I interviewed Mark Thompson about his new software WP Ad Burn which is a new program that let’s you put unobtrusive advertisements on your WordPress blog, allowing you to make more money than you would by putting a regular banner ad or Google AdSense up.
You can download a copy of the MP3 here
Reed: Hi, it’s Reed Floren here, and I’m with my friend Mark Thompson, Mark are you on the line?
Mark: I’m here Reed.
Reed: Awesome. You know, for those listening, that maybe aren’t familiar with your story, can you share a little bit about your background, and what got you into Internet marketing?
Mark: Yes, sure. I’ve been an internet marketer for about 7 years. I started off working in house for marketing company, and I was doing their paper click advertising. So, I was managing $60,000 dollar a month budget in ad words, when I really didn’t know what I was doing. So, I really had to learn on a job, but the cool thing about all that was, I was able to discover my passion for Internet marketing.
So, I started off doing a lot of pay per click, and that kind of transitioned over to doing a lot of SEO. So, from that company I actually started to work for an agency, and so I was managing a lot of different SEO, paper clicks, social media campaigns, and I have a lot of hands on experience, I was really learning what was working in terms of driving traffic, and driving leads and revenue to people’s websites.
And so, over the course of 2 or 3 years of working for 2 different agencies here in North Carolina, where I live, I actually went off and started my own local offline marketing business. And so, I’ve had that business for about 3 years now, and that’s probably half of what I do in terms of the revenue that I generate for my business. It’s just for managing SEO and paper click, and social media, and e-mail marketing campaigns. So, you know, as I was doing that, and working for myself, it kind opened up a doors to a lot of other things, like product creation and affiliate marketing.
The things I really didn’t know existed, I didn’t even know what the warrior form was, up until a few years ago, just because my roots were kind of in the offline world. And I just never got involved in that, and then I got stumble onto the Warrior forum, and I kind of realize the value and how much money you can make just off launching products.
So, over the last few years I have transitioned a lot of my time and effort into creating more products, doing, you know, building an e-mail list, and marketing other products as an affiliate. Really my business has kind of transformed into the 2 different entities, one being the offline world, and the other being the online product creation side of things.
Reed: Well, you’ve been really prolific with that product creation, it seems like you’ve probably had 10 WSOs of the day.
Mark: Yes, I have a really good system in place, so I mean I have a good people that surround me, so I am able to, you know, create a lot of products, I try to launch a product every month, and my goal is not only just to create a product every month, but to also make sure that’s of high quality.
So, I have great people that surround me in terms of designers and copywriters, and good development team. We are able to, I am able to kind of in vision the ideas and the different products that I want to create. And I am able to pass it off to my team, and they are able to execute on it. And I can focus more on the management side of things. So it allows me to give a direction to my team, and really have a good system in place to create high quality products on a regular basis.
Reed: Awesome, and speaking about high quality products, I hear that you have another one coming out, can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Mark: Yes. Definitely. The products is called WP Ad Burn, it’s coming out tomorrow, which tomorrow is Wednesday, October 17th, it comes out at 11 o’clock Eastern. And this product actually came about, because I manage a lot of blogs, and Word press sites, and I noticed that, you know, my ad revenues from these sites was, it kept on going down. I tried to figure out exactly why, and the main reason I noticed this was that people on the internet are just getting much smarter. They are aware of people try advertise to them.
You have probably heard about concept banner blindness, where people don’t even look at banner adds, they don’t look at Google AdSense, they don’t look at text link adds, because they know that people just want to advertise to them. So, there is a less engagement with those adds, meaning less people are clicking through and purchasing products and that leads to you not making this much money as you would have 3, 5, 10 years ago, when people were still trying to become a custom to how they’re been sold online.
As the internet has evolved, so has the average visitor. What WP ad burn does, is it delivers advertisements in kind of a non obtrusive way. It really integrates content with your add. And so, really good example of that, I was just talking to someone earlier today, and this is a really good example, have you seen a show X Factor?
Reed: Yes.
Mark: You know how Pepsi have this huge partnership with the X Factor, where they’re promoting Pepsi brand right on the show, and I mean they still do commercials, but they realize that more and more people, they are not watching commercials, they are not engaged with commercials, they’re engaged with the actual program.
So, they have figured out the way to display their brand and their products right on the show, where people are more engaged with the program. So, we’re taking that same concept, and we’re just supplying it to the online world, and we’re blending the content that is on your site, and we’re blending it with advertisements.
Reed: Cool. So, how exactly does that work? It sounds like it is a Word press plug in obviously, but how are you planning the content with the advertising, making that seem different than say Google ad sense, or just putting Google banner up.
Mark: We’re doing it mainly by design, so the plug in works with your side bar widget, and there is also custom short code that you could place anywhere at your site that you want the ad burn adds to show. But what you do is, you give your ad a title, you give it a picture, and a little description, and it looks more, I mean, if you want you could probably have a demo link under the video just to show them exactly what it looks like.
It’s a little bit harder to explain. Someone could just click and see it, but it looks more like a blog post than an actual advertisement, someone trying to sell to them.
And so, there is a few different things you can do with that advertisement on the sidebar, you can actually direct link it to your ad if you want to, or you can create some of the landing page on your site that incorporates the advertisement or the product that you’re trying to promote with some content about the product. And people can comment on it, there is some more social engagement on the actual landing page.
And so, the way that it’s actually displayed on the site, it doesn’t look like a traditional banner, it’s more like a headline image, description type of thing, and it looks more integrated with the rest of the website.
Reed: Sure, I think I’ve seen similar things on maybe some news articles, link at the bottom, kind of going to other websites, but it seems like they maybe getting paid for that. And now, we get to do that on our sites.
Mark: Right. A big site that does it now is Gizmodo, have you heard about Gizmodo.com. Gizmodo does this, they have like where you can see the number of views on the ads and the ads that can show the most show up at the top, so you can add a little, however views you want, with the little ad burn logo, which makes the eye kind of draws to the ad, but it doesn’t look like an ad.
So, we’re trying to still offer a value, which is the whole point of, when they click on it, they can go on a landing page, and you can offer a review on the ad, you can offer people’s feedback through Facebook comments, so we’re really trying to take the whole content creation, social engagement, and embedded into advertisements as well. So, it’s not just like, here is my banner ad, click it and go buy whatever it is.
Reed: It seems like a much more subtle way of advertising, instead of just grabbing them by the throat and saying, buy this now. That’s good, I think a lot of people want that right now. I think people are sick of just being told, buy this now. That’s crucial. Now, for finding the advertisement so they’re just going on like Click bank or Warrior plus, where are they finding these links to put on their blog?
Mark: Right now it’s basically whatever you decide, it’s going to be. It could be an affiliate program, it can be your own product if you want. It can be anywhere, it could be a Click bank, it could be a Warrior plus, it could be any marketplace. But what we’re looking to do with the products, after we get some initial feedback from users, we’re going to create a 2.0 version of it, and we’re probably going to incorporate some other marketplaces right into it. So, if you want to just have it auto display, Click bank ads, or Warrior plus ads, or whatever may be, you can do that. so, that’s kind of a next step to the tool, but right now we left it open, so it has full flexibility based on whatever you want to promote.
Reed: I know you have the plans for 2.0 when people buy the 1.0 version, will they get upgraded to 2.0 when it’s released, or will they have to buy that later on?
Mark: Basically, the majority of the products we ever upgraded in the future, we’re giving a free access or free upgrades, to existing customers. So, yes, they will get free upgrades.
Reed: Awesome. That sounds really cool, it sound like a great thing for anyone who does a lot of blogging, or even just has a blog that is getting some traffic, they want to start monetizing it, so what if someone want to go about getting this?
Mark: Well, it’s going to be on a Warrior Forum, so we’re going to do a 7 day launch, starting tomorrow. As a right now, like I said, it will be live tomorrow at 11 o’clock Eastern. If you want to read, you can put a link under the video, or under the MP3 just to show how to access it, but it’s going to be right on the Warrior Forum.
Reed: Great. Yes, I’ll definitely do that. Well, thank you so much Mark, I really appreciate this. This sounds like a powerful tool for anyone who does a blogging. I think you guys you need to check it out.
Mark: All right, I appreciate it Reed.
Get your copy of WP Ad Burn here
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