knofun

Kris Jones from Pepperjam is the man. Not only is he the CEO of a kickass internet marketing company, but he continuously hooks me up. He hooked me up and invited me to attend Pepperstock, their annual company party in PA. He hooked me up to speak on his panel at ASW 09. He hooked me up with a pass to Elite Retreat, an unbelievably effective internet marketing gathering.

Now, he has hooked me up further. Pepperjam is the first licensee of ZinText, my in-text advertising platform I built for eBay. If you are a Pepperjam affiliate and you have been approved into the affiliate program you can check out PJN InText here. There are also some reviews up on the web, here are some I have found:

http://www.masonworld.com/announcements/pepperjam-ebay-text-ads-review/
http://nailsblog.com/2009/02/23/pepperjam-in-text-ads/

So thanks Kris and thanks Pepperjam and thank you, the affiliate.

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing pepperjam, zintext

Well I have been working on a few wordpress plugins for a few days and finally figured one was ready for public consumption. So basically all this thing does is implement ZinText on your wordpress blog with no coding. If you don’t know already, ZinText is in-text ads for eBay affiliates. Check out a demo here, or its on this blog on posts older than 10 days. 

Oh yeah thats another cool feature you can say only display ads on posts older than X days so you have more control over where the ads appear. There’s also a whitelist if we aren’t linking the words you want, and a blacklist if we are linking things you don’t want linked. You still have to have a campaign ID from ePN, but if you are a good affiliate you have one already.

Check out wpZinText here

Please leave feeback here or on the plugin page.

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing advertising, affiliate, ebay, in-text, plugin, wordpress, zintext

I harvest a lot of keyword data for my Zintext product, both from the eBay API and various other sources. One of the things I do is scrape the hot terms from buy.ebay.com. Here’s what they say about the terms listed there:

eBay Keywords is a list of highly popular terms that people search for on eBay. Each eBay Keyword has its very own page that allows you to view all the items eBay has for that keyword.

Sounds great right? Should be some really good hot keyword data in there. I was refreshing some keywords today and just happened to notice this keyword that got picked up: “picture of proper sexual intercourse for the elder” from page two of the P’s.

In case they took it down here is a screenshot:

Wow well thats not really what I was looking for, um, thanks anyways? Leaving out the buy.ebay.com keywords from now on..

Uncategorized ebay, keyword, zintext

Released a new version of ZinText today. You can check it out on our demo page.

Basically we replaced the old info window that pops up when you mouse over a link. Now instead of 2 items you get 10, and its all in flash with some cool hover effects and all that jazz. We will be playing around with different movies to test click throughs and all that, but for now at least it looks better

other zintext

Hey all I haven’t really blogged in a while, thought I would update everyone. Here goes:

The Chargers are 0-2. This will all change tonight when we beat down Jett Favre at Qualcomm tonite. I will be there early tailgating (read: shotgunning beers like I was still enrolled at SDSU) so hit me up if you have the digits.

I am going to ThinkTank 2008, and I am really excited. No I didn’t win my way in but I am still going – thanks dk.

ZinText has probably been my most active project, closing a round of angel funding and inking a licensing deal with arguably the biggest affiliate company in the world. Stay tuned for details.

Thinking about moving this blog to knofun.com, and changing all my chrishedgecock branding (twitter,blog,aim etc) to knofun. Yeah I know I have thought of it before and didn’t do it, that’s why I am thinking about it now.

My lil nephew continues to be the best-looking AND most-photographed kid in San Diego – nay the world! Exhibit A:

So yeah that’s probably about it for now.

other chargers, nate, updates, zintext

I cruise the web a lot using services like StumbleUpon. I recently stumbled on this site that apparently does some kind of web-mobile sms stuff. Like just texting from your phone, but with ads attached to your messages. Ok sorry thats a topic for another post entitled “Dumb as a rock business models and why they don’t work.”

At any rate, this guy is using AdBrite’s solution for in-text ads. I guess adbrite calls them “Inline ads” whatever. Check out his intro page:

That’s 8 words linked. Out of 62 words in the opening text, 13% of them are trying to get you somewhere else than the website’s original intent. I know you have to make money, all that but this end result is just unacceptable, from every point of view. As a visitor do I want to ever see this big pile of advertising again? As an advertiser, do I really want my message portrayed to the end user in this fashion? As an ad network, does AdBrite really make more money like this? As a website owner am I proud to show off this website? I can see linking all those words if they were all high value keywords, like if I was listing off a bunch of cool new gadgets like ipod,zune,iphone,digital camera I could potentially see the value in linking each of those. But AdBrite is linking words like present, sign, start, send. Let’s see what happens when you mouse over the word “send” :

Not sure what they are doing, but there is clearly very little relevance between the word they are linking and the ad they are displaying. Where is the value for anyone here? This is just unnecessary clutter.

Attention AdBrite Publishers! Use a real in-text advertising solution, ZinText. Relevancy.. every time.

other adbrite, stumble, zintext

Big thanks to Laurel and the folks at eBay’s developer program. This morning they featured ZinText on their developer’s blog.

BTW, I am headed to eBay’s Developers Conference in Chicago June 17-19. Hit me up if you are going to be out there.

geek stuff, ventures devcon, ebay, zintext

There are some options for Zintext that I don’t include on the get code page. Not that I don’t think people don’t want them, I just want to make it as simple as possible for publishers to get the code on their pages. Here is some average Zintext code:

<script language="javascript">
var EB_campid='00000000000';
</script>
<script src="http://www.zintext.com/showads.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

That’s all you really need to run Zintext on any page, just a campaign ID from eBay Partner Network. Now to the fun stuff.

To link ONLY some words on any of your pages, add this line under the “var EB_campid” line:

var EB_onlywhitelist = 'beige throw pillow,custom ipod,xbox games';

This can be as long as you want, just separate your keywords with a comma.

If you don’t want a double underline on your links and just want them to follow your normal CSS, add this line:

var EB_doublelink = 0;

There are a couple more, and I will add to this list as we go.

FYI – We are also now requiring email at signup, eBay wants us to be able to email you if there is any problem with your ads.

ventures advanced, ebay, zintext

I take my work pretty seriously (stop laughing!!!), so naturally there comes a time to measure up to your competition. For ZinText, that would be other in-text advertising networks like Kontera. So recently I found an average publisher that by chance was running both Zintext and Kontera on the same page. Aside from being a little shocked the code was all working properly with the two competing for space, I got a unique opportunity to see my lil baby in action against arguably the best among the competition (certainly the biggest).

On the homepage, we both linked the word “Nokia” in the first paragraph since it was mentioned twice. Here is what their ad looked like:

Uh, No Xplode? which links to: http://www.toseeka.com/search.php?q=No%2BXplode?? I don’t even know what No Xplode is or why it’s $39.99, but this didn’t seem too relevant to me.

Here’s our ad, same page, same paragraph:

Now I am not knocking Kontera, I know first-hand how hard it is to match relevant keywords to relevant advertising and I am not saying my product is perfect, but come on.

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing in-text advertising, kontera, marketing, zintext

Big news today, well I guess not big but rewarding for a nerd like me, ZinText finally got the blessing from eBay, meaning we get to use this cool logo:

And take the scary “not approved by ebay” text out of the terms and conditions. Pretty cool, thanks eBay!!!

geek stuff, ventures ebay, zintext