My disappointment with “Dating Ad Network” won’t stop me from trying new banner exchange systems in the future, but I’m done here.

Good riddance!

I generally don’t use banner exchange networks to generate traffic. Usually they are Russian date since filled crappola systems.

This one is no exception.

For webmasters you can get tips, add your site and/or sitemap.xml to the crawl list, search keywords on your site and lots more… just not enough detail though, much like the MSN search webmasters area that preceded it.

As well, if you used your MSN login for the old MSN Search, then use the same login/password to access your account again at: http://www.bing.com/webmaster

I have seen some improved traffic for my keywords (the ones that earn me $$) so, so far so good for Bing!

I’ve been putting extra hours into quite a few of my sites, and still building more, as well as working on marketing a new video date service (to be announced soon!), dealing with personal health issues (not any more of this later) and my own website design business too.

Not that DatingB2B.com is unimportant to me… it’s home for me. Completely of my own information, sweat and tears… not that there’s been many tears, unless a server goes down or some blackout that keeps me offline for a while.

But to catch you up, let’s say that I’ve been putting in extra time to have a more relaxed summer. Or at least be able to put in more time on other things, not web-related.

That being said, I have been moving many of my sites to the WordPress system, which requires not only the install and design of the templates, but also the import, often manually, of the information on the site as it existed.

It’s very time consuming. Overall it takes me about 3 to 5 days to convert an existing site to WordPress… and that’s just one site.

New things you want to know about:

1. The Amazon Kindle Store, ebooks for the Kindle Reader, now has an affiliate program that pays you CASH for people subscribing and paying to read your blog. Weird. I don’t know of too many blogs that I’d pay $3.00 a month to read, but there are a couple that have invaluable information for me that I would certainly wouldn’t think twice about kicking a couple of dollars to the writers.

I have used the paypal option on a few sites to send a couple of dollars to the owners/writers. Heck, if it’s worthwhile, I’d just as soon buy it online as read it in a magazine that I’d pay a copuple of dollars for anyways.

2. Quantcast has made it easier to integrate their traffic counter into your site’s pages and show the world your traffic numbers and some more detailed information about your site.

Good for attracting advertising dollars and setting up another counter to show the value of your website’s traffic. You should think about setting up an account. I think that, in the long run, you may appreciate the public comparison numbers more than the abstract Google Analytics stats. Take a few minutes and consider Quantcast.com for finding out more about your site’s traffic.

3. The “White Label” option for dating services has continued to gain in webmaster popularity BUT the key is still “Content is King”.  If you don’t have a unique theme, or a design and related artciles that will continually attract ne wvisitors and keep the old ones coming back, you WILL NOT make any money with online dating services.

That being said is that I still find Bone Fish to be the easiest white label to work with. If you haven’t set a site up with Bone Fish, it’s time you did. Take a look here and consider them for your next dating service project.

4. There was  awhile lot more that i wanted to share with you, but it’s going to have to wait for another day…. but the wait will be worth it, I hope!

I expect to wind down use of this service to promote my site as I drain off the unused 12,000+ credit banner displays in my account.

I hope you have better luck with this network.

They did send at least one email a week proposing some other services , affiliate based, that may have been profitable. But essentially the email was a sales letter, not a testimonial, so I never bothered with their suggestions.

Better luck next time.

After all, you need so much time for design, emails, traffic link exchanges, SEO, and so much more.

But, you also need to join networking groups. This way you’ll make connections and possible trade important techniques that will help you add to your revenue stream.

Here are the main sites (as of April 2009) that you should be a member of:

Facebook - the social networking giant. A good idea is to set up a Facebook blog for your company/website.

Twitter - The occasional “tweet” about what you’re doing on your website is a great idea.

Flickr - If you have pictures and video to share about what you do, you should have a page here.

YouTube - The king of video, you should have an account in your company/website name and talk a little about what you do. Add favorite videos to your account you’d like others to see and post video to your site that seems appropriate. Remember to stay within your subject.

Technorati - Bolg, search, multimedia contact and networking site. Get your profile started now, link your blogs and watch your traffic increase as you add to this networking/blog site.

MySpace - A great venue for more multimedia promotion.

Plaxo - another great networking site that also offers syncronization between your outlook contacts on different computers and phones.

LinkedIn - Networking has never been easier. Meet new contacts from your contacts and find new ways to promote yourself and your company/website.

I know I’ve missed some great networking sites so if you know of any, just comment them in, Thanks!

I had enrolled four of my sites into the banner network exchange hoping for some good traffic from previously well tested banners.

Although I did manage to serve a lot of network banners on my site I did not receive nearly as many click-throughs on to my own sites. This could be for many reasons:

• My banners just not performing well
• Poor banner placement on other banner exchange sites
• Network not well suited to manage traffic

While the first two explanations speak for themselves, the third needs a little more explanation:
If DatingAdNetwork.com cannot handle a large amount of impressions, or the banner sizes I submitted do not work well within the exchange I should have been advised as such. As it is, it took three days for my initial account o be approved, after I am already displaying their network banners, and each banner addition that I added to my account took no less than a full day to be approved. Not very fast in my opinion.
This image shows where my account stood on Monday March 31 2009 when I stopped displaying ads and decided to see how long my impression balance would take to be used up.

My account stats March 31 2009

I will monitor my account and make some banner changes to see if I can increase the traffic to my sites but, for the time being, I will not be displaying any more ads. You can see that my banners were displayed 9,774 times with 32 click-throughs to my sites. A horrible stat. I displayed 25,784 banners and sent 92 clicks to other sites. Another horrible stat. Are we all doing something wrong or is there another excuse?