Hopefully you've all been enjoying our expanded book coverage, which is being written by children's librarian (and my BFF from summer camp) Alli Decker. We have just added a new member to the Ypulse team, and his name is Phil Ardizzone. Phil will be helping us with site advertising and event sponsorship sales.

To put Phil in context, here's a bit of Ypulse history: When I started the blog I handled all of my own advertising -- this meant people emailed me who were interested, I researched and came up with rates I thought were fair and did all of the contracts and invoicing myself. I tried signing on with the kind folks at AdRants and Marketing VOX to be a part of their collective sales efforts, but I found that the ads they were selling and posting on Ypulse were not youth media or marketing related, so I went back to doing it myself.

Over time I had people say, you should work with Federated or another big ad network, but here's the thing: Ypulse is a niche blog, similar in audience to a trade publication. Most ad networks sell to big sponsors based on collective traffic or end up just selling for blogs that have the most traffic. Ypulse will never have the traffic of Boing Boing or Engadget, but we continue to have a growing community of media and marketing execs interested in reaching youth. If you haven't, you can download our new media kit online (.pdf) -- it has our latest stats (though the newsletter just passed 2600 subs) and results from our reader survey.

When I partnered with Modern Media, Charles Pelton took over the advertising relationships and conference sponsorships. What's funny about Charles is that he never really did sales until this partnership (though he has proven to be pretty good at it) -- he was always on the editorial side of the media business. After several months and going on three Mashups, we decided to hire an experienced salesperson to help us grow -- Phil Ardizzone. More about Phil:

Phil has been involved in events and media for over 25 years and started Bedrock Consulting in 1998. Bedrock Consulting has helped numerous event and media companies successfully outsource their sales and marketing needs. His clients have included large Fortune 100 companies like Microsoft, and CA, and event organizers and media companies like Miller Freeman, VNU Expo, Hannover Fairs USA, Jack Morton Worldwide, Adweek, CMP Media, Reed Exhibitions, Imark Communications, and Exhibitor Publications.

Phil enjoys living and working in NYC with his wife, Barri, and 14-pound Maine Coon cat, Paisley, playing golf, entertaining family and friends, watching sports, keeping up with current events, and traveling domestically and abroad.

Personally, I'm a little worried about his cat -- is 14 pounds too heavy? If you are interested in advertising on Ypulse or sponsoring an upcoming Mashup get in touch with Phil at Ypulse.com.

Posted by anastasia