Shaun posted fantastic response to Lois yesterday on a way to drive traffic to GCU and/or to our own Store without solely using a Widget.
The idea is to make an "ad" of your own, sized and worded appropriately for a website you may have "influence over" (church, school, local organization, friends), and embed the GCU email link, to, in effect, make a clickable banner ad.
You can develop a whole series of these Ads over time and place them on various websites, in blogs, and you can even pay to have these placed on high traffic sites (some charge very little). You could also seek out a niche, like quilting, where you could make a series of quilting related cards, place your clickable Ad on a Quilting website made from one of these card images , and generate possibly a lot of sales (no one else is making quilting cards!). That's just one example.
The best part of these clickable ads is you are rewarded by any sales the buyer makes at GCU on that visit, and likely they will return to buy more down the road.
Here's Shaun's post:
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For security reasons LiveJournal does not allow JavaScript or Flash to be embedded on their pages. So unfortunately there's no way to post your widget on a LiveJournal page at this time.
One thing that you can do is use a banner and link it to your store using the promotional link on your card widget page. To get this link, visit the Card Widget page and click the tab titled "Get HTML". Scroll down to locate the Promotional Email Link.
This specific link functions just like the widget links. You'll receive a seller commission for any cards purchased through this link.
You can link your banners to your GCU store using the promotional link, and the html should look something like this:
<a href="http://www.greetingcarduniverse.com/community/store.asp?store_id=567&gcu=41454536697">
<img src="
http://www.yourpage.com/yourimage.gif" border=0></a>
You'll want to replace
http://www.yourpage.com/yourimage.gif with your banner's URL.
Please let me know if you have any questions about any of this.
Shaun
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I then tried this and here is my TEST image:
http://www.fearlessthinkers.com/ads.html I know I can quickly make a series of cards catering to various "Vintage" groups, like Antiquers, memorabilia collectors, car groups, and place ads in related websites and blogs to have them click over to GCU.
I think we all need to become a part of the GCU marketing machine if we can, plus it can be fun and rewarding to see your own banner ads out there displaying your Art.
Cheers ..... TOM
ps: you will need to post your ad-image out on a server so that it has a URL (address). There are various free sites where this can be set up. At some point GCU could consider generating a variety of these custom clickable ads based on artist selected images from our galleries, like they have done for us with the widgets, and provide a GCU image URL.
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