It always makes me feel giddy when a Google Alert pops up in my inbox, announcing that someone has taken their valuable time to write about emptyspaceads. In this case, its Jens P. Berget from SLYMARKETING. His review of our product has left me grinning. Here are some highlights:

“You can just join EmptySpaceAds and two minutes later you will have setup your first ads. Then, you just need to upload their code onto your website and that’s it. You can preview the ads on their website, so you don’t have to upload anything before you are satisfied.”

“I think that this is great.”

Now that I’ve teased you a little, head on over and read the rest of his review.

PS: Please keep all of the great feedback coming! We’d be happy to feature any new publishers on our home page and/or a blog post. Just get in touch!

We are always working on making emptyspaceads better. We’ve heard from a few publishers that they may not understand what the differences are between empty space detection methods. The two modes we have available are: “Automatic” method and the “Let Me Specify”. Let’s cover one at a time:

The Automatic Detection Mode uses a simple approach to determine whether the content is empty space or not. We just completed an update that should make the ads appear less often. Our goal is that the ads only every appear when your user’s mouse is in the empty space of their website. And we’re constantly working on making this happen.

Next up is the Let Me Specify Detection Mode. Until we’re 100% accurate at identifying your website’s empty space, we give you this option to say to us, “I know exactly where I want the ads to appear in.” This approach means you must adjust your HTML just a tad where you’d like the ads to appear in. We’ll cover that in a second.

So say you just picked the “Let Me Specify” option. What’s next? Well, you simply add class=”ESAemptyspace” to whatever HTML element you’d like the ads to appear in. You can pick elements like HTML or BODY, or any DIV you’d like. You’re in control. If you’d like help in setting up emptyspaceads on your site, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

I’d like to give a warm welcome to our newest ‘Spacies’ I like how PayPerPost has really built a community around their ‘Posties’ and I’d like to do the same with our publishers. I’m toying around the notion of ‘Spacies’ (get it? emptyspaceads => spacies). If you have a better name, let me know :). Anyway, to the publishers!

I really enjoy the hard-hitting blogging about sports and tips about monetizing your sports website that JSB delivers. Mitchell is a real go-getter and many in the blogging community can definitely learn from him. Mitchell and JSB have chosen to with the Let Me Specify detection method to get the fine grain control over where emptyspaceads appears We’re more than happy to support you in configuring the ads to work. Just contact us.

Dan from DailyHomeRenoTips delivers helpful advice in a neighborly way. Remember Wilson, the amiable character on that television show Home Improvement? That’s who Dan reminds me of. Dan also decided to go with the “Let Me Specify” option, and the ads are showing up along his left and right sidebar, when the content there ends, and his post continues. We were able to help Dan customize his layout a bit to meet his goals.

Dan from TheShrimpFarm (different Spacy from the Dan above) has a great topical site about those curious crustaceans. It’s very intriguing to me, someone who knows almost nothing about shrimp. There’s also a cool shrimp blog you should check out. Dan is using a mix of our NetworkAds with ShoppingAds® as well as a TextAd to spur people to sign up for his blog. You might see a similar ad on this blog prompting you to subscribe - so don’t be shy :).

I’d love to feature your website when you sign up for emtpyspaceads. So hurry up already, and join the Spacies!

Hello everyone! Much thanks to Simonne over at EzMoneyOn.Net who just wrote a great review of our product. Here are my favorite quotes:

“EmptySpaceAds can be an excellent tool”

“You can offer your readers an uncluttered blog, and yet make money from it”

“The CTR is incredibly high (I don’t know if it is OK to disclose it, but my first tests show it’s almost tenfold the AdSense CTR)”

And that brings me to one of our emptyspaceads Success Lessons, which I’ll present visually:

Looks like ShoppingAds is having a little trouble serving its ads. We’re investigating the problem and will provide an updates to this post as we receive them. Rest assured any TextAds and ImageAds you created will continue to work as normal.

*UPDATE* Looks like everything is working now!

Some people intuitively learn how to use a product, whereas others like to see screen-shots and even videos. This post highlights the 4 steps a user can take to get more ShoppingAds® running on their site. I assume that the user already has a ShoppingAds® account. You may also benefit from Sri’s how-to to getting emptyspaceads running on your site. This guide is concerned with how you get ShoppingAds® to appear in your site’s empty space. We’ll try to keep this guide up to date.
Overall Diagram: Below you’ll see an overview of the steps I’ll be walking you through today. The three columns represent the three separate website you’ll be interacting with: emptyspaceads, ShoppinAds®, and your website.

Step 1: Sign up for a publisher account: Head on over to create a new account with emptyspaceads. There are only a few fields to fill out.

Step 2: Add a website you’d like emptyspaceads to appear on. Your publisher overview page will prompt you with a link, or simply head over to the big “My Websites” tab, and click “Add Website”.

Step 3a) Head on over to ShoppingAds® and create an ad, or use an existing code you have. Be sure to add a new campaign named “emptyspaceads” (or whatever you like) so you can see how effective emptyspaceads is compared to your existing ad units.

Step 3b) Create a new NetworkAd by pasting in the ShoppingAds® code. Again you’ll be prompted with a text link in your publisher Overview screen… or simply head on over to the My Ads tab, and select “Create NetworkAd”.

Step 4a) Copy emptyspaceads code. When you create your NetworkAd, the system will prompt you to copy the code for the website you want to display emptyspaceads on. Or just head over to the “My Websites” view and copy the code.

Step 4b) Paste emptyspaceads code right before the </body> tag. You can put emptyspaceads at the very end before </body>. Likely you’ll have other javascript code you’ll want to put at your footers, but we don’t mind loading last because our ads don’t need to be present right away. The before:

Step 4b continued) And After:

Congratulations, you’re done! You’ll need to upload the HTML or deploy the code to your website to see the changes. From now on, you can easily edit all the emptyspaceads that appear on your website, without having to copy & paste emptyspaceads code again (step 4a & 4b). In the meanwhile, let’s see the fruits of our labor.

Was this helpful? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Here’s a high level overview of new features we’ve added since June 2007 of last year (many of which have been added in January):

• Reduced our javascript library to 68KB (smaller file sizes mean faster page loads for you)
• 36 available configurations! (3 Ad Types * 2 Detection Types * 3 Behavior Types * 2 Dismissal Types)
  • 3 Ad Types: TextAds, ImageAds, and NetworkAds
  • 2 Detection Types: Automatic and Let Me Decide
  • 3 Behavior Types: Follow Mouse, Fixed Position Display, Snap to Margins
  • 2 Dismissal Options: Smooth Fad and Explode
• Improved ad format that looks great in Opera, IE6/7, Firefox, and Safari
• Removed annoying categories feature, making forms simpler to fill out
• Copy & paste your ShoppingAds® code to easily create NetworkAds
• Cleaned up UI to make it easier to understand how to get the ads running
• Added ability to delete websites and ads
• Added ‘Cancel’ button on the ad and website forms
• New preview feature (see emptyspaceads running on your site) actually works… well!
• Adding metrics such as number of times ad displays, number of times the user mouses over the ad, and how many seconds the user hovered over the ad
• Removed portions of our website dealing with advertisers (we’re looking to partner with Ad Networks)

Quite unexpectedly while I was in the #wordpress channel on freenode, and Sridhar of howtotuts decided to give emptyspaceads a try. He put our ads on his site and is currently serving a mix of TextAds and NetworkAds from ShoppingAds. Sridhar has vast tomes of how-tos and tutorials over at howtotuts, so head on over there and check it out!

PS: Hang out on IRC? Check out our #emptyspaceads channel on freenode where we offer free, live support (if we’re available, that is :P).

PPS: Are you running emptyspaceads?  Let us know and we’ll feature you in a blog post all about your site :)!

*UPDATE* Check Sri’s review of emptyspaceads. Thanks Sri!

Don’t run it like we did for the last 6 months. So now I’m raising my hand - it’s all my fault. I haven’t done a good enough job updating our company blog, and being the company’s sole founder, the blame lies squarely on my shoulders. Needless to say, we’ll be updating our blog much more often due to some exciting changes I’ll announce in a future post. I’ve put together a quick list of company blog do’s and don’ts based on my limited experience.

Don’t:

• Assume you can put off blogging. When I’m kicking the tires of a new product or service, I often visit the company blog to see how active the company is in developing new features. We haven’t had a post since June of last year! I think users EXPECT frequent blogging.
• Be afraid to make fun of your company. I’m sure I’ll get some flak for this, but I am of the opinion that a blog should be real and discuss the positive and negative aspects of the product in an open manner. Our blog is “100% spin free”.
• Misspell words on your blog template. And then blame Pakistan. So we had misspelled words on our template for the longest time. And I was going to blame our fabulous designer Zeeshan for the typos, but then realized it was my fault for not proof checking the page.
• Don’t give prominent billing to your blog and have it suck. We had a whole tab for our blog, and then proceeded to make two updates over approximately 11 months. Don’t fail like we did. If you’re not going to update your blog don’t give it a link or a whole front page tab.
• Have separate blogs. One of my friends has about three different company blogs. One on Tumblr and several on WordPress.com. I think this is silly. It just ends up confusing users.

Do:

• Use your blog to brag about every new feature & release. This shows your commitment to your users, readers of your blog, and any potential partners that you’re not off on the beach dilly dallying.
• Submit your blog entries to the social sites that make sense. I’m pretty new to web applications but I learn of other companies using YCNews to solicit responses to blog posts. I’ve even subscribed to a few that I found interesting.
• Create your blog at blog.yourdomain.com. Yes I know it’s painful to administer WordPress yourself, but really it’s not that bad. It looks 10X more professional than not doing it. Plus it helps with SEO.
• Do put a photo in every post if possible. As a reader I love it when I see this.
• Do comment early and often on blogs where your target users will be. We have a great product, one I’m really excited to show off. However because I didn’t do this earlier, we won’t have a group of users from the very beginning to overwhelm our servers with. Soon this will change :).

It was a design goal to get this product released as quickly as possible and get it out to you, our users. You make our product, and you make it great. We’d love to hear anything you have to say - be it flattering, critical, or anywhere in between. We’d love to hear about your user experience, bugs, feature requests, or people you know who could use this product. Please consider the following ways to get in touch with us:

• Find a bug? Got a feature request? Make sure we get the message:
  • file a ticket via TRAC
  • we’ll take a look at it and respond back to every feature request/bug by email
  • soon you’ll be able to email bugs/feature requests directly to us … we’ll let you know!
  • if you don’t really feel like filling out a web-form, check out the methods below:
• Contact Us (see contact page for a summary of methods)
  • by phone: 1 (858) 442-8111
  • by fax: 1 (760) 923-9296
  • by webform: contact form
  • by AIM: emptyspaceads
  • by YIM: emptyspaceads
  • by MSN: emptyspaceads@hotmail.com
  • by Skype: emptyspaceads
  • by GTalk: emptyspaceads
  • by IRC: join #emptyspaceads on freenode