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:

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 :).