For most bloggers, one of the goals is to increase traffic, but how can you do this with fairly minimal effort..

As usual, I have been thinking about ways to increase traffic, more specifically, increasing traffic to new sites and have even been contemplating developing something myself to aid this. While doing research for this, I came across another service that may help to gain readers.

Agridwork is a new service that you can use to advertise your site on other sites; what’s more, it is completely free.

So what is Agridwork?

Essentially, it is a free online advertising network. What it advertises though are Websites and more specifically member’s Websites. I’ll let the founders explain it themselves.

“adgridwork was conceived back in November 2006, after we realized that there was no simple, free and effective way of quickly promoting a website. At the time, advertising options were limited to paying for banner ads or text links, using a contextual service (like adSense), or manually contacting and trading links with other webmasters. Thus, we decided to create a free, open advertising network and allow bloggers, small businesses and other website owners to submit their ads into our ad network. In exchange for serving their ads on thousands of highly targeted and related sites, we would require that they in turn serve ads for other users. The end result would be a giant community of websites that would all help one another promote and market their products, ideas and service for free!”

Adgridwork uses contextual advertising to distribute ads for your Website across their ad network. What this means is that your site will be advertised only on contextually relevant sites, which should help increase targeted traffic. As I have only just signed up for the service, I cannot gauge how effectively its contextual system works at this stage, that will have to be evaluated in a follow up post.

Joining Adgridwork

Signing up is easy, although there is a little annoying survey to take to begin with. They have to cover their costs somehow, so this is not a major problem, as you get a free service out of it.

You simply sign up for the service, enter your site details, select a category, add some keywords and select an ad size you want to appear on your site. You can even select specific sites to exclude from appearing in the ad unit of your site.

Finally, you add the site code to your Website and your in business.

Once you have added the code to your site, you will see ads for other sites appearing in the adspace. Now, don’t be too stingy here, as the frequency your site will appear on other sites is determined by the number of clicks the ads on your site receive.

Site Metrics

All this is great, but if you can’t see how the stats, you would be flying blind. Adgridwork has this covered as well. The metrics are simple and straightforward and start working straight away. You do not have to wait 24 hours to see your stats. You begin serving ads as soon as the code is on your site. Likewise, your site ad appears just as quickly on other members Websites.

Other positives include a very nice site design which is very user friendly. To date Adgridwork has served over 110,767,271 impressions across 44,643,053 page views. The network currently consists of 9,145 unique websites and is growing daily. As long as this growth continues, I think this could be a very useful addition to any site, especially anyone starting out.