As many of you already know, direct sales can be pretty complicated. One of the main reasons for this is that orders can come together in several different ways when you’re dealing with advertisers directly. At isocket we recognized this early, which is why we’re commission-free and why we created sales tools that are flexible enough to handle all types of direct orders, no matter what they look like.

One of the more popular tools that allows isocket publishers this type of flexibility is what we call order fulfillment. We’ve written about order fulfillment a couple of other times before, but this time around we’ve got even better news to share because we’ve completely refreshed and updated how order fulfillment looks, works and functions. Don’t worry, it’s still the great tool that it’s always been, it’s just that now we’ve made it much more awesome and easier to use.

Here’s a quick overview of the changes we’ve made:

1. An easier way to create orders for advertisers and test/in-house campaigns

The first thing that you choose in the new order fulfillment tool is what type of order you want to create. You can either choose a normal order for a 3rd party advertiser or a test/in-house order.

If you choose a normal order for a 3rd party advertiser not a whole lot is different, but if you create a test/in-house order we’ve made it an easier and cleaner process. Many publishers like to test out our system by running a few test orders through, so we’ve made it easy to do that. Also, running in-house orders is very common as well, so we wanted to separate them out from the real orders from advertisers.

2. A quick and easy way to enter information for past advertisers

To save you some time we’ve made it possible to choose past advertisers from a list when creating a new order for them. When used it will fill in all of the advertiser’s information so that you don’t need to spend time entering it in again.

3. A more defined list of possible payment options

We have cleaned up the payment options, which makes them much easier to understand. We give you a lot of flexibility when it comes to how you want to get paid for your order. You can prompt the buyer to enter their own info, you can enter it in yourself or you can accept the payment outside of isocket.

4. An easier order creative management interface

We’ve included all of the creative management on one page, which will help streamline the order process. You can either prompt the buyer to upload the creative or you can do it yourself.

If you have any questions about these changes we’ve made to order fulfillment feel free to ask us in the comments, email us at support-at-isocket.com or get old school with your bad self and call us at 1-866-914-5295.

Ryan’s been bugging me about writing a post for the blog to introduce myself, so (after 2 months) I’m doing it.  Without further ado..

Hi.  My name is Chris.  And I’ve been working at isocket for 70 days.

More?  If you insist.

I’m a California guy, born and raised in the sunny suburbs of Orange County.  I wish I could tell you that I lived next door to Brad Pitt or shot hoops with Kobe Bryant, but in reality it was more like Mr. and Mrs. Dufrene and my younger brother.  After high school, I made the jump to Nor Cal and did four years of undergrad at Leland Stanford Junior University with a B.S. in Computer Science and minor in Mathematics to prove it.

Toward the end of my senior year, some classmates and I founded our first company.  Our initial product was a mobile app to help people find the best spots to go out that night.  After numerous iterations, lots of late nights,  and a year and a half later, I decided it was time for me to move on.  Looking back, that was easily the most valuable work-experience I’ve ever had and an excellent introduction to the start-up world, even without the wads of cash to show for it.

Shortly later, I landed here at isocket, and I’ve been loving it ever since.  My official title is Rockstar Pirate Ninja, but I think that over simplifies what I do on a daily basis.  I’m on the engineering team and basically build and design whatever needs to be built and/or designed to make our customers happy. I haven’t gotten around to writing this post for so long because we’ve been hard at work doing just that!

I’m incredibly excited to be here and look forward to building this already amazing company.  The people are great, the dogs are even better, and I’m honored to be a part of it!

I’ve been attending the San Francisco Ad Publisher meetup since I started at isocket in July. For those who don’t know, the meetup brings together folks who are interested in what’s going on in online advertising: publishers, advertisers, data/analytics companies. I’ve learned about AdSense optimization, met people who sold ad space for digital billboards, and discussed the future of display advertising.

Oleg, the organizer, invited me to give a talk about isocket at the last meetup in early November, and I was happy to oblige. I walked people through the story of Jen – a fictional blogger with real-world problems selling ads directly. We wanted people to know that we understand the challenges in their lives and how we built isocket to solve those problems. If you’d like to learn more, check out our product pages or shoot me an email at jason (at) isocket.com. Enjoy!

John did his interview thing with AdExchanger.com a few days ago and it’s now posted up for the world to see. Be sure to take a look at it when you get a chance.

For those of you who haven’t heard of AdExchanger.com before, here is what they’re all about:

AdExchanger.com is a digital advertising news and discussion site intended to enable the exchange of ideas between all members of the “ecosystem” including agencies, ad networks, advertisers, publishers, data providers, media traders and ad technology companies. The goal of this idea exchange, if you will, is to help improve both understanding and efficiency for everyone involved.

About a month or so ago I saw this post on TechCrunch (who just happens to be one of our awesome publishers) about how Reddit had revamped their self-service ad service. I say ‘revamped’ because Reddit has actually been running their own self-service advertising since back in December of 2009, but after a few months of letting it run they decided to make some improvements under the hood, which explains the TechCrunch write-up.

To be honest with you I’m not much of a Reddit reader myself, but I was definitely interested in the fact that they had decided to spend the time, effort and money to build their own, customized self-service advertising system. It was also cool to see that this time around when they made some updates to the system they used The Oatmeal (one of the craziest/funniest guys on the web) to whip up a cartoon to help explain it. Before you check it out, you should probably know that The Oatmeal didn’t exactly create what you would consider to be a standard FAQ or tutorial. You can take a look at it over here.

Although The Oatmeal doesn’t disappoint with his entertainingly educational guide on how to buy ads using Reddit’s newly renovated self-service system, there are a couple of real takeaways that I’d like to point out after looking over it.

1. Reddit decided to build their own, custom self-service advertising system, which shows that there is a high demand from publishers for these types of tools. Of course, not every publisher has the time, resources and motivation that it can take to build their own system, which is where we fit in. We can give publishers the tools to enable self-service advertising without the major investments needed to do it from scratch.
2. Keeping it simple can still pretty complicated. I’m not sure if you noticed or not, but The Oatmeal’s explanation of how to buy your own ads on Reddit is a fairly long 8-step process, which shows just how complicated these types of advertising systems can be — even when they’re meant to be simple. With most self-service advertisers we’ve found that the easier the process and the more simple the ad options, the better.
3. I now have a serious craving for a Big Gulp sized porkchop milkshake.

Thanks to The Oatmeal for the entertainment and if you’re a publisher and have ever thought about getting into the self-service advertising game be sure to give us a shout, we’d love to chat.

Last Friday I got a DM from Hup asking me to “whip something up for the blog by Monday… to give a sense of my skillz and personality.” After my initial confusion (thinking Hup wanted me to redesign an entire blog in one evening,) I realised what he meant: a blog post. “Feel free to flex your creativity a bit,” he said.

Shit. I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s start over.

Hello. I’m Eston Bond. I left my job last week to come back to the startup fold after absurd amounts of relentless harassment a gentle coaxing by my friend John Ramey. Previously, I was a relatively early Product Designer at Facebook, the original creative director and game designer of Twitter game Spymaster, a consultant for various social gaming companies, and most recently Principal Interaction Designer at MySpace. I’m really, really excited to be working in a fast-paced environment again on product design for a demographic I haven’t worked with yet, so expect to see more from me and my fellow designer (I’ll let him disclose himself) on this blog about the challenges we face in iterating on isocket’s product and UI. There’s really nothing like working on the ground floor of a startup.

Christ. That was boring, too. I’m sorry.

Given the climate at MySpace at the moment, I’m going to have to take down my little nerdcore track for now just to be safe. Sorry guys!

Eston Bond is isocket’s new designer, with the official title of “Mad Hatter.” He challenges all geek rappers to leave some rhymes in the comments below.

Even though we’ve both only been members of the isocket team for a couple of months now, Vinoth and I have already started a tradition (although it’s not isocket’s first). It’s called Beer Friday and it’s nothing too fancy but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere, right? It’s been a long week and we cranked out a lot of awesome stuff, so personally I feel like we deserve a couple cold ones.

If anyone reading this is ever around our neck of the woods in Burlingame around 6pm on a Friday, feel free to join us.

About a week ago we added Vinoth Gopinathan to our team as a super-intern, so I thought that it was only appropriate to interview him so that all of you could get to know him a little bit better. One thing that I learned about Vinoth after reading his answers to my questions was that he’s freakin’ hilarious, which you’ll soon find out as well.

1.  Hey Vinoth, I’m glad that I could drag you away from your laptop for a couple minutes so that we could officially introduce you to the world. Speaking of the world, where are you from anyways? Give us a link to Google Maps if you can – we’re all pretty last these days.

Hey Hup! I’m natively from Chennai, India but moved to Singapore for my 6th grade. Just for your information and for others who are unaware, Singapore is NOT part of China! Its a tiny country south of Malaysia.

Now a junior at the National University of Singapore doing Computer Engineering.

2. Can you tell us all a little bit about what it was like growing up there? I know that you haven’t been in town for too long, but what would you say are the biggest differences (besides the fact that you can now eat at IN-N-OUT Burger anytime you want)?

Well Singapore is a privileged country – safe and prosperous. So all I have to care about was to study and have fun (while my dad funds it). Singapore has a very unique culture since people from different races and religions are living there. Chinese, Indians, Caucasians, Malaysians. Had loads of friends in the 10 years I was there and had different gangs for shopping, eating out, movies or just chilling out.

If you ask me about differences, I would say the culture. Singaporeans, though modern, are still conservative. The first thing I noticed about the people in the valley is that they are so friendly! I always have random chats with people on buses and trains! (Once on the train I met this Vietnamese man who had fled his country during the Vietnam war and entered the US illegally!) Its definitely an interesting and fun experience.

P.S. YEAA I LOVE IN-N-OUT BURGERS! Oh wait, doesn’t my religion forbids me from eating beef?

3. How did you end up here at isocket? Meaning, how did you find us and how did we find you? I know that you’re pretty tall, but I’m sure that it took more than that for us to find you, right? Side note: exactly how tall ARE you?

I would say it was an “accident”. Really!

I am under a scholarship program by my university back in Singapore, where entrepreneurial students are sent to California, Pennsylvania, Sweden or China for a year long stint at a startup company. We work full time and in my case, take evening classes at Stanford University. Cool right?

So I had applied for this program, got through and was waiting for calls from the top 3 companies I had chosen. One fine day I get an email from my coordinator saying I was offered an interview with this company called isocket. I had NO clue about isocket then, but I decided to accept the interview. Did a bit of research to find out more about the company and I was really impressed by the founders’ background and their recent round of funding. Spoke to Zak over the phone and I was the chosen one! Now you’ve got to ask the guys how they found me and their side of the story.

I am 6’4” btw. I am sooo tall back in Singapore that I trip over children, unintentionally miss my not-as-tall friends who walk past me, ram into the hand grabs and doors of buses and trains, etc.

4. Considering that you’re now working with us, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that that you were attracted our vision for what the future of the advertising world looks like. What would you say gets you the most excited about what we’re doing?

I think the idea and concept behind the company is great! But even before I got interested in the whole idea behind the startup, what really got me excited was the passion John and Zak had. I had not met them in person other than a few Skype chats, but their achievements over the past couple of years was what really attracted me to join isocket in the first place. It gave me the confidence that my time at isocket wont be “just another internship”.

5. If you were to arm wrestle our CEO John Ramey, who would win? (hint: these 3 words will help you out – OVER THE TOP)

He’s my height and twice my size! I might end up breaking a bone or two!

Update: Looks like Vinoth was right (although he didn’t end up breaking any bones). See the video below or over here on YouTube.

6. Name 3 things that you definitely want to do/see/experience in the Bay Area before you head back home and why.

I’ve got more than 3! But well here are the top 3:

• Meet a lot of interesting people and learn from them the culture of the Bay Area. I particularly like how willing they are to share knowledge and how open they are to failure!
• Go for Megadeth, Metallica concerts and Russell Peter’s show \m/. I love Indian and rock music. And of course Metchul \m/ I used to be a drummer for one of my University bands.
• Oh yea I almost forgot. Help isocket make a great product that everyone loves and I am proud of.

7. Ok, last question – tell us one thing about you that most people would think is weird. For instance, if I were to answer this question I would say that I have to talk to other people in elevators, even it does seem slightly awkward.

I can’t think of anything weird but I have crazy ideas all the time! Which means I love playing pranks on people. Once during the exams period I told my close friend that I was going out with this pretty girl in college. He, wanting to come to the restaurant and surprise me, took a cab from his room and rushed to the restaurant in 30 minutes, only to find out I had decided to go somewhere else. He then took a cab to the new place but couldn’t find me there as well. He wasted 3 hours that day.

I was actually just Face-tubing in my room. (playing on YouTube and Facebook)

8. Anything that I missed? Feel free to tell us anything else (within reason).

Since I am from Singapore, let me give you a crash course on Chinese.

Zai Jian!! (pronounced sai as in pie and chi-en)

It means bye bye!

Here’s a good post on ProBlogger about how bloggers can attract advertisers or “sponsors” to their blog. The take away:

1. Know your product (i.e. the advertising you are selling and your audience).
2. Market yourself.
3. Make it easy for the buyer to buy.
4. Don’t worry about exposing your pricing, inventory, etc.

We added a comment to that post:

1) It’s important to recognize that not everyone can and deserves to generate revenue this way. Direct sales / sponsorships work really well for some types of blogs, and poorly for others.

2) Put yourself in the mindset of selling a product. When you sell ads, you are a merchant delivering a product (your audience) to your customer (your advertiser). Treat it as if it were a box of goods.

3) Make it easier to find and purchase your inventory. Advertisers won’t jump through hoops to buy your $50 125×125 button.

This goes along with a presentation we give about how to make money from blogging.

Happy holidays!

After some seller feedback, we completely re-worked the way sockets renew. You can now choose to have the socket auto renew during the socket creation process and you can also give the buyer first dibs on renewing the socket before it goes back on the open market.

Also, take a look at your URL bar and you’ll see that we’ve mixed things up a bit with short URL’s. Hopefully, these changes will make a lot more sense. In the next few days you will be able to have beta.isocket.com/group/Your_Group_Name_Here. We think short and logical URLs will help with your branding and direct sales process.

As always, feedback is appreciated.