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AdRoll.com For hand tool buyers, sellers, and readers.
I just signed up with www.adroll.com. I had been looking for a service like this and even pondered (very briefly) starting one for the community, so I was happy to come across it.
It offers a unique opportunity for those of you who are making and selling things at home or in a small shop as well as those like Joel with larger businesses to market those items within the hand tool woodworking community at reasonable rates.
As it stands now, we have several hundred websites in the hand/traditional tool community, many of which are serving ads that are too generic to be useful. For instance, there was recently a Google Adsense ad on this site for a CNC machine. I think you can see the problem.
Great sites like www.woodtreks.com, www.toolemera.com, and Matt's Basement Workshop deserve better.
As a matter of fact, I just looked at the Google ads on Matt's Basement Workshop. There was an ad for Silicon Wafer processing, one for call center outsourcing, another for France airplanes. There was one I had never heard of advertising Japanese hand tools. Matt offers a great podcast and deserves much better.
On the other hand, there are a number of you who make tools and sell suppliers who have few targeted ways of advertising products.
I like the technology AdRoll.com is developing, and I am hopeful their service can offer something useful to our community. By rewarding content developers, it could actually encourage more people to write about woodworking which could foster more interest which could help sell more tools and the community as a whole could profit.
Call me crazy if you like, but I am dreaming of the day when we can have ads for the Blum Tool Company Bench Horse or a Czeck Edge Hand Tool Works marking knife or Barr Tools hand forged drawknives instead of France airplanes and CNC machines.
Best wishes,
Luke
Luke
A very interesting idea. I tried AdSense and dropped it. The majority of the ads had nothing to do with my site or blog. Even with focused keywords, SEO and work through Adsense, the ads didn't amount to much. Adify doesn't focus on our needs either. The possibility of creating a hand tool and/or woodworking focused ad set strikes me as a great idea. I'll be looking over the adroll site to see what it's all about.
This, btw, is a good reason for you to not stop the blog. Possibly a rethink and retooling of the how and why for Unplugged. I find myself blogging when I have time or something to say. Sometimes I go for weeks without anything, than there's a stream of material. Or just musing and meanderings.
Gary
Gary,
I like the idea that any ads on my site should actually contribute something useful. While it might not be the end all, I think this could be a giant step in that direction.
I started the group "Traditional Woodworking" at AdRoll.com. (It is pending approval at the moment, I believe.) If we could get over 50-100,000 page views per month in the group, I think it would start to become quite useful. Just this site alone could contribute about 7,000 page views to that pool right now.
Thanks for the encouragement about the site, and the blog piece you did on it. For better or for worse, I haven't had any offers to take the site in its entirety.
It seems that I will be doing exactly what you say and rethinking and perhaps retooling some things. I am in the process of moving the site to a more powerful server that will allow me to do some new things, so just about everything is on the table at this point.
Luke... I lost count of how many times I reworked my blog or site. At least twice I have totally redesigned the site from the ground up. My goal is always to present the content in a user friendly fashion, to encourage people to experience new stuff and to make the whole updating process easier for me. There is a huge concentration on that last factor.
When Traditional Woodworking gets going, please yell. I already signed up with adroll. The entire CPM versus CPC thing is interesting. I'll be talking about it a bit over on my blog, now that my interest is spiked. I get around 25-30,000 page views per month, with around 5000 views of more than a minute per page.
The topic of how to focus interest for niche groups using available web tools is a hot topic and deserving of out attention. Lots of forums sell ad space, but that is usually limited in time and scope. The idea of having more personal control over what your ad should look like (for the seller) and what ads you would like to feature (for the site owner) is attractive.
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