We all need some extra advertising for our services, so why not get some free extra advertising

WorldTradeForum.com was upgraded this weekend to a new version of phpBB allowing you to post classified ads, but also to create your very own blog. Whenever you post in the forum your blog gets some more exposure since the latest blog post title show up in all your forum posts

The blogs at World Trade Forum are therefore perfect for you to write some more about your products, services or offers for the visitors more interested. Since all blogs also got their own RSS feeds you can build your own subscriber base with users interested in just your offers

So check out WorldTradeForum.com to promote your own services today.

XavierMedia.com has just released a new ad space at their domain where you can get free ad space for your 125×125 banner . You simply just visit this page and place a $0 bid and you’re in . Easy, isn’t it?

your ad will show up on pages at www.xaviermedia.com until a higher bid is received and  since you can place $0 bids you can get free banner ad space.

To find out more about this offer, please visit Xavier Forum or the Xavier Media blog.

Most people got a blog and there are several ways for you to earn a few extra bucks from your blog. Most of you have also tried writing reviews for payment, but there are a few downsides with this because most companies like for example RevewMe.com don’t got enough good and exciting offers. To be able to earn some money you have to write about cars or English classes even if they are not at all related to your blog

However here’s a good thing: Sponsored Reviews. They got plenty of good offers for you to bid on. That’s also another good thing. You bid on the offers you want to write about, the advertiser can then accept your offer, do a counter bid or reject your bid completely.

This adds a lot of flexibility because more popular blogs get more paid for writing about the same company as a smaller blog, which is far to both bloggers and advertisers. This will actually mean that bloggers can earn more if they market their blog. That will also add more value to the reviews for the advertisers . It’s a win-win situation.

So if you haven’t checked out Sponsored Reviews yet you should

If you love Twitter like we do at Xavier Media, then you will just love this new service called TwittAd.com. It’s a service that lets you sell ad space on your Twitter page.

This is an example of how it could look like:

To test TwittAd.com I signed up for an account and you can buy an ad at twitter.com/xaviermedia for only $5/month if you like. Xavier Media got about 60 followers at the moment.

How it works

1 Post Twitter account for advertisers to purchase
2 Select your duration & price
3 Wait for advertiser to purchase
4 Accept or Deny the proposed ad
5 If you accept, upload ad to the design section on your Twitter account
6 Notify TwittAd through your account maintenance page on TwittAd that the ad has been placed

Overall Rating

I’m giving TwittAd 4 of 5 for the creative ad placements. However I haven’t seen any actual results yet (since I joined about an hour ago), so I may change this score if no ads are sold at all….

If you need some place to advertise your blog or forum, then you should have a look at Xavier Exchange which is a free banner exchange using 125×125 banners. What’s so good with this exchange is the free banner creator you can use to design your banner at CreateBanner.com. At this special page you can create free 125×125 banners without the CreateBanner.com brand until the 31st of December

If you write a review about the exchange in your blog and you’ll get 5 000 banner impressions. When you write the review you’re free to use the referral link from their referral program so you get credits twice for the same review

The exchange ratio is sliding which means that the better you perform the better exchange ratio you get. This inspires the members to add the exchange banners at the top of their pages since that will perform better then ads at the bottom of the page rewarding the members with higher exchange ratios

Check out Xavier Exchange today and get your free 3000 impressions just for joining.

Total score:

FreeViral is a way of getting more visitors to your web site. You sign up and get a special page where you send your visitors, for every one that sign up under you you get your link code at their page. For every one you sign up your down line will grow and for every one in your downline signing up friends and visitors your down line will grow even more.

Why do I need a down line? Well the thing is that the bigger down line you have the more visitors to your site you’ll get since everyone signing up under you or anyone in your down line must visit your site to get a special signup code. Without this code they can’t sign up.

Positive things

• It’s free and easy to sign up
• You get free visitors to your site
• The better you promote your 1st line, the more visitors you’ll get

Negative things

• The traffic is not targeted
• Hard to say if you’ll get any returning customers or if the visitors just visit your site to get the code

Overall rating

I’m giving them a score of 2 out of 5 possible:

125Exchange.com is a banner exchange for 125×125 banners (the most popular ad format for blogs at the moment). It works just like any other banner exchange out there: You register, put the ad code on your site and hopefully get some visitors from the network. A few extra pluses is that this exchange is targeted at blogs (i.e. you have to have a blog to join) and you must have at least 20 posts in your blog before you join.

This exchange is exchanging visitors because for every three visitors that click the ad on your site you get two visitors from the network. This encourage the members to put the ad code as high as possible to get as many visitors to click on the ads. The more visitors clicking on the ads the more visitors you will get to your site . So this is a big plus if you compare the network against banner exchanges where you exchange banner views because in those networks the members tend to put the banners at the bottom of their pages where no one will ever see them:(

What I don’t like is that you can only have 3 banners. But since you can have 3 banners it’s not a big minus .

They also got a referral program where you get 10% extra credits for referring other blog members.

Positive things

• Exchange for blogs with special categories targeted at blogs like Entrecard and ProBlogging.
• Blogs must have a traffic history at Compete.com which means that only established blogs with traffic can join.
• Referral program.
• If you got more then one blog you can use the ad code on all your blogs
• Only blogs can be advertised and no other campaigns like rich quick schemes which increases the quality of the network.
• You get 5,000 banner views for free when you join.

Negative things

• You can only have three banners.

Overall rating

I’m giving them 4 out of 5, so sign up you too at 125Exchange.com.

Fastclick.com was a good advertising network in the beginning of 2000 for publishers since they offered a number of different ad sizes, PayPal payments (long before most other networks) and ACH payments (direct deposits into your checking account).

Unfortunately they got acquired by ValueClick and changed their name to ValueClick Media. Since most other companies acquired by ValueClick most of their development stops . The development hasn’t stopped completely for “FastClick”, but I really hope that they’re going to add 125×125 ads soon and maybe also a way to display multiple 125×125 ads in the same code like Project Wounderful can.

One of the new things they’ve added is in-stream video ads which lets you show ads before your actual video . This is amazing for a ValueClick company. I have to say that I haven’t tested the video ads, but I like the idea. The idea of this type of ads makes me actually want to start my own video site

Postive things

• Many exiting ad formats like, in-stream video ads
• Really nice dashboard which gives you a nice overview of your earnings
• Three payment options (check, PayPal and ACH) with low minimum payments (only $25)
• Many ads from advertisers. Many of the big companies like Match.com are also spending their advertising dollar here.
• You can set your own default ads and get statistics for them. You can also if you like set a price on the defaults to track them in the earnings.

Negative things

• It’s hard to get accepted
• The referral program will only pay you for the first 12 months

Overall rating

I’m giving them 4 out of 5, so sign up you too at ValueClickMedia.com:

ValueClick Media Leads at vcmleads.com (used to be WebSponsors.com, a part of WebClients.net) is a typical ad network…. no wait. It was a typical ad network in the mid-90’s when it was WebSponsors.com, but today the technology has completely outrun this old fashioned ad network. Not much has actually changed with this site since mid-90’s. They got a new design (since the take-over by ValueClick) and some new offers (of course), but other then that it’s a typical site from the 90’s.

I have to say that it’s too bad that this site hasn’t been developed at all, in fact they (the new owners) have removed a lot of features that was a part of the site during the WebClients ownership . For example they used to have a site called Free2try.com where you could earn commission on thousands of nice offers, but that’s history now

Another bad thing with ValueClick Media Leads (except for the boring name) is the fact that they still don’t offer RSS feeds for their offers like most of their competitors do. You have to still login and manually get your offers by clicking around in their “slow to navigate” web site

Too bad ValueClick had to ruin a good web site and ad network.

Positive things

• Good offers
• Many banner formats

Negative things

• Slow to navigate site
• Poor search functions for the offers. It’s hard to find the perfect offer.
• You can’t see overall performance for the offers before you’ve tried them
• Few features (no extra functions at all), i.e. still in 2008 they’re at the same technical level as 1998!!!!!
• They stopped with the fantastic web site Free2try.com when they became ValueClick!!!!!
• No RSS feeds. Most other sites like for example TradeDoubler (the European ValueClick) got plenty of feed options for their publishers.
• I don’t think they offer ACH nor Paypal payments for their publishers, i.e. you still have to wait for your paycheck . Another thing from the 90’s!

Overall score

I’m giving them just one adv.erti.se out of five possible:

Ok, after some time of inactivity it’s time for a newstart for adv.ert.se. This time it’s going to be reviews of advertising networks both from an advertiser perspective and from a publisher perspective. Hopefully you’ll all like the “new” adv.erti.se blog

/Andreas