Advertising

Advertisements are a vital (and often the most vital) part of a problogger’s monetization strategies. Thus, the choice of which type of ads to serve on one’s blogs is always an important question. You might be interested in the results of a study conducted by McCoy, Everard, Polak, and Galletta that appeared in the article The Effects of Online Advertising (Communications of the ACM March 2007). Yeah I know, it’s May already – the copy arrived a month late 😉

The paper presents nothing new or radical; rather, it somewhat ‘formalizes’ what many web surfers have known/felt for long:

• Intrusiveness: Pop-under ads are the most intrusive type of ads, closely followed by pop-ups; inline (often banner) ads are considerably less intrusive than the two
• Return visits: More site visitors intend to revisit sites with inline ads than those with pop-unders and pop-ups (which are slightly worse than the pop-unders)
• Content retention: Visitors exposed to inline ads remember more of the site’s content rather than those exposed to pop-ups and pop-unders.

Unfortunately, I can’t quote exact figures or an excerpt, as to republish part of the work requires prior permission and/or a fee. Suffice it to say, the figures for pop-up and pop-under ads are neck to neck; the article seems to suggest inline (e.g. banner) ads are the most user-friendly among the three.

(For those interested in dissecting the paper more, access to the magazine’s online version requires ACM membership.)

A few years ago I started diversifying on the web. I read all the horror stories about people getting dumped by AdSense or spanked by the Google SERPS…so I took action…thankfully!

On April 27, 2007 Google dropped 4 of my sites from AdSense. The good news is that I’ve got plenty of backup income because of my decision to diversify.

So how exactly do you diversify on the web? Here are five strategies:

1. Diversify across content niches

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket (and that includes all you casino and poker hounds). If you find something that works, duplicate it a few times, sure, but you’ve gotta make sure that your web empire isn’t built around just one thing that could be taken out from underneath your feet.

Consider trying out sites in several proven niches as well as some unusual niches. I’ve found that the proven, but competitive niches end up paying off the best. Just diversify across a few of these, see what works, duplicate a few times, try something new, etc. It’s all a learning process, but the main point is that you should be diversifying across niches.

2. Diversify across business models

Content is the easiest business to get into, but the hardest to squeeze pennies from. Consider starting a paid service or product site. They take the most work up front (unless you buy one that’s already started) but can be the most reliable in terms of steady income flow.

It’s true that Google could come along and knock you out of the SERPS for who knows WTF reason, but you don’t have to worry about kissing ass to a 3rd party ad network.

3. Diversify across ad networks

At a minimum, a blog owner should be trying out Blogads, AdSense and Text Link Ads. Amazon affiliates can work too, but you’ll need to be consistent by pushing products.

Here’s a tip: make sure you have a backup plan in case your number one or two source of income breaks. We could all wake up one day and Google might have decided the night before to trash the toolbar PR all together. As a result, text link ads lose a lot of their value. Or maybe AdSense decides that your content is “too mature” (I’m bitter, can you tell;-) and throws you out the door, treating you like a maggot to be stomped on, rather than a person to be reasoned with. What do you do? Do you have a backup plan? Or are you like I was a few days ago…totally caught off-guard?

4. Diversify your link building methods

I have 4-5 methods I use to linkbuild about 2 hours each day. It’s routine at this point. What I’m committed to doing going forward is trying out 1 new linkbuilding method a week. If something works, I’ll keep it, if it doesn’t, I’ll throw it out. Build up your linkbuilding toolkit because, trust me, the things that are effective today will eventually get abused, and then ignored (either by the search engines or your readers). Keep thinking ahead, trying out new ideas, and you’ll find stuff that works.

5. Diversify your marketing campaigns

I don’t do much as far as traditional marketing. If I do anything, it’s organic (craiglist used to be so good!). Just keep this in mind: to make money, you need eyeballs. Eyeballs drive ad revenue and eyeballs sell products. Sit down and brainstorm creative but affordable ways to get more eyeballs to your site on a consistent basis, and without pissing too many people off.

One type of online advertising that I like for physical products is BlogAds. If you find the right up-and-coming site that has its ads priced too low, you can get a 3 month, visual ad block for under $100 and if the traffic is right, you’ll probably sell a lot of tshirts (or whatever it is you sell).

You should be seeing a new yet familiar icon in the pMetrics tab bar. We have just released a module that lets you access your FeedBurner stats from within our service. This requires you to be running your site’s feed through FeedBurner (and you’d have to be pretty much insane not to be doing that already). You’ll also need to enter in your FeedBurner URI on your site management page, which you can access from your pMetrics user homepage. Only basic data is available from FeedBurner’s API unless you are subscribed to their premium service. Performancing has a premium subscription with FeedBurner, so you can see the full range of stats available by playing with the demo account on pMetrics. Enjoy!

It’s obvious from the latest Page Rank update that Google is strongly buffering the effect of certain kinds of links. What kind of links? That’s a complex question, but I think I can answer it with two words: undiversified links.

The key to linkbuilding in 2007 is diversification. Below I explain five ways to diversify your links moving forward.

1. Stop pointing incoming links to your homepage

Let me set the record straight. At this point in time, if you focus 80% of your linkbuilding into non-homepages of your site, you’re going to get a lot more bang for your buck. After the last PageRank update, I had the intuition that Google was severely buffering the PageRank of sites that had an inordinate ratio of links going into the home page as opposed to those going into sub-pages. It’s much harder to manipulate deep linkage than homepage linkage, and Google has noticed this. The majority of my linkbuilding efforts (whether TLA, social voting, linkbait, whatever) are now aimed at pushing pagerank into the domain through the backdoor.

I can’t emphasize this enough. Even if you only pick 2 or 3 subpages of your domain to focus your linkbuilding efforts, you’ll get much more bang for your buck. The evidence is pointing to Google considering and weighting *whole domains* as units of measurement as opposed to single pages. Now more than ever, by building into subpages, you are helping your entire domain. The good news is that PageRank seems to flow a whole lot better throughout a site when you bring it in the backdoor.

2. Diversify the location of your links

Stop putting all your links in sitewide sidebars and footers. If you run a WordPress blog, consider doing targeted sidebar links per category as opposed to site wide. Also, consider throwing links around in old posts. Post level links are the most powerful, but take the most work. Text Link Ads now offers the chance to buy links at the post level, and I think it’s a great idea.

If you’re savvy enough with CSS it might help to change the semantics of your stylesheet div sections. Instead of “footer” you might use “the-end-is-near” … instead of “sidebar”, you might use “we-recommend” … and instead of “entry” you might use “juicy”

The most important thing is to diversify the location of your links. Sitewide is fine, but only if complimented by a nice dose of post-level links.

3. Diversify your anchor text

The worst thing you can do at this point for linkbuilding is get five sitewide links, all pointed at the homepage, all with the same anchor text. That’s a recipe for severely diluting the value of the links you acquire.

Instead, you might get three links into your homepage with anchor text like “Widgets for Wingnuts” , “The Best Widgets” and “Professional Widgets” and then get two links into each category of your site with variations on the category like “Sports Widgets” and “Widgets for Athletes.” Doing something systematic like this is a recipe for successfully avoiding the Google Link Buffer.

4. Get article level links from strong sites

Promote your site at places like Digg, Netscape and Reddit. Right now, I have a little secret in this regard that I discovered by being patient. Nothing mind blowing, but it works. I’m willing to share the “secret” with anyone who sends me a private message.

Pssssssst…another secret….Performancing is a strong site that rewards good content with free article level links. Give it a six month try and you’re golden.

5. Comment at other blogs

There’s good reason to believe that comment level links with the no-follow directive still pass linkjuice. But that’s not the reason to comment at other blogs. The real reason is to get noticed, and to get linked to from other participants who think you’re one of the cool kids. If you have useful things to say, you’ll gain respect and respect almost always turns into free links.

One of the best places to start off with your commenting career is at the Link Nazi’s Blog. Lots of people take him seriously, and lots of the cool cats make posts over there. Friends tell me that a single quality comment can yield your site dozens of respectful glances.

You may have noticed “The Performancing Top 20” over in the right sidebar. Each day we’re ranking the top 20 premium pMetrics blogs according to site visitors and listing them, along with page rank passing links. That’s one more great reason to become a pMetrics premium subscriber.

Worried that you won’t crack the top 20? Just do a little site promotion, write a few articles for Performancing (along with some links to your blog), and market your blog like a pro. The more you promote, the more you’ll see visitors, and the more likely you’ll get some link love from Performancing!

By cracking the top 20, your blog will receive a free, one-way PR 7 link. A killer incentive for a killer product;-)

Maybe I’m more obsessed with Google PR (PageRank) than most, due to being a math and stats (and computer) geek and needing to measure everything. Sure, PR is not an accurate measure of your site’s worth, but it is a measure nonetheless, which for some ad networks helps determine how much you’ll earn. And love it or hate, it just changed. Or is changing. Right now. If you haven’t seen the change, you probably should over the next few days.

Only moments ago, I checked one of my sites that’s too new to have made the last rollout in, what was it, late January or early Feburary? So lucky for me, it went from PR0 to PR4. Which really is meaningless because traffic is still transient. I haven’t posted even once per week regularly, despite my promise on the site. Anyway, until I do get consistent traffic, I have no plans on monetizing it. I’m taking a wholly different approach this time, unlike most of my other sites. [I’m talking about my personal site, which will never have contextual ads, but may have other types in the future, after it hits PR5.]

Still, my experience over the past two years is as follows. Take any keyword phrase and search for it. Usually, but not always, the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) listings will have higher PR pages at the top. That means, since most people are lazy and don’t check past the first page of SERPs, more traffic goes to the first ten pages listed.

The unfortunate thing about this new PR rollout, at least to myself and a friend, is that his PR5 tech site just dropped to PR4. (According to the two tools I’ve found to be most accurate. Other tools show a mix of 4 and 5, though they used to show all 5.) I had intended on buying it in a few days, but the change likely means both a strong drop in traffic and revenue. He let the site sit dormant for too many months after he left the United States.

Which means any zomblogs (zombie blogs) out there are probably losing rank if they are not at least gaining new backlinks. This may mean that Google has decided to implement some important algorithm changes – such as the momentum metric Ryan Caldwell suggested.

So, if you have a site and have let it slide, you may want to quickly find someone to write casually, before the next PR rollout. If you can’t pay, maybe guest-write on their side. Or you could sell your site at Performancing’s Blogs for Sale section. You should be seeing a few of mine for sale soon, as well as few job listings.

Note: If you want to check your PR, you could use Data Center Watch [via SmartWealthyRich], but i find it’s inaccurate. I prefer Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox plugin, which embeds results into Google and Yahoo’s SERPs, or Search Status for Firefox.

Performancing is pleased to announce the re-release of pMetrics blog analytics. In its current state, pMetrics is a simple, clean, “chock-full-of-features” stats program, specifically targeted for blogs.

Plugins & Widgets

As more and more Performancing members adopt pMetrics we’ll be unveiling some uber-cool widgets and plugins to enhance your blogging experience. Plans currently include: 1) an AdSense tracking plugin and a 2) a Performancing “top blogs” widget that links back to the top 50 or so blogs using pMetrics. Discussion about pMetrics development and plugin/widget suggestions will be taking place in our pMetrics forum: http://performancing.com/forum/578

Simple Yet Feature-rich

If you’re a stats junkie like me, you’re constantly looking for useful information about site visitors. Site stats give us the tools to assess the success of our current actions and make strategies for improving the quality of content, navigation, headlines, etc. on a website.

Many of us need more in a site analytics program than daily log analysis. Sometimes we need a real-time look at traffic flow. Sometimes we need a quick and dirty, one page summary of recent search queries, pages visited, and referrals. Unfortunately, if you’re like me, you haven’t been very satisfied with the multitude of stats programs out there, especially for blogs.

That’s one reason why we’ve partnered with Clicky to bring you the new pMetrics. With pMetrics you get detailed information about each user without having to drill down 4-5 levels in the navigation. One of the things I personally can’t stand about Google Analytics is that although it is powerful, finding the information you want has never been intuitive or easy. pMetrics solves this issue.

Real-time “Spy” Analysis

But pMetrics offers you more. Have you ever wanted to get a good sense of real-time user behavior? pMetrics has a Spy function*; a real-time stats-ticker that shows each and every user behavior at your site, as it happens in real time. This information is priceless and can provide the details you need to increase site usability. You can also monitor, in real time, the results of any marketing and promotion that you are involved in.

Doing a Reddit and Digg campaign? Want an adrenaline rush? You can track the results in real-time, and let me tell you, it’s a massive thrill!

pMetrics also offers you a picture of visitor demographics and geography, breaking visitors down into countries and even cities, and then plotting this information on Google Maps.

RSS Feeds

pMetrics gives you the choice of making your stats public or private, and you can even publish a summary via RSS*. RSS gives savvy blog owners the chance to dispaly site stats in creative ways on their blogs and to view multiple stat summaries from a single RSS reader.

Referral Affiliate Program

Performancing members earn 20% of every payment made to us by any user who signs up through an affiliate link and eventually becomes a paying premium member. Additionally, there is a second tier commission of 5%, which means you will get 5% of any payment made to us by your referal’s referals. More information on the affiliate program is available here.

The basic version of pMetrics is available for free, but we highly recommend upgrading to the advanced version for a modest annual fee (just a little more than $1/month). The advanced version includes Spy (real time visitor stats) and RSS feeds so that you can syndicate your stats and view them in an RSS reader, saving you time and energy.

Get started with pMetrics right away!

*Premium version only

This is the announcement before the announcement. The pMetrics site analytics package has relaunched. Get it now for your blog!

Working in coordination with Sean from Clicky, we have put a scalable server infrastructure in place to provide a stable pMetrics site analytics solution to the wider blogging community. Use and enjoy.

A more comprehensive announcement is forthcoming, along with suggestions of what you can expect to see in a pMetrics API for widget development, additional analytic plugin features (AdSense tracking anyone?), public exposure (read: linklove) for successful sites, and more.

Again, this is the announcement before the announcement, but for those of you who have been patient with us, we thought you deserved to know as soon as possible. So now’s the time to get back in the game.

For those of you looking for a sweet analytics program perfect for blogs, check out what pMetrics has to offer. You’ll like it:

http://pmetrics.performancing.com/