We've done it again. We've simplified the advertiser experience in Trafficspaces by making it simpler and faster.

In the past, it took about five or more steps (and about five minutes) to create an ad campaign. Not any longer. From today, advertisers can get started in less than one minute.

We drew inspiration from John Maeda of MIT. In his book, The Laws of Simplicity, he argues that "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful".

Simply put, when designing a self-service advertising system, the key to increase conversions is to

1. Engage them early

First off, after selecting their ad zone, they should see a outline of the ad zone's dimensions.

This helps them get a mental view of how their ad will appear on your site.

Secondly, they should be able to design their ad and preview the changes live on the same page. If they make a change to an image, flash, or text ad, the changes should be live on the same page, without needing to refresh it.

And one more thing, they should be able do all that before creating an account.

2. Save time

Even a newbie advertiser should be able to get started in one minute. Anything longer than this, and people start to abandon the process. Every piece of info they need should be within easy reach – ad preview, targeting preferences, budget, estimated impressions and billing info.

The result. You'll get more advertisers signing up and creating ad campaigns (even if it is to try you out). You've gotta love it.

We've added these improvements to Trafficspaces, and the changes are a breath of fresh air because they'll help you get a good Return on Investment on your Ad Store.

Try it out on the demo and tell us what you think.

Many thanks to Kyle Q. Yan and Art Agrawal for all their advice.

Related posts:

1. How to Use Coupons and Discounts to Increase Ad Sales
2. The login screen now supports Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and more

Related posts:

1. Get a Self-Service Ad Manager In Your Local Language
2. How to Sell Ads Online > Provide a Self-Service Ad Management System (3/7)
3. Techcrunch Switches to Self-Service Ad Platform and Validates Trafficspaces’ Business Model.

One of the key items on our todo list for 2010 is to add support for multiple languages in Trafficspaces.

It fits well in our main goal of helping you reach more advertisers.

Think about it, if you've got a Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, German or French site, it makes sense that your self service ad platform be in that language as well.

Your advertisers will love it

We are hoping to support one new language per month (fingers crossed).

If you'll like us to support a specific language, just drop a comment below. We'll consider every comment.

Thanks everyone.

Related posts:

1. Language Translators Needed
2. New Feature: Allow Advertisers to Pay in Your Local Currency
3. OpenX vs Google Ad Manager – Which is better?

This is the third part of the How to Sell Ads Online series.

To run an ad campaign, advertisers (small and large) need to go through the following processes - 

• strategic planning,
• creative development, 
• media planning,
• media buying,
• ad trafficking,
• performance tracking,
• optimization (a/b testing), and
• reporting.

Now, this is how it affects you.

Direct sales only

You may find that you spend up to 6 hours every month liaising with advertisers, handling billing, signing agreements, testing their creatives, booking the campaign, monitoring it, and preparing the reports.

If you've just hired an expensive $80000 sales rep, you really want them laser focused on serving big ticket advertisers e.g. movie studios, big pharma, national retailers etc. They may run just ten campaigns a month but those ten could represent $500,000 in revenue.

Direct sales + Self service

On the flip side, you may have 100 requests from smaller advertisers, each with an average of $1000 to spend.

There just isn't enough time to help every one of them manually but you don't want to leave $100,000 on the table. This is where a self service system comes in handy.

A self service system allows smaller advertisers to book, pay for, and manage their campaigns online, without little or no manual involvement from you.

These systems are not new. To be clear, we are referring to systems that the publisher control (especially of pricing, billing, branding and relationships) and not the ones that operate like ad networks e.g AdSense, Adbrite or BlogAds.

The most notable self service system out there is Facebook Ads. There are other examples like Myspace's My Ads, Reddit, Plenty Of Fish etc.

No self service?

Without one, you are left with just the good old "contact us" form, which turns away more people than you think. If they do contact you, then you have to either turn them away or run a low value campaign manually. 

So do yourself a favour and invest some time in optimizing your sales process.

Action Points

1. Before you go off to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to create one, search on Google for off-the-shelf solutions.

Effect

1. Complete optimization of your sales funnel.
2. Increase revenue.
3. Improve advertiser satisfaction while you focus on marketing and building relationships.

Related posts:

1. Crenk.com Feature: Trafficspaces – the Self Service Ad Management Platform
2. Techcrunch Switches to Self-Service Ad Platform and Validates Trafficspaces’ Business Model.
3. How to Sell Ads Online > Hire a Dedicated Sales Person (2/7)

Today, a friend of mine sent me a link to an article that confirms that Techcrunch, the leading tech blog, has decided to dump its long term ad partner in favour of a self-serve ad platform.

This is great news because it validates what we’ve always believe in – self-serve ad platforms rule!

All the fanfare aside, it is good to examine why Techcrunch made this decision.

In my opinion, there are two fundamental reasons:

1. Increased Control/Transparency – With Federated Media or any ad network, there is a Chinese wall that shields Techcrunch from its advertisers.
   
   This may not look like a big deal when you are a small blog but as a growing business, it is important to understand your customers and build a relationship with them. Systems like Trafficspaces allow you to do just that. Our API even allows you to get a data feed of all registered users and integrate it with your own system.
2. Increased Profit – This one is quite obvious. Get your own self-serve system and keep 100% of your ad sales revenue. It makes economic sense especially during these uncertain times.

In summary, there is a clear trend toward systems like Trafficspaces. We see it in the quality and quantity of enquires that come in every day. We welcome it and are prepared to satisfy the demand.

With the help of our existing users, we’ve launched a simpler ad campaign workflow, flexible pricing, discounts, coupons, branded storefronts, direct payments into your account and lots more.

Thanks everyone and keep the feedback coming.

Related posts:

1. The Trafficspaces Business Model Explained
2. Crenk.com Feature: Trafficspaces – the Self Service Ad Management Platform
3. The Free Trafficspaces Package is now available