One of the most frustrating things about being a contextual publisher is that you can never get a straight answer from the companies. No matter if its Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network or Microsoft pubCenter, they all give canned responses to just about everything.
My friend Jennifer Slegg has been a consultant to Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft for years and played a vital role in these companies launching their contextual products. Jennifer also consults with both small business and a number of fortune 500 companies on implementing or improving their current contextual ad placement. If your business was to go to any major search engine and ask for a recommendation for your contextual revenue you would be given Jenn’s name.
I have done site clinics about half a dozen timea with Jenn at some of the biggest search conferences in the world and Its very impressive when people toss out their sites and Jenn has tons of feedback for them with in minutes. Then we later hear back from them about how the 20 second review from Jenn doubled their income… Pretty awesome stuff!
For the last decade Jenn has been a moderator at the 2 biggest webmaster forums in the world seeing over the contextual revenue sections. She helps out as much as possible but obviously this is something that does not scale very well.
SOOOO
A couple days ago Jenn announced she was going to be offering JenSense Pro which is a closed community based around contextual advertising. And its COMPLETELY FREE during beta!
Whats the benefits of having a closed community?
Safety
Members can truthfully ask/answer questions and not worry about their answers being taken out of context. Also flames are non existent. Anyone who has ever asked a question in Googles AdSense group and been treated like a idiot newbie knows what I am talking about.
Scaleability
This is something I can certainly understand. I spend hours a day trying to respond to emails, twitters, forum posts… but even if that was all I did 24 hours a day I still could not keep up with demand. But now with ShoeMoney Tools we have a private forum and when someone posts it sends it right to my phone so I usually answer their questions within seconds.
I think Jenn is REALLY on to something here with a closed community. These private communities are really where its at.
Guess who I ask what to do when my Google Adsense check bounces? Or when I get some cryptic warning message from Google… I ask .. you guessed it – Jenn.
Jennifer also has tons of friends very involved in contextual advertising within the community. I am sure representatives from all major search engines will be in there too eager to helpout with such a high quality group of advertisers.
Go signup now for the beta and tell her ShoeMoney sent you!
April 11, 2009 at 3:01 pm
How long before the government gets involved with Google to get straight answers about AdSense?
April 11, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Hi, great article. I just started tweeting and your article is a great help to me.
April 11, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I’m excited for Jenn; she and I were talking about this on twitter and then suddenly a few days later – boom! it was up! I went and took a look, and while I figure myself to be no slouch when it comes to AdSense, I immediately found ideas I could implement right away – and the timing couldn’t be more opportune; since AdSense is down for many of us, and we need new ways to goose our ad placements and our earnings.
I will definitely be spending a lot of time there.
April 11, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Nice offering! This sounds like a great tool and can vouch with your comment about mistreatment on the Adsense forums when I am only starting out. Thankfully others can skip that and go straight to a better place for resource.
April 11, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Awesome article as usual, I just clicked through to Jen’s site and requested a Beta account, I’ll keep you guys posted.
April 11, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Yeah I am reading her articles from past couple of weeks. She also have one personal blog as well.
Certainly she provide good tips and if you are newbie than you should bookmarker her page.
April 11, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Its really an awesome article and its true contextual ads return in better way then unrelated ads.
April 11, 2009 at 11:57 pm
Great blog post, I am going to have to signup for a beta account as this sounds like a great idea.
April 12, 2009 at 3:51 am
Wooooow that is a superb service and all that free. I am surely joining.
April 12, 2009 at 5:28 am
Some great info. I’ll have to take a look soon.
April 12, 2009 at 7:13 am
Nice, improving my contextual advert revenue is something I’m always trying to do. I’ll be sure to check this out.
April 12, 2009 at 12:46 pm
definetly something I will have to take a look at. Improving your contextual advertising will definetly reduce cost and increase profit.
April 12, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Take a look at shoe’s site. Do you see any adsense?
But you sure see a lot of private ads don’t you?
Fact is this – for the average site, adsense CPMs range from $1 to $3. Private ads on the other hand, deliver CPMs over $20. Which is exactly why shoe has private ads.
Screw adsense. Private ads FTW!
April 13, 2009 at 3:50 am
Contextual ads are much more profitable indeed. I’ll take a look at the community, sounds interesting
April 13, 2009 at 4:25 am
I am still learning about context links ads, I think the calculation and formulation should be transparan and easy enough to be understood and no hidden agenda.cool topic
April 13, 2009 at 9:15 am
She sounds very respectable I’ll keep her in mind in the next few months.
Thanks Shoe
April 14, 2009 at 7:12 am
Thanks for the information. I am going to JenSense and check it out.
April 14, 2009 at 12:20 pm
aha, I’m going to sign up for the free beta test..
April 21, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Will definately check out the beta. Thanks for sharing.
May 13, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Nothing wrong with trying it…