pMetrics now has IP tagging and the ability to track any custom data you want

IP tagging is here and is available to all premium users. You can add a name to any IP address and those visitors will be identified by that name instead of their IP address when you are viewing your visitor and session log. If you click their name, it will show more details (including their IP) and all visits from that visitor, as it has before. Here is a screenshot. – notice the ‘username’ at the top!

Currently, it is still grouping this data by the current IP instead of their “user name”. The plan is to test out grouping it by that user’s name instead, but the performance may be poor. I’ll keep you updated.

To start using this feature, click the new ‘IPs’ link from your user homepage. This has replaced the old ‘IP Ignore’ link, and instead those two features have been combined. Meaning, when you add an IP to your site, there is a checkbox indicating whether or not you want to ignore the IP address or just name it.

A related but much more important announcement is you can now track an unlimited amount of CUSTOM data on a per session basis. User names, cookie values, session ids, shopping cart ids, ad campaigns… you get the idea. Anything you want associated with a visitor, can now be logged to pMetrics. This data will be shown to you when you view the details of a session (as indicated in the screenshot from above, which is actually just a simplified version of this more advanced full data tracking). We have been testing this on pMetrics since earlier today, you can see the results here.

There is a lot more information here, including how it works and code examples.

We are open to your suggestions on how to improve it. We considered doing this on a per ACTION level as well, in fact it is already designed to be flexible enough to add that in easily, but there is definitely some concern with data storage if we were tracking that much additional data on your visitors. If there is a demand for such a feature, we may decide to implement it.

Note that full custom data tracking is PRO only. (Our upper end premium package). Interested in upgrading? You can do so here!

A Real Alternative To AdSense

As many of you know, at the end of last month, I suddenly found my best performing site banned from AdSense. Any attempts by people in my company to reason with the AdSense representative “Scott” proved completely futile. We came out far more confused then we had gone in.

Finally, we just gave up trying to appease Google. We started on an adventure to find a real alternative to AdSense, and finally, a month later, we’ve actually found it. I can’t promise that this will work for every site out there, and I plan to test this solution on other sites in the future, but for now, I’ll share this bit of good news that I have discovered.

Basically, we’re now matching previous AdSense revenue with a combination of alternative ad partners. Next month, we think that we will significantly surpass AdSense revenues.

So what combination of ad partners are we using? Here they are:

New Partners

1. AdBrite
2. Kontera ContextLinks
3. AuctionAds

Old Partners

4. BlogAds
5. TextLinkAds

Of the three new partners, AdBrite and Kontera make the largest, most consistent amount. Together, they are just about at the daily level that AdSense had been at when I got the boot. The cool thing is that, unlike with AdSense, I have the distinct feeling that both Kontera and AdBrite are taking intentional, manual (human!!!) steps to help optimize my performance, serve better ads, and improve my eCPM. It feels good, for once, to have the sense that your ad publisher is on your side!

I haven’t really been able to completely figure out AuctionAds, and it surely isn’t consistent, but it is bringing in some money, with occasional surges. We’ll let it run for about 2 more months and see if we can figure the system out, tweak it, and hopefully make it competitive with Kontera and AdBrite. It would be fantastic to have a tripartite revenue backbone, so that if any one member went down, I’d be losing less than 1/3 of my revenue.

The great thing about the Kontera, AdBrite, AuctionAds system is that each ad network compliments the other. Kontera is a link based advertisement. AdBrite is your typical boxed text ad. AuctionAds rotates ads from eBay. The only substantial tip I have at this point is to make sure to turn off interstitial links on AdBrite because they compete with Kontera, and Kontera has a much better payout for that type of ad.

So there you have it. I’ve found a real alternative to Google AdSense. I can’t make any guarantees, but I’m willing to bet that this model scales well enough across niches that you too could try it out and realize AdSense-competitive revenue as well. I’ll be doing some testing across some of my low-traffic sites over the next month to see how it compares to AdSense at that level. Report forthcoming.

And the great thing about this alternative is that 1) it is liberating to not depend on a single company and 2) you have much more room for expanding your ad partnerships (these three ad networks do not have the anti-competitive rule set that Google imposes).

Alternative Niche Ideas #1: Ethnic Nicheing

We’re all familiar with the oversaturated niches. Anything mainstream American is oversaturated. Cell phones, gadgets, celebrity. Anything mainstream techie is also oversaturated. SEO, PHP, web development, blogging.

Some of the oversaturated niches still have room to squeeze out decent profits. But many of you might be looking for alternative niches to explore. And rather than wrecking your brain trying to think of that one under-represented main-stream product, it might be worth thinking outside of the box a bit.

Before I move on, let me just say one thing: there’s a reason for niche oversaturation. Niches that are oversaturated have at least two things going for them. First, they have high advertiser representation. Second, they have a proven readership/client base. In other words, there is excess money being thrown around in these niches.

If you’re going to explore some alternative niches, you need to be aware that some of the value in conquering these newer niches lies in longer-term equity. Sure, there can be immediate profits, but when you explore alternative niches, you are partially betting that these niches will grow, expand, and perhaps become mainstream (along with mainstream advertisers).

One very nice way to do alternative nicheing is to identify a mainstream niche and then throw an ethnic spin on it. Think celebrity is oversaturated? Why not become a major player in the Latino Celebrity market? Having trouble breaking into the soccer/futball market? Why not do a blog on Latino futball players.

By adding an ethnic angle to any niche, you increase the level of specificity and decrease your competition. If you play your cards right, you can have a much easier time breaking into a popular sub-market for a popular niche.

How Bloggers Can Adapt To Universal Search

How Bloggers Can Adapt To Universal Search

Google’s universal search is a huge change to the organic search landscape. On May 16, Google told the world their super popular search engine would be filled with not just text based websites, but also images, videos, news, books, and maps. Yes, the search engine results pages (SERPs) like look a little different.

So, how can bloggers take advantage of these changes? How should our SEO, marketing, and traffic building efforts change?

VIDEOS

I think Youtube and other video sharing sites will be huge in the new search world. Google bought Youtube, so I’m sure they want Youtube videos to rank highly. And let’s not forget that Youtube is the fourth visited website in the world (according to Alexa).

It’s time to start testing video on our blogs. Camtasia and Cam Studio are screencast software that can help you make videos. And your webcam may prove to be a tool to help you reach the top ten of the SERPs. To really make a splash, you can shoot quality videos with a good video camera.

As an added advantage to making videos, traffic from web videos is pretty good quality. This traffic seems to convert better than other types of traffic. This means video traffic is more likely to click on an adsense ad, buy an affiliate product, or opt-in to a mailing list.

PRESS RELEASES

Another tactic to consider in light of universal search is making the news. With online press release site, it’s easy to submit press releases. As news items begin to rank higher, you’ll want to write press releases for your website and your niche.

If you have some money to spend, you can submit your press release at PRWeb. You’ll get traffic and a strong backlink. PRWeb used to be free, but now they charge $80 for a press release without anchor text and $200 with anchor text. If you don’t want to spend money, there are free press release sites like PR-inside.com.

IMAGES

Another thing to consider is the use of pictures and images. In many niches, internet users are looking for pictures. For example, I did keyword research for my wedding blog and found keyword phrases like “wedding dress pictures” and “wedding flower pictures.”

Furthermore, images are the first results on image related SERPs. You’ll get many visitors if you get one of your pictures on the front page of these searches. So, if you’re in one of these industries that love pictures, add more images to your blog with keyword-rich alt tags.

Be Careful Of Self-Deception

Gerard’s post on the AdSense dip reminded me of a topic I like to raise from time to time.

Are you guilty of positive self-deception when it comes to revenue projections? I know that I am. It’s easy to look at your best month and project that month over the entire year.

To avoid self-deception, and get a more accurate revenue projection, ask yourself these questions:

1. Have I taken into account the significant, proven, annual dips that occur (summer, Christmas through New Year’s, spring break, July 4th, Memorial Day Weekend, Labor Day Weekend)?

2. Am I being serious with myself about expenses? Or am I ignoring some expenses that help me achieve these revenue levels?

3. Is the source of these revenues stable and repeatable? Or are you the beneficiary of some short term lady luck?

…and I’ll leave it to the comments section to add to this list. So what do YOU do to keep yourself honest about revenue projections?

Nominate Your Blog For A Reboot

At the end of each week I just like to drop a short note reminding you to nominate your blog for a reboot. As you can see from this week’s reboot, Ahmed puts a lot of thought into the reboots and provides lots of suggestions that are bound to get you more visitors, ad revenue and also help make your blog more sticky.

So don’t be shy. Nominate your blog.

(PS…that’s the first link I’ve used the title attribute on in a looooooooooooooong time, cuz ya’ll convinced me.)

Big Dip In AdSense Earnings

I’ve noticed a worrying dip in AdSense revenue on my sites over the last couple of days. The eCPM has gone down noticably from about $4.60-ish to ~$2.

After reading about the massive termination of AdSense accounts, does this imply that the bidding space is less competitive and people are snapping up adverts for less?

Pardon the slight paranoia, but I just thought I’d check with others to see if they’d experienced something similar.

Link Building … thats SOO 2007

Google’s rumored (and now confirmed) purchase of FeedBurner has gotten plenty of press, but for all the wrong reasons. While everyone is weighing in as to whether the purchase is more about mindshare or monetizing RSS feeds, there has been very little said about the implications of this move on the future of SEO in general and link building specifically.

Now that this deal has gone through, Google has gained access to millions of pieces of user-data which collectively is a very reliable separate indicator of user preferences. Coupled with their SE algorithm, these RSS subscriber figures will provide Google with a set of end-user preferences which is far more comprehensive and thus difficult for SEO’s to game.

For example, if a site has a top-notch backlink footprint but less than a dozen feed subscribers it’s a certain red flag to GOOG that the site might not be as trustworthy as its backlink profile suggests.

If Google is planning on incorporating feed subscription figures and Google Toolbar browsing data to go along with with a site’s backlink footprint into SE rankings, we’re going to be looking at an entirely new and far more complex game for SEO’s and traditional “link builders”.

While this change, if it occurs at all, is still six months out, now is the time to start considering the implications of this shift and how it will affect ranking strategies. I can think of a few things we’re likely to see the day after this shift in the algo is made public:

+TLA Feeds – “Publishers rent out your RSS subscriptions”

+PayPerTraffic – “Rent regular traffic by users with active Google Toolbars”

+Accessibility becomes a more central component in SE rankings as having your site render properly in obscure browsers means more feed subscribers.

+Under the table RSS subscription rings replacing Social Media voting rings

+Every Webmaster switches their RSS feed to Feedburner

Maybe I’m just paranoid, but as I see it, those of us that make a living off of ranking well are about to have to step up our game.

Liberating Yourself From The Google Monopoly – The Times, They Are A Changin’

There’s something big happening on the neterwebs. Don’t know if you’ve noticed.

For whatever reason, Google has been taking a serious gut check. Lately, they’ve been cracking down hard on AdSense publishers from a number of angles (spammyness, mature content, etc).

Well, not “for whatever reason” – I’m sure its because they’re feeling pressure from some corner of the woods. I’m sure they feel dollars and cents and shareholders breathing down their necks.

I’m sure they notice things like the recent Real Simple article my wife showed me entitled “the digital doc” which outlines 5 rules to find good medical information online. What was Rule No. 1? Skip Google.

Ouch. I bet that hurt. The “don’t do evil” company let status quo evil reign for too long, while money poured into their bank accounts, and their search results got all facked up with spam. Now even the common person doubts Google. That’s sad.

Think about it. Google originally succeeded through grassroots word of mouth. Now their empire is on the downturn for the very same reason. I mean, thing’s can’t be good when the “Google isn’t a reliable source of information” meme gets into the mainstream. Larry and Sergey must be furious about negative PR like this.

In an effort to clean up its act, Google is taking down AdSense publishers left and right. Some of those publishers are at least mostly legit. They are trying to kill the beast they created.

The good news is that if Google executes this properly, it could ultimately help the web along with white hat publishers. I say that with multiple meanings. On the one hand, more room in the search space will hopefully open up for good content. But on the other hand, hopefully those of us who got stung by Google’s recent crack down will start to diversify out of the Google AdSense monopoly. Hopefully Yahoo will make its move into the market soon. Hopefully alongside Microsoft. Stung by Google, hopefully publishers will try out companies like AdBrite, AuctionAds, ContextLinks, Azoogle and more.

It’s in all of our best interests to stop the dependency on a single company that so many people have developed. If your livelihood depends on Google, do you have a backup plan? Have you tried out other ad systems?

Here’s a recommendation. Put a backup plan in place. Try out other ad systems. While you may not see the immediate results of AdSense, you may come to discover that with a good combination of partnerships, you can make as much or more than with AdSense.

I’m glad that my most profitable site was booted from AdSense. It forced my hand to try out other systems, and in the process to discover that my site’s were undermonetizing. Dependence on the ease of G can create artificial plateau’s on your profit.

So here’s to the collapse of the Google empire and to the success of the web. Let’s hope it happens quickly, smoothly and productively.

Blog Reboot #4: BlogoSquare.com

Site: Blogosquare
Owner: Hans

Hans says:

I would like to send BlogoSquare for a reboot session. While I have tweaked many aspects of my blog mainly in the design and SEO part, I would like to have some feedbacks on what people think that might be improved.

My main concern in blogging is whether my articles are up to the level : concise, clear,to the point and resourceful. I tried several ways to know about it, like checking constantly the number of feed subscribers but I think that the reboot might provide me with better accurate points I could apply.

In this reboot I’m going to be looking at these 3 main things:

• Blog Focus
• Monetization
• Building Traffic

Let’s get started.

Focus

In the grand scheme of things, blogosquare does a good job of ‘knowing’ its focus but not such a good job of using it to grow the site.

As part of the blog reboot, I asked Hans to run a survey on blogosquare asking his readers what they wanted to learn about blogging the most. The results aren’t in yet, but just the simple step of asking your readers what they want is quite useful if you get decent feedback – I’ve done a lot of that (asking readers for what they want) and it definitely helps you in knowing what to talk about.

But asking your audience isn’t the only (or even the best) way of knowing what to focus on.

Quite often, you can either:

• spot a under-developed sector in your niche to dominate
• learn from what your readers AREN’T saying

Under-developed niches

The idea is for you to look at your market through different perspectives.

For example, for blogosquare, I’d suggest that you use the following starting points to find what you should be focusing on:

• What do teenage bloggers predominantly write about? Why?
• What type of ‘blogging help’ do these teenage bloggers need (keeping in mind what they are writing about)? What resources can you create / recommend?
• Who’s your competition (who else is targeting teenage bloggers) and what are they doing right (and wrong)?
• What type of blogs do teenage bloggers like to read?
• How can you help teenage bloggers get ‘discovered’ by other readers?

Also, here are a few resource ideas to get you started with:

• Read this article about privacy concerns in teenage blogging (it’s 3 years old, but surprisingly relevant) and think about how you can advise bloggers on this / help them with this.
• Technical resources for blog customisation (like your theme / smilies pack, but more).
• Social bookmarking tips tailored towards teenage bloggers.
• Tips for using YouTube to promote your blog.
• Quick image editing using SnipShot, the iMaxWidth plugin, and other tools.
• Site promotion / SEO tips (starting from the basics such as proper URLs, keywords in titles, etc).

What are your readers NOT saying

What is the audience ignoring, or not looking for? Find out what it is, and why they aren’t interested. This will help you discover different segments in your audience, and you can use this information to market to them differently.

You’ll find a lot of teenage bloggers (and a lot of people getting started on blogging) who don’t have the blogging = make money online equation running in their heads. For many people, blogging is just that, writing on your online journal and taking part in a global conversation.

You can target both types of audiences – the ones interested in making money and those interested in doing more with their blogs.

You don’t need to make the ‘make money’ aspect of blogging central to your advice, but do mention it and elaborate on it for that section of your readership who are interested in those topics.

Bottom-line is, the one’s interested in making money will be willing to pay you money to learn more. That translates into affiliate income as well as direct product sales. It’s one of way of making money from your site (i.e. recommending other products / selling your own services / products).

More Content Ideas

Raj has been writing some excellent posts – check out “creating visual content for your blog” and “blog content alternatives: video“.

Monetization

We’ve discussed blog monetization several times here and since your case is somewhat similar to Performancing (even if the scale is different), I’m going to give you the same list that I gave Ryan:

1. How much is BlogoSquare making right now, per month? How much do you want the site to make after an year’s time. $2k / month? More?

   With a target in mind, you can break things down to a monthly basis (ok, so I need to reach at least $XXX / month by August).

   Right now the traffic isn’t ‘great’, so a lot of your focus will be on increasing traffic, but if you do things right you can have both traffic and income rising together.

2. Blog Tweaking Service – you know how to customise themes, how to set blogs up, make them SEO-friendly, etc. You can easily use those skills to earn you an income by advertising your blog setup / optimization service.

   Biggest problem with this idea? If you’re going to target your current audience – teenagers – you’re not likely to find any paying customers.

   Your best bet would be to use BlogSquare as your leverage (part of your portfolio) in getting gigs like these.

3. Push UBSquare as a top bloggers directory for teenagers, and add sponsored listings in addition to the free ones (sponsored listings could cost $30-50, put their link to the top of the directory page for a month and earn them a site review at blogosquare).
4. Direct Ad Sales – While you can go through TLA (and you’ll probably earn $100+ per month through it), another idea is to run the ad sales yourself using WPTextAds. It’s an automated text link ads management system for WordPress. Free version allows 2 links only, the full version (costing $149) has no limits.

   IMO, get the free version, sell your first two ads, and once you’ve got money coming in get the licensed version and earn 100% revenue from your ads instead of 50%.

5. Don’t go into AdSense. Yes, it can earn you some good cash, but overall, if your traffic is low and you’re not getting much search traffic, then AdSense will earn you very little.

   Granted, $60-$100 per month isn’t bad, but you can use the same ad space to push affiliate products through recommendations, from which just one sale could net you $60.

6. Affiliate Marketing – apart from selling services, this is your best bet for making money from BlogoSquare. Products that you could promote:

   Semiologic: Costs $299, Aff commission is $59 or $118 depending on how frequently you make sales.

   PMetrics – premium-grade blog metrics.

   PLR Pro – quality, topical articles every month, excellent for niche bloggers.

   TigerTech – digg-proof web hosting at shared-hosting costs.

   I’m sure you have several more products in mind that you’d want to promote on the site.

More Traffic

Speaking in broard terms, you have 3 main sources of traffic:

• direct (type-in, bookmarks, feeds, regular readers)
• referral (from other websites, including social networks / social bookmarking sites)
• search engines

The ideal situation is to have a strong mix of all 3 types of traffic, although as long as you have a large amount of direct / regular traffic that’s great by itself.

Each type of traffic requires a different strategy, but since they’re all important I’ll discuss them briefly and point you in the right direction.

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic takes a long time to build up – and the key to building your long-term readership is to focus on the content. Provide information that satisfies a core need, whether that’s a need to learn or a need to be entertained. If you’ve got your focus, and you’re passionate and good at what you write about, then building a fan base for your website is not hard, provided that you keep sending regular traffic to the site (which is where the next two sources come in).

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic could take different forms – you could get a burst of traffic from Digg, or you could get a steady trickle of traffic from a review on a popular website.

The key to referral traffic is long term link building – the better you are at acquiring links, the more referrals your site will get and those links will also help your search engine rankings.

Of course, you’re not just getting links from link pages and directories and blogrolls, you’re also going to be doing some old-fashioned (or is it still new?) linkbaiting.

The common perception of linkbaiting is that you target big social networking sites such as Digg / Netscape / Reddit, but you can also target top industry blogs.

For blogosquare, who could you target? Here are a few possibilities

Darren Rowse (problogger.net)
Liz Strauss (successful-blog.com)
Lorelle (lorelle.wordpress.com)
Blog Herald (blogherald.com)
Ryan Caldwell (performancing.com)

In short, read the top sites in your niche, figure out what type of content they link out to and then get busy writing / creating something kickass that they can give the appropriate buzz to.

If this makes you uncomfortable, that’s ok. You’re not doing the big guns a favor – all you’re doing is giving your site / content the maximum chance to succeed by getting it as much authority love as possible.

Links, links links. Whether you get them through directories, through link requests or through link baiting, setup a system to get them, regularly.

Search Engine Traffic

You said that you’ve got a good handle on SEO, so I’ll give you some reading material to spark ideas and if you have any questions, just ask here in the comments.

So you want search engine traffic? – Brian Gardner’s post on building SE traffic is ridiculously simple and equally profitable.
Killer Blog Titles
Why your blog archives are (mostly) useless
Networking tips for SEO
How to get links (seo shortcuts) – make sure you read the three articles linked in there.

General Thoughts

A couple of points about your site that didn’t fit anywhere else:

Your theme looks great in 1024×768 but when you go to higher resolutions (I was using 1280×800) the theme itself is left-aligned while the blogosquare logo (top-right) is right-aligned. So, on bigger resolutions, the whole site pushes to the left and the logo is on the right. All a bit disconcerting really, but something you should know.

Also, instead of saying ‘where teenagers and bloggers meet’, why not say ‘where young bloggers meet’ (you could also say teenage bloggers)? Putting the two together immediately gives you a sense of identity (blogosquare = teenage bloggers’ hangout).

Just my two cents on this.

Wrapping Things Up

I hope this helps you Hans, and as always if you have any questions, let me know in the comments.