using advertising as a primary revenue source. Personally, I think it goes to show just how much “brainwashing” web entrepreneurs of the web2.0/Google AdSense generation have been subjected to. I will never ever say that advertising is a bad way to monetize a site, but I will also never ever say that it’s a good business model to solely rely on advertising revenue for your business (unless you’re a traditional business like magazine, … Continue reading
My Problem With Online Advertising
There’s no one out there that loves the recent advances on the web more than I do. From a user standpoint, “Web 2.0″ is all about innovative technologies that push the boundaries of the web without costing a cent. From Flickr to MySpace/Facebook, Google Apps, and YouTube, one common denominator is that they are all free. And that’s awesome – if you are a user. But what about if you are a development company? Those rare successes have baited us into thinking that online advertising is a really viable business option. From my experiences, it’s as much fools gold as … Continue reading