Creating Advertisements on Steemhost.com
The advertisements on Steemhost.com represent an opportunity for members to create additional sources of revenue. This could for example be something that students who are on their summer break could market in their off hours. Steemhost does not set the price that people might charge for placing an advertisement. Facebook for example charges roughly 0.25 USD for each click (views are less naturally). A person might sell a package of 200 clicks for $50 (you can set the price to whatever is appropriate). In turn the price that you offer as a reward to click on an advertisement is also at your discretion. You might offer 0.05 USD as the incentive to click ( a portion of which goes to the visitor doing the click but also a portion goes to the host whose profile the visitor is on). This would mean that the host placing the advertisement would retain $0.20 USD per click ($40.00 of the original $50.00).
When deciding upon the amount that the click is worth, remember that Facebook does not pay people to click on the advertisements. I described it to someone this morning over breakfast. Facebook will show people the front door, but we pay people to go in. As a host it is important that you work with your advertisers to ensure that they make the most of the eyes being delivered to them. An important exercise for becoming familiar with the process is to create a "Follow Me" advertisement. This will appear on other hosts pages so their visitors will be attracted to your site. While I have suggested a "Follow me" theme, the image that you select should represent you. Here are a couple examples which other hosts have used:
This image can be changed at anytime so I encourage you to change if occasionally if you are not drawing any interest.
Once you have decided upon the image, log into the Host Menu and go to "My Advertisements" and Click "Add New".
Name: The first field is to easily identify the advertisement making it easy for both you and hosts to find. If your target audience, is in Bangladesh ... it is logical to write this in Bengali. Likewise if your target audience is English speaking, it makes sense to write it in English. This will allow Hosts whose language is typically the target language to understand the context of the advertisement. Possibly a rule of politeness would be to use two languages ... For instance: "Steemhost.com 廣告 '/ Advertising on Steemhost.com" if there is a potential for misinterpretation. I personally try to follow this convention when I reply to people who communicate in other languages. Since I try to use a translator as much as possible, I recognise that it rarely is able to interpret what I am saying. I have that problem when I speak to people in my native tongue English. Having two languages might reduce confusion. Also maybe in some future time, my posts will be a Rosetta Stone translating some forgotten language from my gibberish.
Banner URL: This is the link to the image that you will have as an image. The optimum size is 1024 X 90 px mainly because we resize the width to that dimension. Not having 1024 as the width is not a problem unless having it will affect the quality of that image.
Landing Page URL: This is the location that people will land on when they click on the link. For instance with this illustration of an advertisement, it will land people on the previous post in this series. Too often people posting on steem do so because only because they want to make money. They forget that sometimes the message is more important than the earnings you might make. Often you might see an posting from @ned and he rejects any revenue for the post. While it might get resteemed, that posting may not be sufficiently viewed by people. Think how many of your own important posts are missed because your own followers did not care to view or resteem the post.
The Landing page URL is not limited to posts on steem. If you know a person who is interested in increasing traffic to their Youtube, Twitter, Twitch (etc) accounts ... you and I (and the rest of the hosts on steemhost) pay people to visit those pages...
Ad Value - View: I think that Facebook charges just under 0.008 USD per view. While that is less than our .01 steem price it is important that wise visitors will look for our advertisements and click on them. When I visit any website, I never actively look at the advertisements and I never click on them. When people become aware that periodically "Golden Ticket Advertisements" will occur - advertisements which give higher rewards on the click value, I expect that greater engagement will occur.
Ad Value - Click: As a point of reference Facebook charges 0.25 USD. Currently we are working with a lowest limit of about 0.01 steem. This means that a visitor will receive roughly a 0.0033 reward (remember in steem power delegation). As the price of steem rises or falls the minimum suggested will also rise and fall. I can see though the sometimes a host will offer a "Golden Ticket" advertisement offering a high reward for a limited number of visitors.
Click on Save to continue
Once an advertisement has been added, additional features are available. As the person representing the advertiser, you might have a situation that you have solicited the advertisements with the expectation that it will only appear on your site. For instance there is a senior's center in my town who periodically sell advertising for local businesses. They print out pamphlets and trip itinerary for their members and put their advertisements on the printed copies. Unless you have grown up in a small town, you probably are unaware how important it is for people to put birth announcements, graduations, the results of tournaments (card game not jousting) into local papers. People no longer buy newspapers to the same extent as they did before ... opening up the opportunity for sites like steemhost.com to become the new local media. It also opens up the opportunity for people of all ages to post local news content onto steem ... and to increase potential earnings for the people involved via local advertising.
If an advertisement is marked off as "Host Specific" it will only be offered to those hosts mentioned on the Selected Hosts tab. If it is not marked off, the advertisement is available to those people you may add to the Selected Hosts tab but also the other criteria you may supply.
In this illustration, I have added myself to be eligible for the advertisement. If I make it host specific, only this host will receive these advertisements. If I do not make it host specific, the advertisement will be offered to the hosts on this tab but also to those meeting the criteria on the other tabs "Location" "and Subject Areas".
Advertisement payments transfer a balance from your profile to @steemhost01. In the process it creates a memo and reference number that you can use to track your payments. From a personal standpoint, it is important to keep a record of all of these transactions ... because they can be used as an expense to reduce taxable income. A future enhancement will allow you to record the the exchange rate and your currency and a report listing all of your payments. While I no longer consider myself qualified to give financial advice in Canada (too old, don't care), and I definitely cannot comment on other countries. However there is an organization https://www.ifrs.org/ which issues global standards. I have no idea how steem will be handled in the future, but the report that will be on the site will go a long way in establishing expense which you would be able to use to reduce your taxable income. For the present I would suggest that you record in the memo the current price in your national currency.
(Add current price in the memo)
(Always insure the address is steemconnect)
(Steemconnect process the transaction)
While the transaction has been processed on steemconnect, the confirmation is not always instantaneous. However after a short period of time you will see that the transaction will appear as approved on steemhost.
