Tell Peoria Online Media

Who owns TELLPEORIA Online Media?

Debbie Adlof, publisher of The Community Word; and Billy Dennis, owner and writer of blog Peoria Pundit and the owner administrator of the group blog site The Blog Peoria Project, created TELLPEORIA. Debbie has been owner of the The Community Word for eight years’

Why did you create this site?

Tell Peoria started in response to this question: “What can we do to sell more ads?” Despite the downturn in advertising sales at newspapers, ad sales on the Internet aren’t doing too bad. Especially text links ads, the word only ads that link to advertisers’ Web sites.

We created a site to sell text link ads — as well as banner ads — and to distribute them on our own sites. And we thought, well why not put these ads on other people’s sites and take a commission.

How do I register?

Before you start: DON’T PANIC. If you have problems doing this, just let me know via email and I’ll call you and I’ll do it for you over the phone. But if I do, I will need access to your blog/web site’s admin panel.

Go to www.tellpeoria.com/ads and sign up as an advertiser or as an advertiser AND a publisher. The site won’t let you sign up as JUST a publisher, but don’t worry, you won’t have to buy any ads in order to publish them.

Before you do anything, you really ought to have the following information ready:

• Your name.
• Your email address.
• Your blog’s name and URL (Web address) or your business/organization’s Web site’s URL.
• Have a username and a password already picked out.
• 10 or so “tags” that apply to your site.
• A 100-word description of your site.
• If you are going to run any graphic image ad, please have that prepared.

Once you have registered, go to the site and you will be asked for various information, only the fields with an asterisk (*) are requiredut. Section One MUST be filled out, and doing so will quality you as an advertiser. Filling out Section Two qualifies you as an publisher with the ability to make money selling ads.

Once you fill out the information and click “register” you will be sent to a page to register your site for ad publishing. If you do intend to place TellPeoria.com ads on your site, please fill it out. Most of the information they want is self-explanatory. I strongly recommend you sell banner ads that are sold on a “pay per impression” basis and text ads sold on a “pay per click” basis. Once signed up as a publisher, you can click on This allows us to set a consistent rate across all member ad publishers.

What ads should I use?

Large ads like “Leaderboard” can generate big revenue, but they don’t sell often and take up a lot of territory on your site. Most blogs won’t run them.

Once you sign up as publisher, click on “Ad Rates and Settings” under the Publisher Features heading to determine what ad formats you want to sell and what price you want to set.

We strongly recommend you use the price structure on our rate card: http://tellpeoria.com/rate-card/

Please bear in mind that if your rates are too high (and capturing too high a percentage of run-of-the-network ad revenue for the value given), we may decide to suspend you account. Also, if your rates are substantially lower than the rate card, you will short yourself.

Set the “number of ads shown” to whatever you wish. I strongly suggest setting it as high as four. That doesn’t mean your site will show four ads of the same size in the same location. It just means those four ads will rotate. If you set it at “1″ then a second advertiser won’t have the option of buying ad space from you if you have an ad running already, even if that ad is set to expire in a few days.

Once you have entered your site information, click on “Ad Codes.” If you have more than one Website entered, click on the site to which you want to add the code. Then click on the drop-down arrow and click on the ad format you wish to place, which as “Image Ad 180×150.” You will be asked to select various option. I would advise to use “Websites Default Ads” which means a TellPeoria.com house ad will appear when there is no ad sold.

Remember to save the information, and once you do that, the ad code appears at the bottom of the page. Just copy the code to your computer (Ctrl V), then paste (Ctrl P) it in a text widget in your sidebar. Once you save it, the house ad will appear almost automatically. When an ad is bought for that space (or if an ad is running sitewide), then THAT ad will run, and start earning money fpr you.

How do I advertise?

It’s simple. You log in with your username and password. If you want to place an ad that runs across the entire TellPeoria network, click on “Buy run of network ads” link in the left sidebar under “Advertiser features.”

You will be asked to name your ad campaign and to pick the type and size of the ad. You will be able to select certain criteria you are looking for in publishers. My advice is to stick to the default selections. In the future, we will have enough ad publishers to let users get a little more picky.

Once you are done, select “Next step: Set budget” button in the lower right hand corner. You can set the total budget for your ad campaign, you can set the maximum you want to spend per day This helps stop your ad from running out of money before the month is out. You can set a maximum cost per click. I recommend you do not set it higher than 75 cents.

Then click on “create ad.”

If you are buying a text ad, the next screen will allow you to enter a headline, a description, the URL of the Web site visitors can click (your business’s Web address).You can also enter the name of the site you are sending visitors (Your business name).

if you are buying an image ad (also called a “banner” ad), you will enter the destination URL address (your business Web site) and the name of the destination Web site (more often than not, the name of your business). You will need to select the date on which you want the ad to run. Then upload the image ad you have already created using PaintShop, MS Paint, PhotoShop of some image editing software. The size of the ad MUST be the exact size you selected previously. Once you have uploaded the image, you will see a preview. Don’t be fooled by the headline telling you to upload an image again. If you see the image in the preview, you have been successful.

Click on “next step.”

You will now be at your basket, where you will be able to actually pay for the ads you just bought. If you are also a publisher, you might have money in your account with us and you can pay using your current balance. If you are a new customer, you will have to click on the link that says “Pay using PayPal Gateway.”

You DO NOT have to have a PayPal account to pay us.

The PayPal Gateway allows you to pay with a credit card. You also can send us a check or even pay cash in person, and then we will credit your account manually, then you can log in using your username and password again and click on the “View Cart” tab in the upper left hand corner.

Bear in mind, if you run an ad across all sites, it will run in any site that runs that size ad, and your account will be charged the rate determined by the site publisher.

How do I advertise on SPECIFIC sites?

This works almost identically to the above section. Simply click onthe “browse ads” tab at the top of the page. You will see ALL the sites that publishers have registered with us. Look at the information the site owners have submitted. Each entry includes the ad formats and the rates the publisher charges. If for some reason you have selected a site and the ad does not appear, contact us. It’s most likely that you are not being charged and the ad code is just missing from that site.

What kind of ads should I buy and sell?

That’s a very complicated question. That’s why we created a special page devoted to answering this question.

Should your publish your own ads on your own site?

No. Say you buy $100 worth of ads and publish them only on your site. You- would get roughly $75 in revenue. $25 of that goes to TellPeoria in commission. You should just paste the ad directly onto your site yourself using a widget and it costs you nothing. We do recommend running run-of-network ads, even if some of those impressions will show up on your site. Only a small percentage of those impressions will be on your site.