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Here is an Interview with Turnip of Power | Social Networking marketer on the creation of a new advertising network called CMF ADS. CMF (Changing Marketing Forever) ADS is a widget-based advertising system that allows advertisers to purchase ad space on quality niche blogs on a CPM (cost per thousand views) basis. Currently, there are 20 blogs in the network that have been selectively chosen to participate in the initial launching.

I like discovering new and up and coming products or services and thought CMF ADS would be a great candidate to share with everyone. After you read through the questions below, I encourage you to visit CMF ADS and see what it has to offer. Without further adieu, here you go:

What was your motivation for starting CMF ADS?

My motivation was to implement an idea I had posted several times on both my blog and on the Entrecard Forums. Each time the idea was ignored or given the canned response of “We have limited resources for that.” Then recently I was disappointed with the Performancing Ads Network. Stan from razzball.com approached me and said “Why can’t we do something like that?” That’s how it all started.

What are your short and long-term goals for CMF ADS?

Short term the goal was to get good people involved who wanted to be part of something new. We wanted to test our code, our server, public reaction, and iron out all the little unexpected surprises. Long term we would like to expand our portfolio of blogs and reach out to other social networks. As we are only 3 weeks old today, we are still refining our initial goals. Just yesterday I rewrote the widget code to allow for this expansion.

What is your major selling point for CMF ADS (elevator pitch)?

For publishers: We monetize your social traffic for you. All you have to do is maintain a quality blog. We help promote your blog, help you with your website when help is requested, and at the end of the day provide you with a small paycheck for displaying our widget in previously unused space next to their social networking widget.

For advertisers: We get your message out there on 20 of the best up and coming websites. No need to interact with so many small sites individually. We bundle our members’ page views and sell them to you in a very affordable CPM bundle, providing geotargetting and other advanced features the individual site owner could not easily provide due to a lack of technical expertise.

I could imagine many bloggers will want to utilize your service. Do you have strict quality control admission?

We have quality control on both the publisher and advertiser ends. Nobody wants to advertise on horrible made for adsense splogs. Likewise, no blogger wants scammy ads on their website. We manually approve all blogs and ads, allowing both publisher and advertiser to opt out of any ads or sites they wish. Each blog in our network was discussed in detail before being sent an invitation to join.

If a blog is interested in joining what will be the minimum requirements for joining?

Initially we invited only WordPress blogs. Since then we have allowed blogs using other content management platforms to join. The main requirements are your own domain name, a minimum of a 250 pixel wide sidebar, and maintaining a high-quality blog. Sometimes we work around the sidebar issue in special cases, but generally adhere to these rules.

How does the advertising widget effect the speed and efficiency of a site?

Our widget opens in an i-frame, so won’t ever slow down the rest of a site from loading. In addition, we host the bottom image locally, further speeding up the process.

What has been the overall perception of the widget so far?

Reception has been great. The first day we announced our network we sold 25,000 impressions as well as numerous high-quality blogs looking to join the network. Many curious bloggers have taken notice, along with a few advertisers.

Do you see yourself in competition to Entrecard or merely using some of their ideas to create a stand along advertising network?

We don’t see ourselves in competition with Entrecard or using their ideas. We took twenty well-respected blogs and made an ad network out of them. Now because we are active in the Entrecard community it was only natural that these twenty blogs were discovered through Entrecard. One blog has since left Entrecard and we welcome that, as well. A good blog is a good blog, Entrecard or not.

What measures are you establishing to provide the smoothest growth possible?

To ensure smooth growth, we are only letting in a fraction of the blogs asking to join. Each step of the way we have checked to make sure all issues were addressed before moving on to the next phase.

Conclusion:

I think this network has some great potential to develop into a full service advertising network. I don’t know how often they will be accepting new publishers, but I would make admission highly selective, more on the prestigious side. Say it only has enrollment every two weeks and only X number of new publishers will be allowed in during the beta stage, kind of like Gmail was invite only for the longest time. This would help in the beginning to have controlled growth of all the system resources preserving the quality of the network and service by not having a bunch of down time.

I really enjoy when people go out on their own by mixing and matching various different ideas to produce a worthwhile product. Time will tell how things play out, but I would again encourage you to head over to CMF ADS and check it out for yourself.

Since humans picked up the very first stick and rock to help make their lives easier, we haven’t stopped. The same goes for tools online. Learning how and where to find those tools along with using them help make our lives much easier is vital for productivity. Here are my Top 10 Web Marketer Tools (in no particular order):

1. SEO Quake Toolbar

The SEO Quake toolbar is a FireFox extension that allows you to quickly and easily see quick stats about every web page you visit. As I am browsing from site to site I can simply look at my toolbar and know roughly how much traffic, authority, backlinks, age, keywords and indexed pages a site has. This is invaluable information when you are doing research on clients or competition. With a few clicks you can see much more detailed information until you are blue in the face. Here is where you can get the SEO Quake Toolbar.

2. COcomment

COcomment is another great tool to allow you to track the online conversations you have had. Every time you leave a comment on a fellow website or blog it records that and feeds it into your COcomment inbox. If anyone replies to that comment in the future you can see that to continue your conversation. I use this every day, and it helps to build your trust on other websites as a member and participator, even if you only visit to update your conversation. This is a bigger time saver and an absolute must for maintaining an online presence in all different communities.

3. Google Alerts

I have touched on this before and won’t exhaust the topic, but if you are trying to become an authority on a subject there is no better way to stay up to date than with Google Alerts. You can play with the settings to receive alerts by email one a day, hour, as they happen and so on. This is a great tool for brand management and to see what others are saying about your subject, company or yourself.

4. Ping.fm

Ping.fm allows you to send messages to all of your various Twitters, Facebook, Myspace and just about every other major social networking site. I have it set up through my Gmail that allows me to send a message automatically to my Ping.fm dashboard and it simultaneously updates all of my social networking platforms. Huge, HUGE, time saver. Never again do you have to log in and out of 20 different sites to update all your friends and followers. It’s great.

5. All in One SEO Plugin

All in One SEO Plugin is for self-hosted Wordpress sites. So, if you have a blog and use Wordpress, you need this plugin. This plugin allows you to quickly optimize your post title, description and keywords. When you do this on a subject like Halloween Marketing Ideas, when someone searches for that keyword term it shows up in the search engine instead of your normal blog title. It looks better to the eye, meets the searcher criteria, allows search engines to categorize better and helps overall in SEO.

6. Auto Social Poster (ASP)

ASP is really a neat tool to automate the initial boost of your post in the search engines in a given term. What ASP does is allows you to automatically bookmark your newest posts to sites like Delicious, Scuttle sites, Flurl, and many, many more. You can create as many different accounts to all the sites you would like, and it will randomly select as many or few sites to post to. This gives each of your newest posts an automatic backlinks from dozens of social bookmarking sites. If you are writing on a trend type subject, this one plugin alone can help to drive hundreds of visitors.

7. G-Lock Blog Finder

G-Lock Blog Finder program allows you to search for keyword terms similar to yours in order to build good backlinks. If you have a blog about apartments and want to build that blog as an authority on apartments you can use this program to help find those apartment blogs. If you are leaving and participating on their site in a useful manner and have similar content, it should be easy to attract like audience to your own blog. This not only builds your reputation but helps to create more trickle traffic from similar sites.

8. FoxyProxy

The FoxyProxy plugin for FireFox allows you to view the web semi-anonymously by routing your web viewing through a proxy. This helps to reduce your footprint on the web and lets you stay one up on the competition. You can pick and choose how you want your settings and what sites should and shouldn’t be routed through a proxy. Once again, a very useful and free tool that can be used in many different ways.

9. Aweber Newsletter

Building a Aweber newsletter list is a very valuable tool. If you have not jumped on board I would encourage you to do so as soon as you reasonably can. Permission based marketing is becoming a huge tool for marketers to utilize. If people like what you have to offer, setting them up to receive your newsletter is a great way to keep them in contact and make genuine offers you feel will help them. This doesn’t mean you can now spam everyone on your list but it does mean you now have an opportunity to point them in the right direction hopefully with an affiliate link or commission cut. Don’t lie, cheat or steal and you can make good money from this tool just by being responsible.

10. Bookmarking Demon (BMD)

BMD is a lot like the auto social poster plugin in how it helps to automate backlinks from bookmarking sites. These sites help to increase exposure for your content and hopefully some additional traffic as well. With this program you have the ability to bookmark and share your site, useful information or even your friend’s site. This would be the equivalent of an online shotgun with the idea of getting your site out to as many places as possible. This has the potential to be used in a spam-like manner but if used correctly can again help you to increase your digital footprint online.

Before you do anything online you should make yourself familiar with all the tools and possible consequences of using those tools. If used improperly some of these can get your site deindexed or ever banned, resulting in less traffic and authority. You also never want to spend money on any tools or programs that you will not utilize fully. Look up reviews and what others have to say about any one tool over another and proceed with caution. These are a few of the tools I use on a day-to-day basis, and I personally find them useful.

It isn’t just trying to be bigger, smaller, faster or any of the like anymore that will classify as a niche. A niche is a world of its own. In the world of trucks, that niche would be the Freightliner Sport Chassis. This is the truck of trucks, something you should only find in the movies but low and behold it is now something anybody with a thick wallet can buy. The days of lift kits, 20″ rims, more horsepower, loud exhaust and the like are long gone when something like this pulls up to an intersection. There is a dealer not far from me that has one of these monstrosities that even comes with night vision and too many other features to list. Click here for the video of the truck.

These Freightliner trucks have made an appeal to the same people who helped commercialize the military Humvee into the Hummer by General Motors. It has even been reported that The Govenator of California is looking to purchase on of these trucks. Of course, the dealership sells many others things like horse trailers and more horse trailers, but I am sure none of those turn as many heads as this one truck.

Going to the edge of any market is where that market begins to talk about whatever product was brave enough to venture there. At the edge, half of the marketing is already done for you just because you managed to turn some heads like our truck here. The important question to ask about the direction you would like to go and how to market a product is to determine how close to the marketing edge you want to go. Another thing to consider while marketing to the fringe is that there is typically a lot less competition. Most people associate the big money to remain with the masses in the middle, but rarely do they think of the volume of competition all fighting for the same dollars. Profit margins suffer greatly the more competition that enters the market, but when you are on the edge, it is a whole other story.

To turn profits from your blog or website takes a combination of two things, traffic and authority. There are hundreds and thousands of websites that all share the same Associated Press news releases every day, and the only way they make money is by the shear mass of people going through them. On the other end, there is the site that only focuses on vintage bottle openers. A site selling and promoting these rare bottle openers probably has a leg up on all of the competition because there probably isn’t much competition. If there was any competition it wouldn’t take long to beat them out if you have a proper game plan. The whole idea is to become that truck that no one else has seen, that thing that makes you stop and stare at it for a second and ask questions, only to turn around and tell others about it later. To become an authority on a subject or in a niche takes a little time, but when established, the trust in your word can be leveraged to benefit both you and those you are helping.

Strive for the edge and set yourself apart from everyone else. It isn’t enough anymore to appear different. You have to be different.

The other day I came across this video doing a marketing video search and got a great laugh. I don’t really know who the creator is. He only has a Facebook account, but in the end, the video is funny and about marketing. In short, just because you change the marketing doesn’t necessarily mean you have a new product or that people will look at your old product in a different, more favorable way. To make your product remarkable, it needs to be changed drastically in a way that sets it apart from all the others. Whitewashing your old product and relabeling it will not draw the long stating effect you are trying for. Build a niche and set yourself apart from your competition, or build a product that is remarkable enough for people to promote for you. RSS readers Click Here for the video.

Wow, it has been a while since my last Random Rants, but all is not lost in the world of Unconventional Marketing. This week I am excited to present a series on how to go from working a “typical job” to working online. I have to warn you beforehand not to get too excited, because I will not be promoting any products online in order to help you. No ebooks, No software, No seminars, No conferences, just tough questions and some tips learned by me in my quest to work for myself. On to other news.

RSS

Last month boosted my RSS subscriptions to 203. I would like to thank everyone who took the time to subscribe and I know you’ll be getting your money’s worth this week. As a reminder for any new subscribers affiliated with Entrecard, if you would like your 300 Entrecard credits for subscribing, you will need to let me know either here or by a message.

Poll

On the side bar I posted a poll (thanks to vizu.com) asking whether or not you felt I should change my blog layout or style and so far 41% say yes I should change it. I will be looking into a few different options over the next week or so and encourage you to stick around and see what I come up with.

Business Card

I had a competition worth $50 to design a business card for me and the Unconventional Marketing blog. I had 7 entries and it was really a toss up between 1st and 2nd. Jason ended up winning the prize and walked away with $50. Thanks Jason and everyone else who made a go of it.