Automatic Approval Is Live!

Wouldn’t it be nice if LinkAds just magically appeared on your site and made money for you right away without the hassle of having to log in to the control center, approve the ad & then go through the steps of publishing the ad each time an advertiser wanted to buy from you? We think so, too, which is why we’ve just launched a new feature to do just that!

It’s called “Auto Approve” and its live right now. If you think this option is right for you, simply log in to your LinkWorth Partner account and go to “my sites” >> “publish” >> select LinkAds >> and then select one of your URLs. You’ll see the following section at the bottom:

Be sure to click the “What’s This?” link for exact directions you must follow to be accepted into Auto-Approve program.

By selecting “auto approve” you are allowing LinkWorth to approve or decline any link requests you get from Advertisers and publish them automatically on your website. You will be prompted to select ad categories that you DO NOT want to host on your site in addition to outlining any other criteria you want us to follow prior to making a decision. You don’t want Viagra ads, for example? No problem. Don’t want competitors advertising on your site? Done. Relevant sites only? Piece of cake.

The benefit here is that Advertisers will see that you have this option available and since it’s been requested MANY TIMES over the years, our feeling is that you’ll sell more ads. Advertisers want links and they want them NOW, so this will better serve them while making the whole process easier for you.

This is currently only available for LinkAds, however, we may decide to activate this for other products if the Partner feedback is good.

SES Toronto

Calling all canucks! Is anyone going to SES Toronto next month? Ron and I are going old-school and doing the show ourselves for the first time in a couple of years, so come by and see us if you’re going to be in town. (Or, better yet, give me a shout ahead of time and maybe we can string something together.)

Beyond that, neither one of us has ever been to Toronto and we’re looking for some suggestions on what to do, where to eat, etc. If you’re familiar with that part of the world, let me hear from you!

PayPal Delay

We have experienced an issue with PayPal this month that has delayed our ability to make our PayPal payouts on time. It is our understanding that PayPal payouts will hit our partner accounts tomorrow instead of today. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we work through this matter.

Welcome to ShrinkWorth

One of our favorite days at LinkWorth is April 1st, or April Fool’s Day. And when I say “our”, I’m speaking of Matt and I (Ron). Each year we try to out perform our previous year of gags and jokes we play on the staff. This year I am 100% sure we topped all previous April Fool’s Day performances. I’d like to thank our staff for putting up with the full day of non-stop craziness and watch out for next year, because we already have the next 2 years planned out!!!

Let me run down a quick bullet list of what we did yesterday:

• We turned LinkWorth into ShrinkWorth by shrink wrapping the entire office
• We removed cubical dividing walls in the sales pit creating shared spaces
• We snuck keys away from many and moved their cars in the parking lot
• We ran video on everyone walking in first thing seeing it all and giving them an early morning blow horn
• We ran a looped audio of a sneeze we recorded from Matt Baker, who is the loudest sneezer in the world, through the phones for much of the afternoon
• We made a pot of coffee with half a container of sugar in it
• We caused our admin backend to appear to be crashed giving errors
• We had outsiders tell people they had live snakes in their drawer
• We sent fake emails to each Account Manager making them think their biggest client is canceling and complaining about them…and took video of them explaining themselves

As you can see, while it’s not a recognized holiday, there isn’t a lot of work that gets done on April 1 each year. There might be other spur of the moment ideas we put in place that I’m forgetting, but you get the point.

We have lots of pictures and even more video. The pictures are below and the video will be soon, once I figure out how to edit and put it all together in a nice looking format.

Hope you had as good of a day as we did!

Here’s a video tour of ShrinkWorth

Ad-tech – San Francisco – 2010 – Discount Code

LinkWorth will be exhibiting at the Ad:tech conference in San Francisco on April 20-21. We’ll be located at booth #5973, which to most of you, will mean absolutely nothing. I honestly can’t say I’ve ever visited a conference and paid any attention to booth numbers. This is where we’ll be, so if you’re attending, please stop by and ask Robin to sing you her original “Linky” song. She has a great voice and the song is really good too. Also be sure to ask David why they call him “Ace”.

If you have not signed up to attend Ad:tech and want to go, we have a nice little offer for you. Just follow our special link here and you’ll get a $200 discount on a full conference pass. They’re not cheap, so discounts are always great. If the link doesn’t transfer our code, use this:

Ad:tech San Francisco Discount Code: LWADTEC

Just remember…”Have a DrinkWorth with LinkWorth which could lead to InkWorth, and then you’ll wake up in a StinkWorth probably needing a ShrinkWorth.”

Big Update to LinkWorth System

Last night we made a pretty sizable update to our system that is significant enough to let you guys know about. Up until last night, we’ve considered listings as “sites” or “blogs”. Blogs were setup more for LinkPost where the rest of our products were geared towards a regular “site”. With the majority of sites being a blog these days, it was more of a headache than anything else, so I say with great pleasure, it’s all one listing now!

You no longer have to submit your blog as an entirely separate listing! (insert crowd raawr!) If you had a blog listing previously, no worries, we’ve merged everything over to the “site” side of things and this is how you list everything now. There’s no more managing your blogs or anything else that used to come with the blog listings, it’s all been merged with your normal site listing.

As we’re testing and really getting a good live run-through today, we’re on the hunt for any bugs or problems that we might have missed during testing, so if you see something, PLEASE click the “FEEDBACK” icon in your lower right-hand corner and let us know. Include errors or pages, as much detail as possible so we can quickly jump into action.

This is one small part of several big improvements we have on the list. Soon, our control center will be as simple as pie…something we’ve “ALL” wished for, for a long time.

We Have Power – Woohoo

Apparently the cause of our entire office building being down yesterday was due to a pesky rat! It evidently chewed through a main power cable and not only ended its life, but ended the power for an entire work day for us.

The good thing is, they fixed the problem yesterday afternoon and everyone is back to work today. We apologize for any inconvenience us not being in the office might have caused. LinkWorth.com was not affected by this outage, thankfully.

Power Outage Update

The LinkWorth corporate offices are currently without power. I’ve been told we may be down all day, but that has yet to be confirmed by the electric company. We will update you when we get more information and we appreciate your patience.

Come See Us At SES NYC

If you’re attending SES in NYC right now, stop by and say hi to our crew!

Little Feature Added to LinkPost

We’ve added a new feature to our LinkPost and LinkPost Jobs that many will find extremely beneficial. It’s called “Pre-Written Content” and in a nutshell, Advertisers create the content for the LinkPost they purchase and Partners use this content to create a new post on their blog.

One of the most complained about items when it comes to LinkPost and LinkPost Jobs, is the actual content produced in the post. While there are many that do a wonderful job at writing original content, there are also many that just don’t quite meet the Advertiser’s standard.

Due to this reason and suggestions from clients, we have implemented a new feature called “Pre-Written Content”. Think of a LinkBB and a LinkPost combination; the Advertiser creates the content and the Partner publishes it. The Advertiser gets a perfect post they are 100% satisfied with and the Partner gets a guest blogger making a new post on their blog and being paid for it. It’s “VERY” easy money for the Partner.

Advertiser Information
For Advertisers, we’ve added a new radio option as shown below that asks if the new outline will have pre-written content or not. If you select “Yes”, a new pre-written content text field will appear where you will put the content in. <HTML TAGS ARE ALLOWED!> The best recommendation would be to either format your post with some sort of editor that allows you to insert the html tags, then copy the content with tags over to the pre-written content field. You can also submit the content without tags if you choose to not use them. All paragraphs and line breaks will be recognized and carried over.

After you have completed the fields for the Outline and submitted, your outline will be saved and queued for review. Once your outline is approved, everything else will operate the same as before.

We definitely recommend making each pre-written LinkPost unique. The most effective practice would be to select the blogs you want to publish your LinkPost on. Learn the blog and how they speak to their audience. Then do your best to make your pre-written LinkPost blend in well with the bloggers other posts. You’ll need to create a new outline for each pre-written post.

Another recommendation is to go ahead and put the links in the content where you want it. This takes all of the work out of the Partner’s hands and you’re 99% certain it will be published exactly how you want it to be published.

Partner Information
LinkPost just became really easy for Partners when pre-written content is provided! The worst part, for most, is thinking of what to say about said site/product or keywords. Quite often, the content falls short of what the Advertisers are hoping to see, so this option helps both sides.

Partners will know when a pending LinkPost or a LinkPost job has pre-written content included. As you can see in the image below, you’ll see the yellow highlighted part that says “Use pre-written content as the blog post”. You’ll also see the content on the right side column.

Once you click “Approve”, it will direct you to the next screen that gives the publishing instructions.

On the Publish Instructions, you will see all of the usual items, but now if it includes the pre-written content, you’ll see it in the right-side column. All of the pre-written content will be inside the textarea box that will highlight with a single click, and then you can copy to your clipboard with a CTRL C (or right-click and choose Copy). Then go to your new blog post page and paste the content with a CTRL V (or right-click and choose Paste).

Note: when using copy/paste that has html tags in WordPress, you will need to switch your wordpress editor to the HTML version. Otherwise the special formatting will be lost. This is an illustration of the two editors offered.

If you would like to go over pre-written content before publishing, click the “Preview” link under the textarea box and it will open a new window showing the page formatted properly.