I just read a helpful tip in the InstantBuzz forums. A member wrote that he found his AdWords CTR increases when the display URI includes a directory like:

/special
/new
/limited

A very limited test on one of my own ads revealed that, at least for the /special directory, it does increase the CTR.

While this won’t make a bad ad pull well, it will make a good ad even better.

The sign on a door of our old Orangeville office in January:

The same door, new sign, in February:

There’s a somewhat cheesy and overpriced software package that’s quite popular with the Internet Marketing set called “Make Your Own Software” that promises that you can program your own Windows software (software, in this case, is a javascript filled webpage wrapped in a Windows executable) in 30 minutes.

Now I’ve discovered something that really does create software in 30 minutes or less — but the software is PHP coded and delivered over the Web.

Today, on a whim, I downloaded a program that can create PHP scripts to add, edit, delete, sort and search data in a MySQL database in less than 30 minutes. In fact, once I entered my database information, I accidentally created a nearly perfect script to update the tables in less than 30 seconds, just by clicking the various buttons in the menu.

The software is called PHPMaker from hkvstore.com, and it is quite possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in web development software. The company that makes it also offers similar software to generate ASP, CFM, JSP and XML that’s also probably outstanding, though I haven’t tried it personally.

As for PHPMaker, it’s a much cooler product than MYOS, and it’s about half the price too.

It was fun while it lasted, but a three day trial period demonstrated that there’s not a whole lot of cash to be made from linear exit links on my main site.

A quick calculation of my earnings thus far show that I would earn about 12 cents per thousand clicks. While this might improve on other sites where the ad targeting may be a little tighter, on my flagship site the money just isn’t worth annoying my visitors for, so I’ve removed the code.

I’ll leave it up here, though, and I’ll be adding it to a few other sites where the niche corresponds more exactly with an exitpoint category in hopes of seeing better click-through figures and revenue.

Today I got an acceptance email for the TargetPoint program, and I installed the Exitpoint code on a few of my sites — I also added it to this blog, so you can click any link to an external site to see how the ads look.

My first thoughts are:

1) I was a little disappointed that the ads aren’t truly contextual. You choose a category and subcategory of advertisement, and the results show up in the bar. It would be cool if you could add a keyword or to the anchor tag to create better results, but it’s understandable that the script can’t read external links to create perfect contextual results. Nevertheless, I was hoping for something a little more groundbreaking.

2) The ad frame itself is pretty small and non-offensive. I’ve decided to use the linear ad format, which is basically two ads running right across the page. There is also a full banner type which looks sort of like Google’s leaderboard ads, except they fill the full screen width. The link back to the page you came from, and the ‘Remove Frame’ link are nice touches. The ‘More Results’ link brings you to a TargetPoint search engine which, in my experience, doesn’t actually bring you to more related results at all… just random looking sponsor results. Not so hot.

3) The javascript code takes up to 20 seconds to load after the html page is fully loaded. In many cases … especially on pages dedicated to links, the surfer has already clicked a link before the code is set up, so the ads are skipped entirely. I’m not sure why this happens, since I’ve got the code in the header, but it’s sure to impact the revenues that can be earned through this method.

So my rating on the first day of this experiment (before any clickthrough stats and revenue can be seen) is about a 6 out of 10. Nice idea, inoffensively implemented, but can definitely be improved.