Dear Bloggers,

I am thrilled to announce the First International Jewish Bloggers Convention – Hosted by Nefesh B’Nefesh, and Powered by WebAds.

The theme of the convention is “Taking JBlogging to the Next Level”.

This convention will be a great opportunity to meet other Jewish bloggers from all around the world, to network, to learn, and just have fun.

There will be panel discussions with leading Jewish bloggers from around the world on issues such as how to be a more influential blogger, how to increase your traffic, and blogging on issues related to Israel and Aliyah.

The keynote speaker will be Zavi Apfelbaum, Director - Brand Management Team, Foreign Ministry of the State of Israel.

Zavi is in charge of a new initiative by the Government of Israel, to promote pro-Israel branding and PR on the Internet, particularly in interactive forums such as blogs.

Among the bloggers on the various panels will be Treppenwitz, Jewlicious, Hirhurim, My Shrapnel, and others (see the website for all the name).

Also offering a special guest performance, direct from America, and right off the special Nefesh B'Nefesh Blogger flight, will be the comedy of FrumSatire.

As it’s a convention (of Jews), there will also be great food.

The convention will be on Wednesday, August 20^th from 5pm to 9pm (Israel time) in Jerusalem.

Space is limited and registration is required, you can register to attend in person, or watch it all by webcam and forum.

Registration is at the following URL:

http://jump2.webadsisrael.com/?WebAds.NBN.JBlogger.Convention

This promises to be an exciting event and we look forward to seeing you all there.

If you have any questions, just email me.

And please, feel free to forward this to other Jewish bloggers who may be interested in attending.

How To Use Your Data - Out of the Box

We have a client who always asks us to break down the geographic data from her campaigns in very different ways.

I happened to ask her why she always wants it that way.

She said that besides all the great leads we supply here, the geographic information supplies here with even more.

From the reports, she learns which communities are interested in her projects. She learns of new neighborhoods of potential buyers. She discovers the relative sizes of the different communities in terms of numbers of potential buyers. She identifies which neighborhoods expressed more interest in terms of relative size.

And what does she do with all that?

She goes out on road shows all the time to the different neighborhoods and communities based on the data we supply her.

Now that’s smart thinking.

A letter from an Advertiser

We received the following letter from one of our advertisers in the "Jewish" community niche. He asked that we send it out to all the publishers who participated in his campaign.

An Open Letter to the Jewish Community of Bloggers,

On behalf of the 2,500 Warm the Needy families, I thank you for your generous and invaluable support. As you may know, this winter has been the coldest Israel has seen in thirty years. Twice, Jerusalem was blanketed with snow. A record number of cold-related deaths were reported. This made our efforts ever so important.

Thanks in significant part to you, Warm the Needy was able to distribute over six hundred heaters this winter as well as assist over 1,500 families with their electric bills.

We could not have possibly done so without your help.

As a grassroots organization, we do everything we can to ensure that 100% of every dollar is spent solely on actual aid work. There are no paid employees but a team of dedicated volunteers who work day and night for the cause.

In partnership with the Israel Electric Corp., we have developed and maintain a sophisticated system spanning the entire country. We continue to work hand in hand with several major aid organizations across Israel battling the severe poverty now affecting over 1,678,000 Israeli classified as living below the poverty line. Our activists are spread throughout the country and ensure every family is dealt with professionally and in a self-respecting manner.

With the winter coming to a close we look back at what we have achieved. Simply stated, through your assistance, we did a tremendous amount.

I wanted to personally thank you all for for your contributions, for your assistance, for your connections, for your kind remarks, and even for just taking an interest.

Best wishes for a healthy and warm winter,

Hershel Puretz
Founder, Warm the Needy

Shana Tova

Everyone at WebAds wants to wish all our Publishers, Advertisers, Partners, and Friends a Shanah Tova - Happy New Year.

Adding WebAds code to MSN Space.

Difficult. It’s the only word to describe it. It’s a bit of work to add WebAds code to your MSN Space site. Furthermore it appears that you can add it to you frontpage site, but not into the blog itself.

Here it goes...

1. Log into you MSN Space and Edit your Space.
2. In another window go to:
http://gallery.live.com/LiveItemDetail.aspx?li=84a3d485-a787-4bf9-93ad-c699b02288f2&l=1
(It make take time to open).
3. Click on Add it to your space on the HTML Sandbox tool page.
4. Go back to your Space and click on Customize
5. Under Modules -> Gadgets you’ll find something called Sandbox – Add it.
6. In the Sandbox module (box) that opens click on Edit HTML

7. At this point the best thing to do is ask us to send you the code segment directly for your site.

If you want to do it yourself, log in to you WebAds account, generate the code for an IFRAME HTML Banner Code, and then extract the second half between <iframe> and </iframe>.
But it is easier for us to simply supply you with the code.

8. Click on Save under the Sandbox. And save your Spaces configuration if you need to.
9. Click on Exit Edit Mode, and you’re done.

Whew.

You can see what it might look like here

Formatting your Flash Banner

When we receive a Flash Banner for an advertisement it needs to conform to
certain parameters.

The sites in the WebAds network display banners in two sizes 160x400 (sidebar) and 468x60 (fullbanner). Second we try to have the banners stay below 25k, otherwise it starts to demand to much extra bandwidth which may not be available to the visitors. And we don't allow automatic sound (but you can put sound in if it requires a click to start it) because that is simply annoying.

On the technical side, the Flash should be saved as Flash 6 (not Flash 7, 8 or MX).

Do not embed a URL inside the flash, but most important is this: we need the following code in order to properly track the clicks on the banner. It has to be in every frame, otherwise we're just showing ads with zero feedback as to how effective they are.

The code is as follows:

on (release) {
if (clickTAG.substr(0,5) == "http:") {
getURL(clickTAG, "_top");
}
}

It should be created as a button the same size the banner and inserted into every frame.

Very simple, but it helps maximize the effectiveness of the advertisers campaign.

Positioning your ad

The question has come up, "How do you more accurately control the positioning of the Web Ad on the page?".

There are two parts to that answer. The first is straightforward, you simply insert the WebAds code into the place in the HTML code where you want it to appear next.

This is good in a limited sense, but sometimes you want to do more. You might want to nudge the ad a little right, or have it positioned in the top-right corner of the page.

At that point you need to add some inline CSS code (nothing difficult):

<div id="webadsbannercode" style="TEXT-ALIGN: left; POSITION: absolute; RIGHT: 3px; TOP: 4px; ">

By changing 4px or the 3px in the example above you can control the absolute positioning of the ad from the right or from the top. You can use LEFT:3px instead of RIGHT:3px if you want it positioned from the left. Piece of cake.

Where does it go within the WebAds code?

The above line of code goes right at the beginning of the code:

<!-- BEGIN WebAds.co.il CODE BLOCK -->
<div id="webadsbannercode" style="TEXT-ALIGN: left; POSITION: absolute; RIGHT: 3px; TOP: 4px; ">

And you mustn't forget to add in </div> right before the end of the code block.

</div>
<!-- END WebAds.co.il CODE BLOCK -->