Yesterday we uploaded our new weekly build of isocket. Among some general bug fixes and tweaks, we launched another often requested feature – you can now have multiple user accounts under the same group!

An isocket group is like a brand. If the Wall Street Journal used isocket to sell their ads, then the group would be WSJ and each of their sales people would have an account.

This is great because some sellers have different sales or ad ops people involved in different areas. For example, one of our publishers has a sales rep for accounts over $50k, and another sales rep for more self-service oriented orders under $50k. Each one can create and manage their separate sales through isocket, while still benefiting from a central dashboard.

For now, every group member is equal and can do the same things (edit info, etc). In the future we might build in different permissions and admin statuses.

Your different people will show up on your group profile, so that potential advertisers can see who they’re working with. When looking at a specific socket, only the user who manages that socket will show up.

How to invite people

It’s pretty straight forward. Go to your Account and select the new menu item for “Invite Group Members”. Here’s what it looks like:

A simple but often requested feature has been the ability to upload custom images for your socket pages.

One of our built in features is a screen capture system. So if you create an ad package that runs on your website www.techcrunchit.com, isocket will automagically go take a screenshot and use it for your ad packages.

But now you can upload images in addition to this screen shot and set one of them as your default!

This might be cool for publishers selling unique ad packages or who want to put a custom spin on their inventory to help it stand out. Here’s an example image made for one of TechCrunch’s sister websites to show where the ad grid is. They took a screenshot, dimmed the background, and added green squares:

It’s very simple to use. Just go to your socket, click the “Edit Socket Image” button.

Then upload one or more images. All you have to do is click the image and it will become the new profile picture. You also rollover to delete.

Enjoy! More to come…

We know many of you have been waiting for access to isocket and believe me, we’ve been anxious and working furiously to get it in your hands!  We consider this the beginning of a public beta (since the product is still a work in progress) – but specific wording aside, the big news is that we’re ready to start opening the doors.

The time that we had in private beta testing was time very well spent. We learned a lot about you, what you wanted and the direction of where isocket will be heading in the future thanks to our early beta testers.

So as part of this launch there is a ton of new stuff going live. Here’s some highlights:

Want To Sell Ads With isocket? Apply Now!

If you want to start selling ads through isocket, we’d love to have you!  Publishers who want to join go through a short application and approval process. The application is open as of today. You can start with the tour or skip directly to the application – it should take about 3 minutes.

Why do publishers apply?

We are requiring this application process to keep the quality of our marketplace high – you’ll make more money if advertisers know what they’re buying is legitimate. Many websites out there aren’t meant for direct sales, either because they are spammy, too small, etc. We’d be very sad to see someone pay for months of isocket service and not sell any ads, so if we really think that will happen, we’ll politely say so.

Want To Start Buying Ads?

If you want to buy ads through isocket there’s no application necessary. You just find the ads you want, and create an account during checkout. We’ll be releasing more features and ways to find inventory in the next few weeks. Check out our new advertisers page to see some of our featured inventory!

Brand Spankin’ New Public Pages

If you previously went to www.isocket.com looking for more info, you were probably dissapointed. While we were getting off the ground it acted as a placeholder and a way to measure interested in our product.  But today we’re launching the first versions of new public facing pages and it’s a big step forward for us – there’s detailed info about what we do, our main features, our pricing, a page with featured publishers, etc.

Be sure to go check it out and let us know what you think in the comments. My personal favorite is the about page, because our team rocks (and of course because there’s a handsome picture of me on there).

Full Redesign

A few weeks ago we quietly launched new designs for the advertiser-facing group, socket and checkout pages. For example, if you visit TechCrunch’s ad sales page, it’s a totally new look. The response has been great so far and advertisers report having a much easier time finding and buying the inventory they want.

Here’s a screen shot of the new socket page:

Versus a screen shot of the old version:

Dashboard and application redesign

Building off of the new design theme we started with the group pages, we’ve changed most of the look and feel of the product. These new designs also went live with this launch. One of the biggest things we wanted to improve was how you moved around the app and how things were organized.

Image of the new:

Versus image of the old:

Preview of things to come

This isn’t all that we’ve improved. We’ll be highlighting some additional features and announcements over the next few blogs posts. Some examples will be:

• A new account setup wizard.
• Custom socket images.
• Our pricing tiers.
• Order fulfillment – placing orders as a seller on behalf of buyers.

This is part 4 of a 4 post series about direct sales and web display ads. Many website owners are benefiting from or considering selling ads on their sites directly. But direct sales can be confusing and it isn’t right for everyone. The posts:

1. The Two Types of Web Display Ads: Premium vs Remnant
2. Why Direct Sales Is A Great Way To Sell Ads
3. How isocket Powers Premium Ad Sales
4. Should I Try Direct Ad Sales On My Website?
   

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It’s Not For Everyone

Selling premium ads is not the best idea for every site on the web. Whether you want to conduct outbound direct sales or inbound self service, there are some basic factors that will impact how successful you are and if you should even make the investment to try.

So that I feel better about spending all that time and money on getting a Business Economics degree, allow me to present a very complex technical graph:

However, there are no hard rules – it’s more art than science and it’s a sliding scale. If you’re already conducting direct sales, either by hand or with a service similar to isocket, then it’s a no brainer. If you want to start selling premium ads here’s some criteria to consider:

1. You can invest the time and effort to make direct sales work.
2. You’ve had people email you saying “I’d love to buy an ad on your site!”
3. You have ideas for new / valuable advertising options.
4. You have the level of traffic and audience an advertiser would want to buy.

Can You Make The Investment?

Although isocket makes it a lot easier than it used to be, selling premium advertising on your website, whether it’s outbound direct sales or inbound self-service, is an investment of your time and energy. Even if you plan on using the self-service model exclusively, which is a “set it and forget it” type service for the publisher, it still takes more time and attention than using AdSense.

It takes time to get everything set up. You have to set up your ad zones, implement our ad tags on your website or in your ad server, create your inventory packages, fill out your profile, etc.

Then, once you start selling ads, you have to approve each order before it goes live on your site, answer any questions or bids you’ve received from potential buyers, update your traffic numbers, keep your content fresh, etc.

Most importantly, you need to actively promote and sell your inventory. After all, it’s called direct sales for a reason – you are selling your “product”, which involves making people aware it exists, making it easy for them to find (perhaps via an advertising page on your website), and contacting potential advertisers.

But You Still Need The Traffic

Think about it: if you run a blog that is read by 14 random people and your mother, would an advertiser make the effort to buy an ad directly? Your best option in that case is an ad network.

There is no hard limit on minimum traffic, and isocket doesn’t have a magic number we use to screen potential customers. However, we do believe that a rough rule of thumb is to have at least 50,000 page views per month.

We have run across publishers with less traffic than this that are successful with direct sales, but they usually offer something else that is valuable, such as a highly targeted audience. Or it could be a unique situation where you only get 10,000 unique visitors per month but they are a very engaged audience that generates 200,000 ad impressions, etc.

Does Size Really Matter?

When it comes to premium ad sales, yes. From an advertising buyer’s perspective, it has to be worth it for them to put the time and money into making a direct purchase. We discussed some of these reasons in the second post of this series.

Let me put it another way: you wouldn’t drive an hour to buy a McDonald’s hamburger that was $1 off. It may be a mighty tasty and efficiently priced burger, but the effort didn’t warrant the reward.

This is why premium advertising has been a privilege of the larger websites. If an advertiser is going to be making calls and sending checks anyway, they may as well buy from the biggest sites they can. In other words, an advertiser would rather make 5 phone calls to 5 websites to purchase ads that will reach 5 million people, as opposed to making 500 calls to 500 websites that will reach 5 million people.

The graph above represents the audience size of websites, ranging from the #1 site on the web to the last. The shaded blue areas show that the total audience size of the top 50 websites might be the same audience size as the last 500,000 websites combined. It’s a bell curve, and it’s the graph that spawned terms like “the long tail.”

The Floor Is Dropping

An important trend is emerging. The “minimum size” of a website that can successfully sell premium ad space is dropping. In other words, if a couple of years ago you needed to have at least 1 million page views to successfully sell a premium ad, today you might only need 100,000.

This change is happening for a couple reasons. First, the dramatic rise of small and middle sized ad buyers spending their ad dollars online has increased the demand for “middle class” advertising (as opposed to big budget advertising, like on CNN.com). The other reason is that tools like isocket are making it easier for more groups to try direct sales without the huge development or staffing costs.

Try Us Risk Free – Plug In Your Existing Ad Network

If you think you meet the criteria outlined in this post and still want to try premium ad sales, great! We wanted to help people try direct sales without risking the money they are already making. One of isocket’s features is the ability to daisy chain our service with your existing ad networks. If you’re already using a network like AdSense, you can put their ad code into isocket, so that while your premium ad is waiting to be purchased we will display your AdSense code.

You can read more about how isocket powers premium advertising in the third post of this series and sign up for a beta invitation on our homepage.

This is part 3 of a 4 post series about direct sales and web display ads. Many website owners are benefiting from or considering selling ads on their sites directly. But direct sales can be confusing and it isn’t right for everyone. The posts:

1. The Two Types of Web Display Ads: Premium vs Remnant
2. Why Direct Sales Is A Great Way To Sell Ads
3. How isocket Powers Premium Ad Sales
4. Should I Try Direct Ad Sales On My Website?
   

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Selling Your Own Ads Is Tough

So selling your own premium advertising can be a great thing. But going at it alone can be very difficult – conducting direct sales as a publisher is a time consuming mess. It’s very manual – emails back and forth, invoices, etc.

On average, publishers who are trying direct sales spend up to half their time on the administrative overhead behind ad sales, or the “nuts and bolts”. One of our beta testers described his daily routine as “hand to hand combat.”

We’re one of the new tools that makes the processes easier and quicker. Plus we’re the only one that is commission free and built for flexibility and customization.

Outbound Direct Sales vs Inbound Self Service

There are two ways premium ads get bought and sold. One is outbound direct sales, where the seller is actively trying to push his inventory by pitching to potential buyers “you should buy ads on my website!” The other is inbound self service, where a buyer initiates the purchase by coming to the seller and saying “I’d like to advertise on your site!”

Let’s take a look at a typical inbound scenario:

1. Buyer is browsing a website and is interested in advertising on it.
2. Buyer goes to the “advertise page”, such as xyz.com/advertise.
3. The advertise page tells the buyer that they need to email advertise@xyz.com for more info.
4. There’s a back and forth of emails where the buyer is asking questions, trying to figure out what is available to buy, the price, etc.
5. Buyer and seller agree on a deal. Seller creates an invoice for the buyer and emails it to them. Buyer sends payment via check, PayPal, etc.
6. Buyer emails their banner ad to seller. Seller takes the file and puts it into their ad server, manually creating a campaign based on what the buyer wanted.
7. The ad runs. The buyer can’t see what’s happening or change their banner image, so they email the seller to see how much of their order has been filled.
8. The seller emails a report to the buyer once the campaign is done.

That doesn’t sound like much fun. It’s a very tedious, time consuming, manual processes simply to sell a banner ad. Lots of independent moving pieces and things that have to be kept track of. Think about it – an ad buyer has to jump through hoops to give you money that they wanted to spend on you!

isocket Makes It Easier

Rather than tell you what we’re doing, we thought it’d be better to show you! Here’s the first public look inside isocket (a 4:45 video screencast).

Here’s some of the key features highlighted in the screencast:

• More options – isocket helps you sell any kind of ad inventory, including web display banners, email and RSS.

• More control – Create your ad inventory the way you want to – you can set the price, duration, details, etc.

• More money – Why are you still paying 30% commissions? isocket charges a low monthly fee. On average, publishers that switch to isocket are saving up to $1,000 per month!

• More transparency – Because we’re commission free, we don’t try to hide who you’re selling to or buying from.

What Do You Think?

Our goal is to build you the best ad platform around! The best way to do that is by listening to you. Tell us what you think of the sneak peak into isocket or what features you would love to see! You can also connect with us on twitter.

In our effort to keep moving from “functional” to “usable”, we just made some significant changes to how sellers can create advertising opportunities / inventory (what we call “sockets”) and make them available for purchase.

One of our challenges is building a system that can represent every major form of advertising. It’s a balance between making one process that is broad enough to cover everything from banners to billboards, yet making it simple and powerful enough so that you can quickly build exactly the type of inventory you want to.

For example, if you are selling a web banner, you shouldn’t have to go through a physical location / geographic step. We’re also working to reduce the number of duplicates, such as demographic info on both your group and socket.

We’ve taken the familiar tabbed form boxes from your dashboard and used them for creating sockets. It’s a 3 or 4 step process, depending on which ad type you sell.

We’ve also limited the types of ad inventory you can create during our private Beta. Yes, we still support all forms and will open the list up in the future,  but we’re focusing on the core ad types for now. You can always select “other” if you’d like.

This week’s sneak peek into the new design going up next month: activity icons. Our goal is to provide more “one click” functionality to the socket listings and give the user more control and information on their dashboard pages.

In most of the places where ad inventory is listed (such as the Active Sockets list on your dashboard), each socket will have status / activity icons.

These activity lights are small icons on the right of the socket listing that will brighten when certain actions are required or something important has happened. For example:

• When a question is asked
• An ad copy needs to be approved
• A private message is received
• A buyer requests renewal

Continuing our sneak peeks at the new design / version being rolled out next month, here is what the new user profile page looks like. This is the page external people see when viewing your account.

We wanted to highlight your role, history, group and brand memberships, and of course the ad inventory you’re managing.

Click to enlarge. Comments welcome!

Big design changes coming over the next month! One of our goals is to make it easier to manage your accounts across different groups/brands/websites.

Here’s a sliver of the new account home page. The account home is still unique for each group you’re a member of. It brings the newsfeed up front and account management tabs behind it.

Let us know what you think (click to enlarge):

As an ad seller, what can you do in times like these to increase your sales and attract new buyers? What can you offer to local or small businesses who might be shrinking their ad budgets?

You often have more types of inventory to sell than just web banners. By offering different inventory, whether it’s unique and wacky or phsyical and offline, you’re able to cast a wider net in your sales efforts. And as more local and small ad buyers are moving online, combining those banners with other opportunities puts you in a great spot.

One of our beta testers, IndyMojo, has built a full time business around selling ads to local small business owners. IndyMojo is a local community website based in Indianapolis, Indiana that has about 7,000 members and quite impressive numbers for a local community portal. What’s even more impressive is how they’ve handled their ad sales.

The guys at Mojo have done a great job building a sales process. They also understand that selling an ad is no different than selling a physical piece of inventory. As such, they’re working hard to make it easier for buyers to find and buy their inventory. You can see their internal sales page here and their isocket brand page here.

Because of the nature of the IndyMojo brand and audience, IndyMojo sells ad opportunities that expand beyond banners. It makes sense for their business because they offer more than just a website – they offer conversations, real world events and the ability to reach a very targeted group. For example, they have created VIP cards that give card holders discounts at participating local businesses. Other examples:

• Email newsletter sponsorships

• Directory listings

• Network forums with discussion

• Classified ads

• Calendar listings

isocket helps IndyMojo runs the sales for all these different ads through one place, rather than managing 5 different types of services for each option they offer. This makes it easier for both buyer and seller – less overhead, less email tag, less checks to write, etc.

As we said in our last post, “Truly creative advertising engages people…”  Give your advertisers the opportunity to engage with your community in novel ways.  Whether it be via online discussion or an offline meetup in your most popular city, allow buyers to get creative and it will pay off for you.