The past few weeks have been absolutely incredible. August was recording breaking on every front. Not only did we pass 50,000 bloggers, we also had the most blogger signups in a single month, the most advertiser signups in a month and by far our biggest month of sales, blowing past the already aggressive goal we had. We grew sales 62% from July to August and September should be very strong as well.
The amount of Opps being put through the system is staggering, we are bringing on two more Customer Love representatives to handle the demand. If you have noticed any delays please bear with us, growth like this can be difficult to manage.
I am overwhelmed with excitement! Things are going very well with the current system and Argus is gaining shape as each day passes. I have been working hand and hand with Pete and team to define every button, form and piece of functionality in the system. I have worked on some pretty large web projects in the past, but this effort is enormous in comparison.
Those that attended the focus group saw rough black and white wireframes which have now been transformed into a beautiful user experience. I would like to give Scott at MindComet a shout out for creating such a kick ass design from my wireframes. It is gorgeous… he has such a gift.
The dev team has taken the designs and put together the first few
functional screens of the system. One of those screens is the new
"Postie Profile". We are making it much easier for Advertisers to
locate and hire Posties in Argus, this has been a highly requested
feature. In order to create Postie Profiles we are going to require
some additional information about you as a blogger. In the coming weeks
expect to see a form inside of the current system that allows you to
populate your profile before the new system launches.
There has been a lot of discussion around PPP Tools, domains, blog
hosting platforms and Argus. I would like to clarify a few things
surrounding these topics. Argus makes extensive use of PPP Tools, a
piece of javascript that you copy and paste into the HTML of your blog.
In Argus PPP Tools will be utilized to provide actual traffic data to
advertisers surrounding visits, pageviews, click throughs, traffic
sources, etc. We never found a replacement to Performancing that worked
so we have built our own analytics engine…and it is incredible. While
we will still offer Alexa and Google as influence indicators
Advertisers will be able to segment on actual traffic in Argus. This is
great news for international bloggers that have high percentages of US
based traffic.
Perhaps more important than actual traffic segmentation is more
accurate and expanded advertiser reporting. The more data we can
provide Advertisers the easier it becomes to demonstrate and maximize ROI.
If you can’t install PPP Tools you can’t provide reporting or traffic
data to Advertisers. If an advertiser has to choose between someone who
reports data vs. someone who doesn’t chances are they will choose the
blogger that does. That data is critical for Advertisers to do their
job and determine advertising effectiveness.
Another issue that comes into play has to do with free blog hosting
platforms. Many of these platforms don’t allow javascript in any form,
making it impossible to install PPP Tools and report traffic. In
addition, traffic on these blogs is aggregated under the master domain.
For instance, if you have a blog on live journal all of that traffic is
attributed to live journal by the media reporting agencies like
comScore. There is no way to separate out your blog traffic so there is no way
for us to provide information to the advertiser about your blog.
PPP Tools will also unlock an exciting new blog monetization option. I can’t say too much about this right now, but let’s just say you will be able to choose from more than just sponsored posts. You guys will really like this ; )
With all that said you don’t have to move your blog if you don’t want to. We are going to be marketing Posties of all types like never before. However, please realize that you are at an inherent disadvantage to those with their own domain and PPP Tools installed. The choice is yours, I just want to make sure that your decision to stay with your current setup or move is an informed one. If it was me and I was a serious blogger I would bite the bullet and make the change. You don’t want to be left out.
Argus is going to be the biggest disruptor to hit blogging since PPP launched last year. Get ready guys… this is going to be big.
