I couldn't agree with this more.

Personally, I hate VOIP and Skype and all that communication over IP nonsense. When I speak to someone I like to have a telephone in my hand and have my call on a good old fashioned telephone line or a new fashioned cell tower. Plus, I am so much funnier realtime than with a few second delay using VOIP. Adsymetrix is powered by real telephone lines for real business. Check out this posting to get some other opinions on how lame VOIP calls can be.

Under two weeks until the big beta launch and things are really heating up around here and the poor developers are working their fingers to the bone.

More to come....

Three ways to track advertising

Three Easy Ways to Track Advertising
from yahoo small business

An article highlighted by Yahoo's Small Business news site points to a few ways that advertisers can track the effectiveness of their ads. If only there was some way to do all this tracking automatically...

You could really kick some ads that way.

AdsKicking

What you want most from your advertising is to get the people who are in need of your product to decide to use you to provide that product. The least you want from your advertising is for it not to make you or your company look worse than if you hadn't bought any advertising at all.

We're here to help with that. There's no sense - no business sense anyway - in shouting from a street corner about your business if no one who needs your business ever crosses that road. AdSymetrix will help you refine your targeted advertising buys and help you make the best decisions you possibly can about how and where to spend your advertising dollars.

When you sign up and register your advertising placements and campaign, you'll be able to track just who and how people are finding your ads. You'll be able to learn what locations, approaches and techniques work best for your business, and you'll be able to kick those bad ads to the curb.

Don't take my word for it.

The trouble with advertising isn't necessarily that it doesn't always work. The problem is identifying what works for you and your budget and your personal results. Someone you know may have had great success, or think they have, advertising in one place or the other. But, unfortunately what is good for the goose isn't always good for gander. You will be able to watch your own realtime results for all your advertising as it happens. Check out this AllBusiness blog entry about advertising in newspapers.

Article from WSJ on effective online marketing

Martketers Give Email Another Look
from wall street journal
some assembly required

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article in today's edition about the ways that email is being redesigned to become more effective for marketers. Firms like IBM are using Heatmapping to track the way a reader's eyes move across the screen. The hope is that a style guide can be created that would allow designers to build more effective email messages and drive more sales.

Check out the article if you get a chance

Alpha Beta Gamma

We've got multiple tracks working on AdSymetrix. Biego hs developed a template for the site that will work with their customized version of Joomla! to manage the content that shows up on the page. They're are also working on the actual application you'll use to track all your Advertising real-world and online. You've heard a bit about that work, now you should know a bit about the other projects on the table.

Rick is working out the plan for introducing AdSymetrix to organizations. Business groups and the like. We believe that by allowing members of these groups to track their ads, they'll be able to make better decisions and more targeted ad buys.

I'm working on the content that will show up on our front page. We want to make sure that AdSymetrix is as simply explained as possible. Think about how the simplicity of Google changed the way people used search engines. One single form entry and a world of knowledge. AdSymetrix should be as easily explained.

With all that, we've got a launch date of our beta planned. August 7, 2006. Make sure you visit our site and sign up for the grand announcement.

How it Looks

We've got a few weeks left before we launch, and things are going surprisingly well. Our templates have been designed (and are being refined) for the content management system and the application is pulling together. We should be set soon to show you some of the things AdSymetrix will do for your business.

And that's where I'm headed now, to develop the content that shows exactly how we work and how it will help your business.

We love small businesses.

At Adsymetrix we love small businesses and hope to greatly assist small businesses to learn more about how to plan, track, adjust and maximize their advertising plans. To that end here are some links that small and medium sized businesses may find useful.

I really like this simple CRM tool
Check out one of Metrofi's seminars for small business. Info is available at zvents.com
I was pretty impressed with TextLinkAds today and placed four ads for $139 after my $100 coupon. I will let you know the upshot of this test.

AdBrite is pretty great as well if you are looking for a way to try different types of online advertising in different forms. You have the option of text ads or an interstitial. I prefer the less obtrusive interstitial. But decide for yourself and use AdSymetrix to track the results. In fact, you can use Adsymetrix to simply compare a different types of advertising against each other and see where the most bang for your buck is.

On the free side there is always Craigslist which is a great way to sell things like cars and houses or to rent an apartment. Maybe you wonder how your free Craigslist ad compares against paid advertising? Use Adsymetrix to find out.

The great news about Adsymetrix is we are an impartial third party that you can use to track all of your advertising, whether it is online, offline, print, radio, banners, emails, billboards, direct mail, tradeshows, you name it and you can track it in 30 days from today.

CMS, CSS and AdSymetrix

AdSymetrix will use Joomla! for our content management software. Use of a CMS system will allow us loads of flexibility in the way we present the products we're developing.

Content Management Systems separate the presentation of information from the information itself. This means that we'll have a set template for the structure of the site. You'll visit and see the navigation, login and identity in the same consistent locations, with all the information you're looking for specific to the page you're viewing.

Molly at Biego is refining our template design currently. Making sure that when you visit, you're presented with an intuitive website that makes it easy to get the information you want and use the AdSymetrix application. She's doing this with the help of the CMS and the use of Cascading Style Sheets.

Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, allow for greater control of the colors, fonts and images that show up in a web page. You can make one change in one file on a server and have every page inside the site reflect that change. It's powerful stuff. And of course we'll be using it.

The key now is figuring out just what goes into the CMS grinder. The task at hand is to develop a map for the copy holes in the site. Understand the best way to tell our story and to drive the website's visitor into becoming a customer.

Our plan is to keep things simple. We believe that it's more important to get the information than learning how to get the information you want. To that end,we'll use graphics, short text passages and examples to show how our system works. We believe that this strategy will act as an extension of our brand strategy in keeping the entire process simple.

Because you need to run your business far more than you need to learn how to run ours.