Is there a job board that works similar to AdSense?

Source: I founded www.buyads.com and www.isocket.com, which powers the direct ad sales for the web's best sites (like TechCrunch, AOL, Microsoft, etc) We hand invited the publishers that join our market because, as your question suggests, there is some threshold between who should and should not try direct sales. There are no hard rules, just guidelines. The superseding one is this: Do you have inventory (audience) an advertiser would take the time to specifically work with you for? If you open a "store" and starting selling this stuff, do people want to buy it? One measure is traffic, but that's not enough. In general we like to look for sites with 100,000 page views a month or more. But it can depend on the content and vertical. For example, we power a website that gets 25k hits a month but is the only site covering the voice over talent industry in Hollywood - so its super nichey and there is a market for those advertisers. Other examples of small but successful premium properties include some hyperlocal ones (www.queensmamas.com, www.brooklynheightsblog.com, www.brokelyn.com, etc), the largest blog for truckers, largest blog for prison wardens, etc. The conflicting examples are sites with large traffic but bad audiences/verticals. We reject a lot of "tech blog" also-rans that just copy and paste content from TechCrunch but get a lot of SEO traffic from it. Or even if it's a legit site, it can be in a bad brand-advertiser vertical like home finance / mortgages (which is mostly lead gen advertisers)

I hate to be "that guy," but I'm gonna say, "it depends." What I mean by this is it is highly subjective to the market you are in and the target you're going after. However, with that being said, let me share a few of my favorite growth-hacky-type ideas that you might want to consider using to grow your customer base: #1 - Produce a TON of content. Make it valuable, and don't cut corners. Then, promote it to your existing tribes. If you don't already have a tribe, see the bullet #2. #2 - Build a tribe. Get started at a place like triberr.com where you can connect your social profiles and your blog and share with likeminded folks. It takes time to get going, but you'll thank me for it later. #3 - Test every aspect of your landing pages. Use something like Unbounce (my favorite) to strip down every element of your pages and split test constantly. Get used to the fact that your landing pages are NEVER complete. They can always be improved. #4 - Build an email list from your blog traffic by using "content upgrades" or "lead magnets." Search Google for the specifics, but basically, you create free content that is related to each post on your blog that the reader can download in return for subscribing to your newsletter. It works like a charm! Let me know if you want me to go into further detail on any of this stuff.

The answer depends on your situation: You could be a start-up that is more concerned with not blowing tons of money, or you could be in a rush to be done. In both situations, your objective is to find inventory sources that work quickly and then massively scale into those inventory sources. I am going to assume that the goal is to be efficient. In this case, I would start with relatively few inventory pieces and a pretty low bid. The goal of your experiment is to determine what inventory DOESN'T work while spending as little money as possible. By concentrating your spend on a few pubs, you can get to significant results quickly. If you spread out your spend, you won't generate enough clicks or backend actions per inventory source quickly enough to determine if one is actually working. (In my latter user persona, you can simply spend gobs of money to get significant results on lots of inventory quickly.) So the moral of the story is that you want to get to results, you have to scale the number of pubs you work with to align with the amount of money you are planning to spend. You would like to, within a day or two, rule out bad inventory and focus on new inventory, or alternately, make massive investments in working inventory to print money for yourself. I would be happy to do a call to further discuss.

Hey, I'm a conversion optimization consultant so I can offer some help here. Whether a conversion rate is "good" or not is a relative measure. If you run a test and get it to 35% from 26%, that's good! If if go from 26% to 10%, then you know you could be doing better. Comparing your conversion rate to industry averages rarely tells you anything meaningful or actionable, so the best thing you can do is continue testing and compare to your old baseline. The confidence level is the likelihood that the detected result actually exists. For example, if you flip a coin 10 times it will likely land on one side more than the other. If you stopped testing after 10 flips, you might assume that one side has a higher probability than the other... But we both know that's wrong. The real result (50/50) would only begin to emerge after 20 flips, and even then you would not have 100% confidence. So you don't want to start flipping (ie, testing) too soon because you might draw the wrong conclusion ("the coin landed on tails 6 out of 10 times, therefore tails beats heads by 20%"). You also want to know when to stop and what is the smallest meaningful difference ("the coin landed on tails 49 out of 100 times, and the 2% difference is not significant, so we can confidently say the probability of landing on tails is the same as landing on heads.") The confidence level tells you when you've reached this point. Before you start any A/B test, you need to know how many "flips" (sample number, ie, visitors) are need to reach a result that is likely to be true, and what is the minimum significant change (is a 2% increase significant, or is that just random fluctuation?). Here is a handy calculator to calculate this before you start your test: http://www.evanmiller.org/ab-testing/sample-size.html If you (or anyone reading) would like some help in setting up and running A/B tests to increase conversions, get in touch!

I am a firm believer in hiring professionals to do a professional job. We have worked with dozens of freelance videographers and helped brands achieve some sharp marketing videos. So some tips: 1) Hire a freelance videographer and writing team. Developing a story board is not easy and there are brilliant writers just waiting for jobs like this. 2) If you are going the DIY route make sure there is a beginning, a middle and an end to your story board. 3) Use humour where possible. 4) Keep the script short and attempt to get your message out in the first 30 seconds. 5)Speak directly to the audience -so know really well who that audience is! 6) Find the right tone depending on your company brand and mission. 7) Tell a solid story. So you want to start by presenting a problem, introducing a solution, then explain how it works, and lastly create a call to action for your target audience. Hope this helps. I'm here if you'd have further questions. blue skies, Daniela Hope this helps