About 6 years ago I added my first advertisement on my blog with some prodding from my wife. I first looked at what Microsoft was offering, and came up with little ideas. Ironically it was my wife who made me realize how much time I was spending of valuable personal and family time with little return that she could use on groceries or money that I could use to finance community trips and SharePoint events. Then I looked at what others were doing with Google and was turned off pretty fast with all of the junk ads, especially those that were essentially dissing the product that I was trying to promote community around. Amazon has had a decent offering, but it's a closed market with amazon products and while serving up products from the amazon catalog, it's still limiting. I felt there was more that could be done. SharePoint Ads was the first to bring SharePoint targeted advertising in a good way. I've had a pretty good experience with it, but have seen more could be done. Over the years I've build a network of vendors who have helped me and close connections sponsor events such as the popular Sharing The Point community building organization.
Adam Preston and Bonnie Surma have real passion about community and the ad space. I've been working with Bonnie with a number of vendors in the advertising space for more specific targeted advertising on my blog and with NothingButSharePoint with premium placement. She's done an excellent job of managing relationships and helping vendors deliver "Go to Market" strategies through my blogging services from targeted advertisements, product reviews, and paid announcements. We work with a number of companies now in a professional way with master services agreements and continue to have excellent repeat business. Our customers have been very happy. Adam has been very involved in market research both in SQL and in the developer space. He approached the two of us about leveraging our connections and networks and the plan was born. In our discussions, the three of us decided there was a service to be built here that could provide both a network for bloggers and provide more of the go to market flexibility that vendors are looking for in their targeted awareness promotions and advertising needs with flexibility and genuine customer service that would ensure quality.
We wanted to make sure we could provide a service that was different. We decided our key tenants would be based on customer service, performance, and both narrow and broad markets based on what was needed by the vendor. Bloggers care about the speed at which their pages render, and vendors care that the message is being delivered and they have the ability to hit the audience they care about most whether that be SharePoint, SQL, or Powershell, and audiences from IT, Developer or Business decision makers. With our personal experience of what ads work, we could help provide feedback that would produce results.
Personally I've found that monetizing your passion isn't a bad thing. There's a WIN/WIN/WIN here. The vendors in our community are part of the solution, and TechAdsNetwork is built to help bridge the gaps that exist in our community in helping to educate IT, business decision makers and influencers. The market is going to continue to grow. I challenge you to look around at the SPC12 exhibit hall, it's huge. There are a lot of vendors, trainers, and solution integrators and your ability to become knowledgeable about their services may start with a simple line of promoted text or ad. Don't get me wrong, there is overdoing it, and we don't want used car salesman in 
our space, but we do need to get the right balance of awareness that brings the right customer to the right solution and that's our goal.
I'm excited to announce that the TechAdsNetwork will be launching at the SharePoint Conference #SPC12 in less than a week. We will be accepting bloggers and websites that are interested in showing premium ads. As well, we will be running a special promotion for advertising partners that are looking to bring awareness to their product or service. We welcome users who are displaying ads already, we won't ask you to change or modify what you're doing… just ask that you give us a shot. Feel free to determine the placement that works best. During this promotional time during the evaluation phase we will be providing Breast Cancer Awareness ads as well as other non for profit. 10% of our profits in the first six months will go to Breast Cancer Research. Those interested in signing up to be a member of the TechAdsNetwork blogger and website network can request a packet. Partner vendors can also sign up early to get access to 50% off specials during our pilot build out phase through the SharePoint Conference and for the first couple of months of service. If you have questions about any and all of this you can contact us to get details on the full offering and promotions.
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See you at the SharePoint Conference! Swing by the booth 1137 to get additional details and discuss your needs in person 1:1, follow us on twitter @techadsnetwork or contact us today. Not at the US SPC? I'll be in Europe and Asia in the next few months.