Friday Archive Dive: Breaking the Q1 Slump

Today's Archive Dive is from Jan. 25, 2013, when I wrote some advice on breaking the First Quarter slump that many of us who rely on advertising revenue experience this time of year.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, ad revenue tends to plummet in the first part of the year. Most businesses are reassessing their budgets in the first quarter, and most of them habitually cut back on spending until those budgets are cleared. It's especially noticeable coming after November and December, when ad budgets are ablaze with holiday-shopping promotion. It's a steep drop that puts me into an annual panic.

And right around now, you're probably getting "helpful advice" from your ad networks, like this...

"Some ways to maximize your Q1 results is to lower your AskPrice to increase demand for your inventory and to increase your reach by removing any advertiser blocks you have implemented in order to capture spend from a wider pool of buyers."

That, of course, is bad advice...

 Read the entire post and comment there.

Eisner Awards - Call for Entries

It's time to nominate work for the Eisners again!

Google's New Ad Policy

As you may have heard on sites such as Gizmodo, Google's new Terms of Service goes into effect today:

If you have a Google Account, we may display your Profile name, Profile photo, and actions you take on Google or on third-party applications connected to your Google Account (such as +1’s, reviews you write and comments you post) in our Services, including displaying in ads and other commercial contexts. We will respect the choices you make to limit sharing or visibility settings in your Google Account. For example, you can choose your settings so your name and photo do not appear in an ad.

First Hot Seat of the new year!

It's time to get back into the Hot Seat critiques. Let's start of with a popular one: The Hitch It / Ditch It. I'll go to your site and list one thing I think you're doing great and one thing I think could stand some improvement. Then I'll open up the conversation to the group at large.

Starting the new year off right

Today's post was generously submitted by Julie Faulkner.

Welcome to 2014!

The New Year and that clean-slate feeling make it so easy to just get excited about your own potential! So we make our resolutions, some we keep and some we let go, but there’s always that moment of infinite possibility!

The trick is turning possibility in to probability.

Challenging goals are ideal, but they still need to be realistic. Objectives that are too easy become boring and lose your interest and commitment over time but goals that are so difficult that they are unattainable are just as discouraging. There are likely as many strategies for achieving your ambitions as there are ambitions themselves, but I’d like to share some of the ones that I’ve had some success with by mingling them together, starting with writing out a great big, blanket, vision statement. Some people prefer to do a vision board; a collage of images they associate with their resolutions but personally, I find that a little too vague. Great, I have a picture of a sandy beach to make me think about that vacation I want to take, but it’s not helping me make that vacation happen.