Advertising

Wanna see a live Digg happening in real time? Well, it’s happening right here on Performancing where we track our stats with pMetrics. Just click on the link below and monitor our front page Digg in real time (only while supplies last;-) ->

http://pmetrics.performancing.com/stats/spy?site_id=1

Whenever I think about starting a new blog or to start blogging on an established blog (like when I came onboard Performancing), there’s a strong feeling of apprehension and … fear.

What will I write about? Will anyone read it? What if no one comments? What if the blog doesn’t work? What if I run out of topics to blog about? How will I beat my rivals?

It’s a nightmare, I tell you.

The worst thing you can possibly do – and probably the biggest mistake I’ve made while blogging – is to not start earlier.

To quote someone wise (I’ve forgotten who said this):

The best time to start something was last year. The second best time is right now.

So the best bloggging advice you can get is – start blogging.

However, starting blogging blindly is not enough, so you need direction and focus. And that’s where my second biggest mistake comes in:

No end-game.

Do not – and I cannot emphasize this enough – do not launch without having some idea of what you want out of the blog and if necessary, how you will make your exit.

If it’s your personal blog, forget what I just said and go blog about your cat. But if you want to make money from blogging, have an endgame, an exit strategy in mind.

Being focused on the end result helps you disregard most of the non-essential stuff that you shouldn’t be doing in the first place – you’ll be focused on bringing in results while enjoying your blogging (assuming that you’re passionate about whatever it is that you’re blogging about).

And the best part – if you do these two things, you will sidestep 90% of the starting anxiety and jump right into the excitement of starting and growing a brand new blog.

99% of wordpress themes, sponsored or not, are crap and unusable.

It may offend you, but that’s reality. You’re not going to be able to go to WTC or the WP themes site OR any one of those large lists of WP themes and find a ‘quality’ theme in 5 minutes.

It takes time, and mostly it’s a situation of reaching an ‘acceptable’ compromise.

So what’s this about?

In the last few days it’s been fun to sit back and watch the trash talk fly towards WP because of their ‘decision’ to not promote sponsored themes through the themes.wordpress.net platform.

A few things that I want to point out, stuff that most people have missed at the start:

• The blogroll links are attribution links to the developers who had a hand in creating and developing WP. It’s quite similar to the ‘designed by’ theme credits you see on WP themes.
• The theme crediting links are NOT the problem. It’s a ridiculous equivocation, and if you’re going to do a rant on it without reading up on the background you’re going to come out of this looking like an ass.
• I think Matt Mullenweg truly believes that the move is good for the community (Mark Ghosh IMO did it because the sponsored themes pissed him off – he has every right to do so as he’s in the thick of it and must get tons of spammy submissions every day). You may disagree with him, but he’s serious about it (and there is a lot of support for banning sponsored themes in the WP community).
• There’s a serious problem of definition – when Matt talks about sponsored themes he’s talking about the trash that the people at themes.wordpress.net and Mark Ghosh at WTC are seeing. When we talk about sponsored themes we think of one link that’s removable in the theme. There’s a clear difference – see this article for an example.

Sponsored themes is an advertising model, and like all advertising models there will be some people looking to make a quick buck by peddling crap. So is the case with many, many sponsored themes.

My personal view on themes is that there should be a manual review – a quality review – of all themes, sponsored or not, and that WTC and themes.wordpress.net should filter themes based on quality, not advertising models.

Are you going to seriously tell me that promoting sponsored themes will cause WP a problem with Google? You’ve got to be joking.

Matt’s taken the low-effort option on this, and once the furore passes we will invariably see one or two sites coming up to challenge WTC and the WP themes site.

Bottom-line – banning sponsored themes tends to ban a few good themes as well, while it does nothing to improve the quality of the existing setup, which is full of trash (99%).

If you want to do something for the good of the community, don’t promote trash, promote quality. Be the filter for us instead of hosing us with long lists of unusable themes.

Eventually though I think this has a lot to do with how the open source community treasures keeping free things free (or not-for-profit) as opposed to any serious objections to a single sponsored link that is removable if you choose to remove it.

Logically, if you produce a theme with sponsored links that can be removed via the interface, that should be ok for Matt and Mark. But I doubt that it’s about allowing removal – their base emotional reaction has been to the advertising model, not to how its implemented.

Props to both Matt and Mark, I realise how tough it is for both of you, especially since you’re at the center of the whole theme submission game, but could you please be proactive instead of reactive and prune themes on quality?

More reading:

Sponsored themes – Mark Ghosh (9th April 2007)

On Sponsored Themes – Matt Mullenweg writing at WTC (12th April 2007)

No sponsored themes on WTC – Mark Ghosh (10th July 2007)

To do sponsored links or not? – James at RealityWired.com (11th July 2007)

No more sponsored links what a bunch of bullshit – Shoemoney (11th July 2007)

When the powerful pontificate, I puke – Ryan Caldwell (13th July 2007)

There are many reasons why people hate AdSense and most of them are quite silly. I’ve taken the top 10 reasons below, and discussed each of them individually.

There are some valid concerns, definitely, but a few of them are just ridiculous.

10 – Poor email support / Poor support overall

This is a fair point – AdSense can and should do more in terms of tech support.

However, when you consider the sheer number of people who use AdSense and even if you place the percentage of people who need tech support generously low, that’s still a lot of users.

I’d like to see the Google AdSense team do more (they’ve improved since last year, IMO), especially in replying to all email support queries within 12 hours. Impossible? Hardly.

9 – Google allows AdSense ads on scrapper sites

Google is in favor of using algorithms as far as possible to weed out the trash, and to their credit they’ve done a lot over at Blogspot to reduce the splog-effect.

But MFA-sites are NOT going to go away, and to combat the problem Google needs to do manual checks both at the point of application (maybe introduce minimum conditions for joining – such as site age, traffic, etc) and at any random time every 6 months (or 1 year).

To get the scrappers out of the system sites need to be checked manually – although this raises another nasty problem where personal bias on ads can mean the difference between a site being seen as heavily optimized and blatant spam.

But why are people crying about Google allowing ads on scrapper sites? How does this affect you?

8 – Smart Pricing

If you don’t know what smart pricing it, read this article from Jennifer Slegg and then this followup by Loren Baker covering Google’s response.

It’s the way AdSense / AdWords works – deal with it.

7 – Doesn’t pay enough

A problem of expectations and nothing to do with Google or Google AdSense.

AdSense is usually a function of traffic – if you have low traffic you might want to head the TLA way and push your PageRank up.

And if you sign up to AdSense expecting it to pay all your expenses, you’d better be prepared to put in the hard work to build up your site’s traffic to that level.

Don’t rely on just one source of income – and depending on your niche and site traffic, AdSense could be your worst or your best earner.

6 – Ugly ads

I disagree – but maybe that’s because I’ve been using AdSense for so long. I do think that Google have done a decent job in how their their ads blend in well with content – and on the most part I’d blame the advertisers, not the ad network, for the quality of the ads and ad text.

5 – Don’t allow arbitrage

Losely translates into:

Don’t allow us to cheat by going against their TOS.

Boo hoo.

I’m all for arbitrage, but you have to make sure you don’t get caught 🙂

4 – Dont allow banned accounts to be reinstated

Never had an account banned (touch wood) so I can’t say much about this. If it really is a zero-tolerance policy then it’s not necessarily a bad thing – although accounts that are wrongly banned for suspicious activity should be reactivated once the mistake is discovered. Google will only get better at detecting fraud though, so the number of false positives should decrease.

3 – They’re everywhere

A testament to its simplicity and ease of use. Doesn’t apply unless you hate Google, which is a whole different story.

2 – Poor targeting

Are you saying this relatively or objectively? Relative to other networks, AdSense is actually much better. And when it comes to depth of inventory, Google is usually ahead as well.

There are certain cases where relevant ads are not presented, but those cases are isolated and there’s a fix for every one of them.

1 – It feeds the Google Borg

Yes, it does.

I can live with that, even if sometimes your earnings per click get slashed for no obvious reason and AdSense support or an optimization expert assigned to you does absolutely nothing to explain why this happens. It’s annoying, but instead of complaining, you need to adapt, find alternatives and fix things on your end.

—–

While I was writing this list I realised that I might come out sounding like a Google apologetic – please no 🙂 I’m just trying to put forward both sides of the story as I see them.

So, have I missed out on any reason why you would hate AdSense?

Many blogs use the related entries plugin (or it’s equivalent) – along with anti-spam plugins and smart URLs it has become an integral part of a blogger’s arsenal.

I’ve recommended the plugin myself a countless number of times but yesterday while working on one of my blogs I started wondering if, in some cases, showing related posts would actually be less effective?

Consider this – the most common spot to show related entries is at the end of a blog entry. However, that spot is also a prime advertising spot, that’s where you put the comments and if you want people to digg/reddit/delicious/stumble/etc your post, that’s where you put your social bookmarking links as well.

All that clutter means that when the reader reaches the end of your article, he doesn’t have just one thing to do – he’s presented with an array of options. More often then not, I’ve found out that the fewer choices you give to the reader in terms of what to do next, the better results you will get.

So for example, if you’re looking to maximise your AdSense CTR, don’t put other ‘exits’ – outgoing links – around the ad block. If you want to maximise comments, emphasize the comments section and reduce the clutter between the post and the comments area (i.e. ads, plugins, other links).

So what happened yesterday is that I’m thinking of replacing the ad block at the end of the post with a graphic ad promoting a forum, and while I’m OK with losing the extra revenue I don’t think that the ad will be that effective, especially with the related articles, the social bookmarking links and the other fluff that comes in at the end of the article.

Is this a case where you should a) ditch the related entries plugin or b) shift them to the sidebar, or as an aside inside the post itself, or something like that?

For a couple of years now I’ve taken it for granted that you ‘must show’ related entries at the end of each post because ‘it’s good for increasing pageviews, SEO, etc’.

On a successful site that already has good rankings and a good visitor to pageviews ratio, do you still need the related entries plugin? And if yes, what’s a good place to put it (apart from the end of the post)?

Robert Scoble writes:

One trend that bloggers don’t want to talk about? A number of my blogging friends have seen their traffic go down lately. They assume that their readers are off in social networks. I think they are absolutely right.

Hugh McLeod responds:

The time of the A-List is dead. Thank Christ. Not a moment too soon.

Brian Clark follows up:

Value will always be key. And I think you’ll find that the migration of pure social chatter off of blogs and onto social networking applications is a good thing for the rest of us who are looking to build businesses powered in whole or in part by blogs.

I think this is a joke – no, not the funny kind, but the ridiculous kind.

For as long as I’ve been reading ‘about blogging’, we’ve had this A-list debate. It’s similar to high-school social hierarchy, where the popular boys and girls get all the attention and there are always a few rebels ready to call their time up.

Let’s face it, there will ALWAYS be an A-list. The names will change, some old ones will fade and new ones will take their place, but in essence, the psychology of the A-list will always be there.

The people who denounce the A-list and push value blogging are right by their accounts, but in the process they too are turning into the A-list by virtue of their increasing audience.

People like Michael Arrington, Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Hugh McLeod, Aaron Wall and Rand Fishkin ARE part of the A-list – they are, whether they like it or admit it or not, celebrities whose popularity extends beyond their own niche.

I’ve seen Rand Fishkin go from a relatively unknown SEO geek to one of the leading SEO bloggers online, in the space of the last 2-3 years. He made it to the A-list by providing value, and full props to him.

Don’t tell me that the A-list is dead simply because the rules of the game have changed. By nature the A-list will adapt and thrive in the new conditions. There will always be rock stars and celebrities, whether it’s social media, mainstream media or ‘value blogging’.

So please, the A-list is NOT dead. Blogging – well that’s a different story 🙂

Performancing has this killer site statistics app called pMetrics. You might have some killer app, or some killer service too. But you might also think that not enough people know about your killer product. So it’s time for some good old fashioned, hard-core SEO.

One of the most difficult tasks in all of SEO is finding and choosing the best keyphrase to target.

Take a look at the Performancing sidebar. We link to pMetrics with “Site Analytics” – a poor choice in my view (and a poor choice that I made several months ago).

There are much better options. For example:

1. Blog Stats
2. Blog Statistics
3. Site Stats
4. Site Statistics
5. Web Stats
6. Web Statistics
7. Website Stats
8. Website Statistics

In other words, I think people are much more likely to do searches on things like “stats for my blog” then “analytics for my blog”

Now some of you might say to me, just target all of those phrases. And it’s true. We could try that. But what I like to do as an SEO is “divide and conquer” – I like to focus in on one killer keyphrase at a time. A target keyphrase. Once I’ve conquered that keyphrase (by conquer I mean nothing less than top 3), I move on to the next one.

But the problem I always have is choosing which phrase to target. Sure, you can point me to this or that tool. But I know about your tools. I just don’t always know how to use them to choose the best among good options.

So let me ask you this: as I put in place a major SEO campaign for pMetrics, what should I target? Is there any under-developed niche (blog stats)? Is one word (stats) better than another (statistics)? If so, why? If not, why not?