Igloo news

New release

2009-11-14T09:46:11Z

There are a couple of major new features and lots of small changes:

You can now choose to sell your ads per impression rather than per day (eg you could create a Banner ad section that only showed one ad at a time)
You can choose to have your advertisers be automatically reminded when their ads are about to finish (edit your ad sections to set the options)
Notifications should be working now (please tell me if they aren't)

Things that we are working on now:

A blog for announcements like these (hey, here it is!)
Automated payments (so that advertisers can pay you directly without you having to manually invoice them)
Discount coupons
Allowing multiple websites per user

Also, a reminder that the first Igloo subscription invoices will be sent on 16th September (as stated on the pricing page). All subscriptions will be charged at the Basic subscription price ($7.50 for Early Adopters).

Scheduled maintenance

2009-11-14T09:45:58Z

Igloo will be unavailable for one hour from midnight (UTC) 22nd September until 1am 23rd september

New release

2009-11-14T09:45:49Z

Igloo now has the capability for you to create Coupons. Coupons allow you to give discounts to particular people, rather than to everyone all at once. It is a powerful way to target particular people to advertise. You can create as many coupons as you like, and each coupon has it's own expiry date. Some ideas for how you could use coupons:

Create a coupon for giving to your friends, or people that have done you favours in the past.
Create a coupon for giving to advertisers, whose ad is just about to finish that expires soon. This will encourage them to re-advertise.
Create a coupon for giving to all of your past advertisers.
Create a coupon that expires at the end of October. Put up a blog post about it, and tell your readers to "tell your friends".

There are plenty of cosmetic changes around the place too.

Things that we are working on now:

Automated payments (so that advertisers can pay you directly without you having to manually invoice them). Hopefully we will hear from Paypal about this one soon.
Allowing multiple websites per user
An easy way for you to email your advertisers through Igloo
A way to offer bonuses to your advertisers if they spend more

Also a reminder: sometimes new features that are added to Igloo require you to "turn on" the feature in your ad-section or website-profile. Last release we put in automated reminders, but we forgot to say that they are disabled by default. You have to turn them on if you want them.

Please contact us at igloo@igloohq.com if you are having any problems, or have any ideas for things that you would like to see Igloo be able to do.

Release number 11

2009-11-14T09:42:59Z

Well, we are up to release number 11 now. That has just flown by hasn't it?

This time around the major thing that we have put live (which we are very happy about) is Automated Payments. Automated Payments allows the advertiser to pay you through Paypal directly without you having to send a manual invoice. It is all automated. Have a look at the Product Tour if you can't picture what I mean.

To set this up, you need to open the Administration Interface, edit your website, and tick the box that says "Allow advertisers to pay with Paypal". So now, all you need to do is "Approve" an ad, and everything after that is automated.

Other things that we have been working on are:

Bonuses: these are a way for you to reward your advertisers for spending more. They are the opposite (in some ways) to a discount. Instead of taking less money if the advertiser purchases a month of advertising, you take the same amount of money and give them some bonus days. Look for these in the Administration Interface.
You can now email your past advertisers through a very convenient interface inside Igloo. Select all the advertisers that you want to email, and then edit the message and then each advertiser will be sent an individual message.
You can now create multiple websites, if you want to host advertising on multiple sites. There is now a convenient (and obviously named) create website link that will be shown underneath your current website.
We have updated the styling of the lightbox that appears on your website when an advertiser clicks "advertise here". I hope you like it.
We have put up a Product Tour, to hopefully expain better what it is that Igloo does.
Lots of other small changes.

So now we are going to be working on:

Automated/scheduled payments for Igloo users. This will free us up for more interesting things than managing payments.
Resize advertisement image when it is uploaded, if it is not the correct size (and warn the advertiser that it occurred)
A registration system that does not depend on Google. We are starting to think that potential users don't like being confronted with a Google login page when they are not expecting it.

Paypal automated payments are working again

2009-11-14T09:39:03Z

Edit: Payments are again working. Thankyou for your patience.

Paypal automated payments are currently not being accepted by Paypal

We are working with Paypal to figure out why not and we will keep this post updated with details.

The error page that is shown to the user recommends that the user request a manual invoice from the website owner. They can do this via pressing the "Invoice me!" button. This button is normally there for users who do not have a Paypal account and do not want to create one.

Once the user has clicked this button, you will receive a notification requesting that you send a manual Paypal invoice to this user.

Release Number 12

2009-11-14T09:38:25Z

This is a big release, it has lots of changes and so we have done lots of testing. Please, please, please if you have any problems get in touch and I will try and fix the problem for you straight away, and fix the problem for everyone else as soon as possible.

Following on from our release of Automated Payments last time, we now have the ability for you to manage your account with Igloo. This means that we will be able to manage Igloo subscribers more easily, without spending all of our time on invoicing! As part of this change:

Subscription plans are now priced and changed weekly rather than monthly
We introduced a cheaper plan with no included ad impressions for those of you that were not getting good value from those plans
Increased the price per thousand impressions to 2.5c (rather than 2.2c). This only takes effect for new subscribers, or if you change your Subscription Plan.
You can now choose your subscription plan in your Website Preferences
The first month of use is now documented on the Pricing page as free. This was already informally true, but now that we are automatically charging your account, it is written down.

To make this work, each week Igloo will charge your account (within Igloo) for your subscription fee, and usage fee, and we will notify you if your account is getting low. You can tell us when to notify you too "Please notify me when there is only $20 left in my account".

Please get in touch if you have any feedback on how easy this is to use, or if you have any problems. There is more information in the FAQs.

Have a look at your current balance or top up your account.

Other changes:

We have now implemented another login method, rather than just relying on Google Accounts. New users have the choice of either method. Current users should continue to use the Google Account login.
We have removed most of the dialogs and now everything is bookmarkable (if you don't know what I mean about 'bookmarkable', it just means that links can take you straight to part of the application eg: Preferences). This also means that you can use the 'back' and 'forward' buttons on the browser and they will mostly do what you expect.

There are as usual heaps of other minor changes and bugfixes.

A new release

2009-11-14T09:37:11Z

A new release is live. This one has mostly pretty minor changes, and some bugfixes.

There are some changes to the navigation structure, and the names of things. I hope you aren't getting confused... I think I am a lot more happy with where things are now, and how they work. Please tell me if you are not.

Prices in your advertising section setup are now mandatory
Igloo should work a lot better in IE7 now
You can now configure a link that will show in the screen to create an ad. Go to your Site Profile to set this up. You should put a link to your advertising information page here.
Ads that are 'free' (ie $0) now no longer need to be marked as "Paid".

New version

2009-11-14T09:36:36Z

There is only one major change in this version. When an advertiser uploads an image for their ad, if it is not exactly the size of the ad slot, then it is automatically cropped and resized to be exactly the correct size. The advertiser is warned that this occurred and told to check the image to ensure that it is satisfactory. Because of this the "exact size" option in the advertising section was removed as unnecessary.

Small changes to the navigation appearance as well.

How to Boost Ad Revenue: Speed is Your Secret Weapon

2009-11-14T09:34:08Z

The guys at BuySellAds have put up a post relating page load speed to how much money you can make through advertising. Basically, the faster your page, the more likely you are to get more page views out of each person. Interesting idea.

How to Boost Ad Revenue: Speed is Your Secret Weapon « Online Advertising Blog – BuySellAds.com.

How to get started with direct sales advertising

2009-11-14T09:33:00Z

Dosh-dosh has an excellent resource on how to get started with direct sales advertising. It is in 5 parts:
Direct Advertising Sales for Beginners: How to Develop an Alternative Revenue Source
10 Direct Advertising Options to Monetize Your Website or Blog
How to Set Your Own Advertising Rates for Direct Ad Sales: An Extensive Guide
Marketing Your Ad Space: How to Create Your Own Direct Advertising Sales Package
How to Find Advertisers for Your Website and Increase Direct Advertising Sales