Empire Avenue comments on Advertisements
I didn't think I would write on my blog about Empire Avenue, but here it is. My first second post related to it and a little tip about advertisments in EA.
If you've followed any of my tweets in the past couple of months, you might have heard of Empire Avenue. A new cool social network that attempts to measure your influence in Social Media. When you join Empire Avenue you join the ranks of the influencers. Whether you influence hundreds of people with your voice, like Adriel Hampton or Brittney Le Blanc, or whether your circle of influence is smaller, you should join Empire Avenue. I won't tell you a whole lot about it on this post because many others have already written about it and done a much better job, but I'll tell you the basics.
The Basic of EA
You join empire Avenue, and then you get a ticker symbol. Much like a corporation gets a ticker when they become a member of NASDAQ or another stock exchange. For example, Google's NASDAQ ticker is GOOG; Apple's is AAPL. In Empire Avenue, you pick your own ticker and if it hasn't been selected by someone else, then its yours. I, very appropriately picked OG; short and sweet and all me. Other people join EA as a company and thus pick a ticker accordingly. When you select your ticker, give it a little bit of thought because although you can change it, it will set you back 1000 credits.
After you have your ticker you can then be traded by the other influencers and you can start trading them as well. This is where it gets fun. Plug in your blog, your twitter and your FaceBook feed to Empire Avenue, then continue to tweet, blog, engage and participate in the communities you already are part of and you'll see your ticker rise. Drop off your normal social media outlets and you'll see the ticker take a dip. Simple math really. The cool thing about it is that you don't have to be active in Empire Avenue to have a decent stock price. My friends Mia (MIA), and Shelby (DENIKE) are witness to that; they hardly go into EA but their stock remains at a great price and continues to rise slowly.
Advertisments
This is about advertisements within Empire Avenue. I thought there were a little bit confusing. Hopefully it helps out, Brooke, Mia, Ursula, and others that might be in the same boat as I was.
When you become an influencer in Empire Avenue, you have the chance to advertise anything you want on the site. Your ad will appear in different places depending on what page people are looking at and you get to say whatever you want in 140 characters; very twitter-like. You buy advertising spots with EA credits, which you earn daily. Activity online, earnings from stock you own and achievements get you new EA credits. The ads show up on pages in blocks of two and look like this.
Some people advertise about their stock ticker, some push their blog or twitter. Other people try to get you to buy other people's stock (crazy I know). So the content is up to you, make it clever and catchy and you could attract a lot of buyers. Advertising is cheap in the grand scheme of things so don't be afraid to try it after you've gotten your account all configured and ready to go. I wouldn't do advertisements until you've got a week or so of activity going on so that there's something for people to look when they want to decide if they should buy you or not. Buying an ad when you haven't prepped your account is the equivalent of putting one of those under construction animated gifs on your website. Don't do it.
Initially you can have one active advertisement. If you so choose, you can buy another spot for 1995 credits and have two active advertisements at any given time. You pay per page views and the dashboard reports on how many pageviews you have remaining and how many clicks your ads have generated. Remember I told you you could advertise anything you want? Hint, Hint. Anyway, the thing that caught me was that you can archive the ad you currently have running so you can start up a new one. Maybe you're not getting the results you want and you want to re-do it. Use the archive feature, then the ad will get archived and you can start up a new one.
Note that if you haven't used up all your credits for that ad, the remaining credit is put back into your bank account when you archive it. This is simple and brilliant, rather than trying to keep tabs on how many remaining pageviews you've got on each archived ad, or anything else, the ad is for all intents and purposes cancelled and and remaining credits is just put back into your account. There is no clear indication of this happening unless you're paying attention to your bank balance but it happens. At first I thought we would just forfeit the remaining credit, but this is not the case, see the screenshots below.
Advertise your blog, your ticker, your twitter or your cause, and rest assured that you'll get some return on your virtual investment. And why not? its free to play for now. I think I might buy my second slot of advertising later this week. We'll see how things go. I hope you found this post useful. Shout back in the comments if you want to comment or have a question.
