This page was last updated on 17 August, 2007.

Marketplace Frequently Asked Questions

For WP Text Ads Bloggers

For Advertisers

For WP Text Ads Bloggers

What is the Marketplace good for?

The Marketplace is a directory of WP Text Ads blogs. It provides a convenient place for advertisers to find relevant site and traffic information about your blog.

Without the Marketplace, popular sites will get most of the attention from advertisers. The Marketplace tries to make it easier for low-traffic sites to win advertising dollars.

As ad runs and rates are visible at the Marketplace, you can adjust your ad rates to remain competitive in the Marketplace. Interested advertisers might even contact you to negotiate ad rates! This is all possible because WP Text Ads allows you to establish direct business relationships with advertisers.

How do I join the Marketplace?

Unlike traditional directories, the Marketplace harnesses the network and tagging powers of del.icio.us! To join the Marketplace, you must have a del.icio.us account.

To be added to the Marketplace:

Ensure WP Text Ads is running on your blog, with your desired ad rates and run information.
Bookmark your blog's home page (eg. http://www.mydomain.com/blog) to del.icio.us.
Must read: How to add del.icio.us tags correctly, so it helps and not hurt you.
Describe your blog with tags in del.icio.us so that advertisers can find you.
Important: Include these 2 del.icio.us tags - for:wptextads and wptextadsindex.
Go to WordPress → Options → WP Text Ads → Marketplace, and fill in and submit the form.

Please pay extra attention to steps 2 to 5. Many times, I've had to delay completing the submission because they were not properly followed. You should also read the section on adding tags correctly. Many folks add tags that actualy hurt their chances of being found by advertisers.

The for:wptextads tag will alert me in del.icio.us of your request to be added to the Marketplace. Once I have confirmed it, your blog will be added to my del.icio.us bookmark of WP Text Ads users. The wptextadsindex tag lets me track your home page so that I can detect future changes to the tags.

To maintain the integrity of the Marketplace, I will manually check every submission request. It may take up to 72 hours for your blog to appear at the Marketplace. If you're feeling impatient, you can chase me over email :)

One thing that you absolutely must do is to promote the Marketplace. This is crucial because the Marketplace can only flourish if advertisers know about it, and the Marketplace is worth visiting only if there're many WP Text Ads bloggers. This is a chicken-and-egg problem that will be solved if we're willing to help ourselves.

How do I keep the my blog's information at the Marketplace up-to-date?

Changes to the del.icio.us tags for your blog's home page are detected automatically so there's nothing you need to do. To avoid being banned from del.icio.us for hitting their servers too frequently, it may take up to 7 days before changes are reflected. It is also very important that you never remove the for:wptextads and wptextadsindex tags.

For other changes such as ad rates and runs, blog information and your personal marketing message to advertisers, go to WordPress → Options → WP Text Ads → Marketplace and resubmit the form. Changes will be reflected in a couple of hours.

Will search engines blacklist my blog for joining directories like this one?

Static outgoing links from the Marketplace to your blog use the rel="nofollow" attribute, where as dynamic links are not crawled by search engines. Therefore, they will not boost your PageRank or whatever-Rank in a manner that search engines frown upon. Consequently, you should not get blacklisted. But if you're still not comfortable, the best thing is not to join the Marketplace.

How can I promote the Marketplace?

Here are a few methods:

Blog about it frequently. Tell the world why WP Text Ads and the Marketplace rocks! (erm.. they rock, right?)
Link to the Marketplace, your blog's page at the Marketplace and WP Text Ads. You may even want to optimize your anchor text with words like 'WP Text Ads', 'Marketplace', 'make money', 'buy and sell links', 'no commission' and 'no middleman'.
Recommend WP Text Ads to your friends. Preach its benefits to them.
Place your advertisers' links prominently so that they get their money's worth. Because WP Text Ads is configurable, you can place the ads in the sidebar and/or in the posts.
Display your offer to sell links prominently on your blog. If advertisers can't see it, they won't know they can buy ads. You can even place those links at the bottom of every post to encourage them to buy per-post ads.
Place the WP Text Ads images on your blog to capture attention.

If you have other methods, please tell me and I will put it up. The whole purpose of promoting the Marketplace is to ensure that advertisers will come. And they will find it worthwhile only with a large pool of publishers. So our task is to popularize WP Text Ads (without resorting to bribery or paid reviews).

How often are the traffic statistics updated?

Most of the traffic statistics you see at the Marketplace will be cached for about 1 week before it is refreshed. Only the dynamic traffic graphs from Alexa show real-time information.

Why don't you use traffic data from Quantcast and other services?

I would love to, but their APIs are either non-existent or not mature enough. It would really benefit advertisers if I could provide more information. Please inform me if I am mistaken about other services.

Why isn't the PageRank of my blog shown?

Google doesn't officially release the PageRank of any site, and it's doubtful that the PageRank shown on the Google Toolbar is actually accurate or up-to-date. Furthermore, Google's ranking algorithm has changed so much over the years that PageRank is no longer a dominant factor. In other words, PageRank shouldn't be used as the benchmark of a site's popularity. For that matter, knowing there are 1,992,223,530 links pointing to your blog in Google's index hardly means anything because it says nothing about quality.

Bloggers, we need to convince advertisers that traffic statistics are a better indicator of popularity. Yahoo Web Service's data is also included to show the sites that link to the pages at your blog.

I'm a little convicted here, so there's no chance that PageRank will appear at the Marketplace. This goes for whatever-Rank used by the other search engines. Sorry.

What is My Marketplace Permalink in WP Text Ads?

My Marketplace Permalink is a URL that appears under WordPress → Options → WP Text Ads → Marketplace. It links to your blog's details page at the Marketplace after you join it. You can give this URL to other people or put it up on your blog for others to visit.

If you get a 'Page Not Found' error, it means that your request to be included has not been approved yet. But if you could access that page before, then something sinister is going on! Please contact me.

What is the correct way to add tags to del.icio.us?

Adding tags is really simple. Use words separated by spaces, avoid punctuations, and you'll be ok.

The most common mistakes people make is to use punctuations like commas (,) and quotes (" and '). This complicates the situation and hurts them instead.

For example, suppose you have tags like these - "technology news", apple, ipods.

del.icio.us will see 3 tags - "technology news"(including the quotes), apple,(including the comma), and ipods. This is bad news for you because if someone searches for technology news or apple ipods, your bookmark will be missed since these tags don't exist. Adding ipods technology apple news would have been perfect instead.

For examples of well-formed tags, check out WP Text Ads' bookmarks.

For Advertisers

What is the Marketplace good for?

The Marketplace lets you find many WP Text Ads users in one place. With all traffic and pricing data available to you, your task of finding good blogs become a lot easier.

How do I buy ads?

Please visit the blog that you're interested in and look for the links that offer to sell you ads. Click on the link and fill in the form. The blogger will then inform you if he has accepted your ad. After payment has been made, your link will appear at his blog.

What are the benefits to me by buying ads from WP Text Ads bloggers?

For one thing, you save a lot of money. Because you deal directly with the blogger, none of your costs go to a middleman. As a result, ads sold with WP Text Ads are substantially cheaper.

You can also buy ads to be placed on the home page, blog-wide, or per-post. These options let you place ads on selected pages that are highly relevant to you, saving costs again.

Visit WP Text Ads to learn all the benefits.

How reliable is Alexa traffic data?

Traffic data is more useful for comparison than for single-site analysis. So if Site A is ranked 10,000 and Site B is ranked 2000, then we conclude Site B is much more popular than Site A. But a ranking of 2000 doesn't say much by itself.

The same kind of reasoning goes when comparing user reach or page views between various sites. We can say with some confidence that one site has much more traffic than another, but the actual numbers ought to be taken with a pinch of salt.

It would be great if we could show Google Analytics data, but Google has not released an API for it. For the time being, Alexa traffic data is the best source that I know. If you are aware of other sources, please inform me.

By the way, see what Alexa has to say about itself!

How fresh is the data from Alexa, Technorati, Compete.com and Yahoo Web Service?

The dynamic traffic graphs from Alexa contains real-time information. The rest of the data from Alexa is up to 7 days old.

The data from Technorati and Compete.com are up to 7 days old.

The data from Yahoo is fresh from its index.

Why do WP Text Ads links use the rel="nofollow" attribute by default?

Starting from version 1.1 of WP Text Ads, the rel="nofollow" attribute is used by default for all ad links. This is in direct response to Google's position on paid text links. I've written two article summarizing what google thinks of paid links and the importance of using the rel="nofollow" attribute.

Google is strongly against paid links that exist for the sake of juicing up PageRank, and rel="nofollow" prevents that from happening. If your blogger turns off this attribute, he might not be doing you a big favour.

Where's the PageRank for each blog? It's not shown.

That's deliberate. PageRank is not a reliable indicator of a site's popularity. Do you know that the PageRank you see in the Google Toolbar may not even be accurate or up-to-date? This obsession with PageRank has to stop, and it surely won't appear here.

The traffic data provided at the Marketplace is a more reliable indicator as you can use it to compare sites.

The Marketplace doesn't live up to my expectations! How do I protest?

Drop me an email or instant message. I love to be contacted by users, even angry ones! :)