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First Thoughts: Google Analytics & Bloggers

Ok, so Google have made live their long expected free analytics program this morning. The question we want to ask at Performancing is, what does this mean for bloggers?

The answer is, not much really. It’s an adwords tool, that although does have some fairly standard features you’d expect to find in an analytics program such as page views, geo location, exit links etc, is probably less useful than a dedicated blog analytics tool such as Mint, or the soon to launch MeasureMap. It’s certainly several steps above something like SiteMeter, but as noted, the app is geared toward ecommerce sites using the Adwords system.

Those are my initial thoughts. Im currently waiting for them to update my stats, they say sometime in the next 12hrs which makes me ask why they’re not live stats? but when I have more to say on it, i’ll reply in this thread.

If you’re going to test Google Analytics, tell us what you think…

Misinformation on Search in the Blogosphere

I’ve been pondering whether or not to even dignify this post (EDIT: the post has now been removed) with a link and mention, even negative mention at Performancing tonight.

The thing is though, I’ve been noticing a worrying trend in the blogosphere recently, and it only seems to be increasing. It boils down to this: People are giving out advice about ranking in Search engines, when they clearly know nothing whatsoever of the topic.

Worse, in extreme cases, as in the one above, they’re giving out information that is patently false, and could actually get bloggers into trouble with some engines.

Read it, if only to learn exactly what you should not be doing with your blog. At best that post is misguided, and at worst, dangerous.

There are no quick fixes

Really, there just aren’t. But if you guys are interested in learning about some common sense ways you can make your blogs more search engine friendly, then i’ll happily write about that a bit in the week.

For now though, be aware that there is a lot of very bad information being spread about Search out there.

Affiliate Pimping vs Paid to Blog

Is there a differnce between pimping Chitika in almost every post your write, because you get paid when new people sign up under you, and getting payed a flat rate for posting about a product? It’s a good question isn’t it?

Remember Marqui?

I was speaking to Patrick over the weekend about this, and in the process ended up explaining the whole kerfuffle with Marqui last year. The upshot being, that they paid a whole bunch of prominent bloggers to post about their CMS product — a great many people, including me, thought this was more than a little shite, but for varying reasons.

Personally, i thought it was a ludicrous affair. You had a whole bunch of folks posting silly little “im paid to blog about Marqui” badges on their blogs and doling out the most horrifyingly mind curdling crap i’ve ever had the misfortune to read.

Most others however, where hard at work debating the ethics of being paid to blog. Not something i cared about particularly, but that’s where most felt the crunch was on this topic; Whether it was ethical to be paid to blog on a product.

Enter Chitika

Now, someone explain to me the difference between what went down with that whole Marqui fiasco, and the current professional blogging trend of making every third post something lame about Chitika, just to get your affiliate id in the link, again. Hmmmm?

As with Marqui, it bothers me little personally. If i feel that my subscription to your blog is less valuable to me as a result of you churning out Chitka posts, i’ll simply unsubscribe. No problem. But it’s interesting to note, as Scoble just did, the hypocrisy that the comparison exposes.

Here’s a tip: If you’re going to flood your feed with posts about Chitika, or anything else you’re on a commision for, make sure those posts are genuinely helpful. If they’re just Feed Fodder™ then I’m outta there…

Why Feedback is Vital

How do you know you are achieving what you set out to do? What ways do you know if your readership appreciates your writing? How can you grow your blog with engaging well-targeted content?

One word. Feedback

My weekend reading tends to put me back in touch with topics that I just don’t have time for during the week. Monday through Friday priorities mean I rarely visit the more thoughtful, conceptual or intellectual blogs on my OPML. Clicking around my “weekend reading” folder I happened upon the following diagram contained in a post about innovation which sparked a “a-ha! moment” (not the popular 80’s pop-band).

feedback loop

I think this diagram sums up an important difference between old media and blogging. Bloggers have access to much greater feedback, in both quantity and quality, but also immediacy.

In a magazine you send in an idea, the editor approves it. You send in your draft, the editor changes a few phrases. A couple of months later your article appears. A few people write in to the letters page. Post a blog and

  • Readers comment
  • Readers email “you suck” or “thankyou!”
  • Bloggers write about your post and criticise, agree, clarify, expand on it
  • Readers subscribe/unsubscribe
  • People tag and link to your post or link to a post that discusses your post
  • Forums link your post and discuss it
  • ….or your post gets ignored (which is also feedback)

One of the best types of feedback I receive is when people say “great post, how about writing on the topic of x?” – ideas are hard to come by, ideas provided by your audience are like gold dust.

Feedback is vital to constant improvement, otherwise you are just guessing at how well you are doing. If you are writing for an audience engage that audience and encourage feedback.

So, what do you think?

Please let us know how we are doing, even if your feedback is of the “you suck” variety! What do you like, dislike? What would you like to see more of? Please let us know, we want your feedback!

Blog Advertising Programs A-Z

Adsense and Chitika are not the only fruit. Far from it in fact, there’s quite a number of programs out there that can be run on your blog, some contextual, some not.

I’d like to put a list together of the A-Z of advertising options for bloggers. The list so far is pretty good, but most likely not complete, so please post anything i’ve missed!

A-Z of Blog Ad Programs

So, without further ado, here’s the list:

AdBrite

  • Description: Allows publishers to sell text ads on their sites
  • About page

AdEngage

  • Description: Allows you to sell text ads on your blog.
  • About page

AdGenta

  • Description: A kind of manual Adsense
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Adsense

  • Description: The ubiquitous contextual ad program from Google
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Affiliate Sensor

  • Description: Contextual affiliate text links
  • Warning: Snake oil seller one page sales letter website with spammy looking text links in the footer. Does not inspire confidence.

All Feeds

  • Description: Varied offerings from contextual ads to search ads and affiliate links
  • About page

Banner Boxes

  • Description: Contextual looking Adsense like ads
  • About page

BidClix

  • Description: Allows publishers to sell text ads on a PPC basis
  • About page

BidVertiser

  • Description: Adsense looking ads where advertisers bid for placement by site
  • About page

Blog Ads

  • Description: Banners in all shapes and sizes where publishers join groups of similar publishers. Blog specific.
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

CB Pro Sense

  • Description: Provides auto generation of ClickBank affiliate links
  • Warning: Snake oil sale one page sales letter with lot’s of exclamation marks and outrageous promises of instant wealth.

Click Ads Direct

  • Description: Unclear what the exact model is, but they appear to be pitching the exclusivity angle
  • About page

Chitika eMiniMalls

  • Description: Contextually served interactive ads filled by Shopping.com and others. Allows readers to find reviews and more info on products aswell as purchase
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Clicksor

  • Description: Contextual network matching to affiliate programs
  • Warning: These guys do pop-up/unders
  • About page

Context Web

  • Description: Adsense look-a-like contextual ads
  • About page

Crisp Ads

  • Description: Blog ad network where publishers can join the “catalogue” and have advertisers be able to browse their blog then buy ads, or earn on PPC from showing text ads
  • About page
  • Amusingly, this blog network doesn’t appear to have a blog

Expo Active

  • Description: Lord knows, there’s no way to tell without signing up
  • Warning: Website looks like it was thrown together in about 10mins. Very worrying.
  • About page

Fast Click

  • Description: Variety of different formats including regular text ads
  • About page

Feedburner

  • Description: Various kinds of banners and text ads for RSS feeds
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Feedster

  • Description: Similar offerings to Feedburner, text ads and banners in feeds
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Federated Media

  • Description: John Battelle’s ad network for blogs. Banner ads in various sizes.
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Info Grabber

IntelliTXT

  • Description: Links words in the body of your text contextually to advertisers
  • About page

Kanoodle BrightAds

  • Description: Contextual Adsense like ads
  • About page

Kontera

  • Description: Very similar to IntelliTXT
  • About page

Mirago Context Stream

  • Description: Mirago is a third tier PPC engine, it can deliver contextual PPC results into content
  • About page

Nixxie

  • Description: UK specific IntelliTXT like product
  • About page

Pheedo

  • Description: Provide “tools” to integrate ads into regular and feed content
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Quigo AdSonar

  • Description: Private label PPC bidding for text ads on your site
  • Note: Must have 1M+ page views a month to join
  • About page

Revenue Pilot

  • Description: Provides a PPC Search solution for sites. Possibly a little too complex for most busy bloggers to be bothered with.
  • About page

Search Feed

  • Description: Search and content PPC text ad integration. Like Revenue Pilot, a little complex
  • About page

Target Point

  • Description: Contextual affiliate text ads payed out on a CPC basis
  • About page

Veoda

  • Description: Auto generated PPC text links provided by other third tier PPC engines
  • About page

Help Us Build this List Out!

I’m aware that the list is not complete. I’ve probably made some embarrassing ommisions, but with your help, we can build this list out to be the most comprehensive list of blog advertising programs on the web.

Please let me know what im missing in this list! and i’ll ad entries to it over time. Just post a comment and we’ll mop up any last programs we’ve missed 🙂

I have not included YPN or MSNAdCenter as both are in beta right now, and not open to all, and pure affilate networks aren’t what we’re here for, that’s a seperate list.

I hope you get some use out of this, so please tell us what we’re missing, and what you think of individual programs!

Respect your Reader, Reap Rewards

One of my pet hates from the marketing world is business people talking about their customers as “consumers”. This conjures up images of cattle being force-fed whatever garbage the business wants to churn out, safe in the knowledge the “consumer” has no choice but to consume. Robert Scoble, reporting on Mary Hodders post, makes a good point about “user generated content”. Describing your audience as “users” is not much better. What do you call people who visit your blog and why does it matter?

First of all it does matter. It matters because of the attitude adjustment that happens in your head. It matters for how you put across your message. Your world view changes your tone of voice, your tone of voice carries your message in a certain way, the reader reads between the lines. Your audience grows or shrinks.

There are a multitude of ways to describe you, the person reading this. While I am saying what I call you, at least to myself, is important, rather the meaning the word carries is the important bit. You deserve respect. If I don’t give you respect then you might well stick a couple of fingers up at the screen and click off somewhere else never to return.

Far too many bloggers have a sense of entitlement once their traffic has reached a certain level. It’s like whatever they put out will be sucked down so why bother thinking too hard, put it out there! Got to keep my posting level up! I guess those folks are in “feed the consumer” mode.

For this blog, and my other favourite Threadwatch, “reader” is too passive. The idea at these blogs is visitors become registered “participants”. Everyone wins when you participate, contribute, add to the conversation. We want you to give us the benefit of your thoughts, ideas and experience. Win, win and win.

So what shall I call you? We have two types of people coming here I guess. We have people who are not registered yet, I could call you a “guest”. We also have people who have registered, welcome back! I guess you would be a “participant”? Hmmm…

You know what though? We have an advantage here at Performancing. The one thing in common that binds us all together! We are all bloggers.

What do you think?

How to Mine Competitors and Readers for Links

Whether you view other blogs in your niche as “the competition” or, or like Performancing, part of your community, they still have information about your niche that you may not. Particularly if you’re the new kid on the block. Your initial visitors may also have a lot of information that could benefit you. The question is, how do you get that data?

There are two little known, yet very effective ways of gaining a jumpstart on niche data. Both methods involve letting your competition, and visitors do the hard work for you. Neither of these methods use anything even remotely evil, you can get all the information you want from publically viewable sources. Let me show you how…

Using Bloglines to Mine Reader Interests

If you don’t know about this, you’re gonna kick yourself, it’s so simple. Let’s assume you’ve done your initial research, and have a whole bunch of feeds you use for information on your niche. For this technique, you’ll need to open a Bloglines account if you don’t already have one.

Click on one of your feeds, and check the blue bar at the top to see how many subscribers the feed has. See figure below:

Follow the link shown in the image above, and you’ll find a list of the feeds public subscribers. All you need do after that, is to click the individual subscriber links, and check the left frame to see what else they’re subscribing to!

Some bloglines subscribers are very organized, and will even be kind enough to put their feeds in nicely labeled folders for you. Find the folder, check out the feeds. You’ll hopefully find a whole load of new information on your niche.

Often you’ll find that other bloggers in your niche have used their own names for their bloglines accounts, or maybe their blog names. This makes it even easier to work out which are the prime sources.

Using Del.icio.us to Mine Competitor Links

A similar technique can be used with del.icio.us. The idea is to find and subscribe to the link collections of bloggers in your niche. There are three different ways to go about finding the link collections of readers and competitors.

  1. Try typing in the name of your competitor, or blog name. This is the least effective, but you can strike lucky from time to time.
  2. Watch your incoming realtime link stats very closely. By finding links coming in from http://del.icio.us/UserName you can potentially find gold.
  3. Watch for blogs in your area that dump their delicious links to a daily post on their blog. This is by far the most effective way, but not everyone does this, I certainly don’t, as personally i find the posts to be more than a little shit. They have title’s that don’t tell you anything, and on that basis alone i don’t read them.

Before we get onto the details of how to mine delicious for information, let me just tell you how to go about finding the source of those dumped daily link collections in point 3.

Finding the source of daily link dumps

  1. On the daily link dump post, find the most obscure link you can and bookmark it using delicious yourself
  2. Go to your delicious home page, and click the “By UserName” link beneath the link you just bookmarked. You can also click the “By X other people” link to find out who else has an interest in that link.
  3. Now you should have the bookmarked links of your competitor, or visitor in front of you, time to get to work…

Use your inbox to subscribe to spam free info sources

One of the neat things about using this method is the avoidance of tag spam in delicious. As you’re mining real people, rather than just a tag, you avoid all the promotional crap that comes with such feed subscriptions in competitive areas.

The first thing you need to do is follow the link beneath your username at the top left labeled “inbox”. When you get there, follow the link on the right that says “edit inbox”. You should see a box like the one below:

From there, it’s a simple matter of entering the username of the person you want to monitor, and optionally specifying which of their tags you want to mine. Lastly, subscribe to your inbox’s feed, simple!

Information is Power

If you spend a little time on these techniques, you can quickly build up a very comprehensive overview of your niche, and as you’re subscribing to human compiled information, your RSS should remain spam free, which these days, is a prize not to be sniffed at.

Happy mining…

Link Shout: WebProBlog.com

Hey, my friend Rich Ord from iEntry is blogging! Rich knows his stuff, as his empire shows, but now he’s blogging at WebProBlog on “internet advertising, email marketing, search engines, eBusiness strategies”. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that that’s a blog worth subscribing to.

Good luck with the blog Rich, expecting to see good things coming out of there!