SquidOffers is the new advertising system over at Squidoo; . Here is the scoop from The Mighty Godin (long may he reign):
So we invented SquidOffers, which I hope will work for us, and which I fully expect will show up in other places soon. The idea is to combine the voting mechanism of Reddit or Digg or Plexo with the text ad mindset of a Google ad. But instead of an ad, it’s an offer.Make an offer. Pick a category. Pay a small fee ($100 a month). Then, our users vote on the offers. Get a lot of votes and you rank more highly, which means more clicks. And you don’t pay for the clicks.
Now there’s an incentive to write better and better offers (but they need to be genuine or we boot you). Offer a free sample or a free issue or a consult or an ebook. Be generous. Get permission to follow up.
It was intriguing enough that I set up an offer as soon as I read about it. The offer went live Monday. See it here. What do I think?
- It was easy enough to create and pay for my offer (paypal).
- Choosing a category is hard, and I made a mistake with the category my offer is displayed in but there is no mechanism to change it
- Initially our paid-for offers were competing against entrenched place-holders, they have been zeroed now
- Offers are not particularly visible, only the top 5 display at all, and the best screen real estate is given over to adsense. The bottom offer will be below the fold on many monitors.
- There is not much voting action. I am lucky my offer is (was?) among the most popular but I had to ask for votes on Darrens blog comments to get them.
- I can’t see any incentive for people to vote up offers. It might be an idea for a vote-down button for people to junk spam, of course this would create its own problems.
- You should be able to see who voted. Right now it is way open to abuse.
- The advertiser screen is hard to find and pretty much useless. It only shows your offer, run dates and a delete link. Where are the visitor, page view and click-through stats?
Overall it is an interesting experiment and early days. I have paid for a month so will do a follow up post about squidoffers after the month trial is over.
Update: More about my Squidoo Squidoffers
Tags: squidoo, seth godin, squidoffers, review, blog, advertising, marketing, news, tips, traffic