Advertising

Reading Andys post about “hate” got me thinking about criticism. I realised that in the past I have learned more from flames than I have from compliments. This could be turned to your advantage.

It seems like longer but Performancing has only been live for a few months. In that time we have received much feedback, mostly positive, some fairly agressive. I am sure if you do a vanity search for your blog you will find the same. While the bad stuff might upset you, criticism can be a valuable asset.

While it might be better for your ego if you do not always read and digest everything that is said in comments you must not be selective in which comments you read. Only listening to compliments can be really damaging to your blogs quality, and arguably for yourself as a person.

While it would be nice if all the comments were positive, complaints can be your best feedback. Many people who lash out actually feel aggrieved or hurt rather than feeling like causing bother. This is an opportunity to see how you have been misunderstood, misrepresented or what you have said could have been distorted. We post so quickly and often it is so easy for a throwaway comment to be taken the wrong way and you know what? Communication takes two parties, it is your job to get your message across as it is your blog. You can’t blame the other party for not understanding.

By showing that you welcome all feedback you will get more comments and openness is a great quality in a blogger.

I am not suggesting that you just take on board everything people say to you or about you and it is OK to be upset. Bad comments can be paralysing and can make you want to pack up and quit. I have been there many times. This is not about being a doormat. What you are doing is listening and analyzing to see if the feedback has validity. Think to yourself how the situation looks from the others point of view. Could they have misunderstood due to bad communication on your part or are they just being a grumpy git? There are people who just want to make trouble. Be on the look out for people causing trouble with other visitors on your comments also, it is up to you to police those.

When you receive a negative comment

• Don’t be crushed, Don’t be defensive, listen and encourage explanation
• Think “what can I learn from this”
• Get a second opinion
• Consider how you can get your point across more clearly
• Remember how it feels for when you next criticise others

Like piloting an airoplane, when you are blogging you need to make course corrections. It is only by listening to feedback, good and bad, that you can learn what the real situation is. Your audience are the ones who you are writing for, your blog is for them not you.

It might not seem this way but often “bad” feedback is the most honest. In fact a bloggers most common feedback is silence. A lack of feedback means something is wrong but there is no way of pinpointing what it is, at least with negative criticism you have something to act on.

While it might take a little courage it is a good idea to solicit criticism – ask your audience what they worst things about your blog are. What single thing would they change. Tell them you will not be offended.

How valuable would it be if someone let you in on the one thing that is keeping people away? That one single factor that annoys the hell out of your audience that you never noticed.

I’ve always felt that committees were pure evil, something to be avoided at all cost. The decision making process grinds to a halt, creativity is throttled into submission and the life is kicked out of any potentially great project.

I’ve been neglecting my blog reading this week (and last) as we all scurry around in a kind of organized chaos getting ready to release our somewhat 007 major product offering for this year this month, but happened to stop by Jeremy’s site and see his post about how committees suck the life out of projects and displaying this rather natty graphic from a post about risk aversion at one of my long time (hehe, well a few months at least) favorite blogs, creating passionate users.

The post at CPU is superb btw, read it.

Being a company of 3 and a half (i dont get to steal all of andy’s time..) we dont suffer from this particular ailment, if we all agree, great, if i want to get my own way i just shout and scream untill i do 🙂

You can now download Performancing Firefox 1.1.1 Beta 2 if you’re feeling brave, and help us trouble shoot the last couple of little bug fixes. We really appreciate your help, and although public beta testing got off to a slow start, we’re now starting to get some great feedback on posts posted by PFF devs in the PFF Beta Forum.

As always, please follow Jed’s instructions for using beta builds

Please Help Us Test!

There are a few points we would really like some help testing on this beta, hopefully it will be the last one before 1.1.1 final.

• General Posting/Editing: Does PFF still work as it should in your blog software of choice? Particular interesting in this beta is category support in Drupal, yay! Because of that, it’s possible there are some regressions with other systems. Though we think it unlikely, confirmation that all is well in your software would be great.
• General Functions: Context menu still working, side tabs for tools and bookmarks etc?
• Set up your Performancing Blog! If you want to blog on the loose topic of pro blogging right here on performancing.com, you can now setup your blog right from PFF — registered users have had blogs for a while, but thanks to Emily, we’ve now integrated it more thoroughly into the account manager. Is it workiing ok? (tests will be removed, so dont worry about that…)
• Blog This Blockquote Bug: If you don’t know what it is, dont worry about it, if you do, please let us know if it’s fixed.

Ok, have fun with this one, and please give us feedback on how it’s shaping up, hopefully we will be able to move onto 1.2 in a matter of days.

Thanks everyone.

When discussion turns to which template works best or which ad format works best with adsense, you can usually rely on me to spout my default piece of wisdom; “test test test”. Problem is I am not sure everyone knows exactly what I mean. How do you test your adsense tactics?

One of the real benefits of online advertising for both advertisers and publishers is the detailed tracking that is possible. No need for focus groups and clipboards here, the data is all there in real time in black and white. You know what works and what doesn’t almost as soon as you have done it.

The problem is this immediacy can make you jump to conclusions. Clicks increase on the day when you post a picture of your cat dressed as Elvis and you think “hmmm … must post more rock and roll pets”. There are any number of factors that influence how many clicks your blog will get on any given day, not least being pure chance.

Reduce the effects of chance

To test any changes to your blog you need to compare results with all other factors being equal, as far as is humanly possible. This is where A/B split testing is useful. Split testing is where you compare one new change to the existing status quo. Your existing template or ad format is the “control”, your mission is to beat the results you get from that control with your change.

This requires two things;

1. Consistency – you need to know that the only thing being tested is the new change element. If other factors leak into the results you will not be able to make good decisions. It is easier to ensure consistency if you randomize what the visitor sees using programming.
2. Good Data – you need to be able to record the differences. Make sure you have good tracking in place. If testing ad formats give each their own channel name, if you are testing templates give all the ads the same channel name, one name for the new layout and another for the control layout, and implement a good tracking solution.

I mention using programming to ensure consistency. If you show randomly one version or another then you have effectively excluded time of day, referrer, content, etc from the equation. If you wait a day or an hour and make a change then wait another hour and change back you might be mistaking the effects of lunchtime traffic for the effects of your new design. If you do not feel comfortable programming you can still be systematic in your approach, you will not get as immediate results and will have to do more manual work.

Some simple code to illustrate how this might be achieved is below. It is a small piece of PHP that simulates a coin toss. The HTML output right now is just heads or tails but it could be anything from a banner to your adsense code.

heads

“;
}
else
{
echo “

tails

“;
};

?>

Many big sites do this sort of testing. Have you ever visited Google or Amazon and seen a difference in the design then gone back and it has changed back? This will be the companies split testing.

Significance and Confidence

Earlier I said it is easy to jump to conclusions. With split testing it is still easy to jump to conclusions but you are limiting the possibility somewhat. You need to wait for a significant amount of data. There is as much art as science with this kind of thing. If you are going to stick to truly scientific approach you will have to wait perhaps a few days or at least several thousand page views. Most people are not going to take that long and very often you will believe you see a difference before then.

There is a free online tool called Splittester that will give you an idea if the results you are seeing are significant or not. It’s there to sell an adwords ebook but you can ignore that aspect and still find it useful!

A lot of people in direct marketing go way further than simple A/B split tests and do multiple tests and use advanced formula to reduce down the amount of time it takes to get an answer. While you might want to try these sorts of things, and there are software packages that are designed to help you run Taguchi and equivalent tests, you must remember there can be an “annoyance” factor. Rapid and varied changes to your blog could be distracting to your visitors and just plain put them off your whole blog.

Summary

Seem like something you would do? Too much hassle? Is it something you already do?

I would be very interested to hear how you test your changes. Do you just post up the change and see what happens or do you have an approach?

We are getting close to releasing the latest version of Performancing for Firefox, version 1.1.1. We really need your help to make sure it is a quality release.

Dowload Performancing Firefox 1.1.1 Beta ! Here

Please follow the instructions for installing the beta and tell us how it works for you.

We especially would like to know if the international encoding is working.

If you have submitted a bug or not please take a look at the fixed bug list, all items on the list were requested by members so we hope this release puts those problems right.

Thanks all for your support.

It’s nice to see the Adsense blog giving out specific optimization advice for bloggers today, but it’s simplistic in the extreme. Darren adds meat to the bones but even so, there is still a little something lacking from the rather generic heat-map-esque pictures Google provided.

If you really want to optimize your Adsense, then using those images as a starting point is an excellent idea, but it should not be the end in my opinion. You need to be using the tools Adsense provide you, and quite likely some third party tools also to really optimize for your own blog, your own audience and your own CTR.

As you can see from the images, those palcements are pretty sensible, and if your at a stage where those kind of recommendations are new to you, then they’re an excellent starting point. From there though, you’ll want to look at a number of slightly more advanced ways of evaluating your ad placements.

Using Google’s Own Tools

For starters, you can start by creating custom channels for each and every type of ad you are giong to use. You’ll find this all on your Adsense control panel, and it’s pretty simple to use. Set up a channel for:

• Each size of ad
• Each type of ad
• Each ad placement
• Each color combination

The idea is that by comparing CTR (click through rate) of various position/size/color combinations, using the heatmaps as a starting point, you should be able to fine tune the way you show your ads to get maximum CTR and thus earnings.

For the record, these days im not a big Adsense user, but the principles havn’t changed much since the last time i took a deep look at this. When I last optimized my Adsense, i managed to take my CTR to 33% higher than previously just based on some neat little tricks I’d read, some intelligent display logic and paying close attention to channels.

Using Third Party Tools

There are also a number of excellent third party tools you can use to delve even deeper into your Adsense optimization. One popular one is this script for use in conjunction with Google Analytics.

My personal favorite would be Adsense Tracker, which, despite the nauseating snake oil seller homepage, is a damn good tool for really discovering what works and what doesn’t with Adsense.

Adsense?

Dont forget though, Adsense is not the only fruit! Your best optimization strategy may be to drop Adsense alltogether and use an entirely different program. Andy Hagans would be the best person to pay attention to in that area, though to get you started, i compiled a big list of blog ad programs a while back that you might find useful.

Do let me know what your experiences are with optimizing adsense, if there are any good tools, or tips you can share that i’ve not covered, or any other points you can ad. The power of the performancing community is the community, so lets hear what you have to say!

Until recently I had not noticed so much but now I realise there is a disease spreading through blogs and I see it getting worse. Most affected are product blogs, particularly in my beloved digital photography niche. What is this disease I am so fearful of?

I am sure this problem affects all types of content, I have no doubt newspapers and trade magazines are the worst offenders. In fact I used to work with people who relied on it.

The problem is using press releases as filler.

As bloggers one of the things we need on a daily (or more) basis is content. Content is the fuel of our endeavour. Press releases seem like ideal content, I can see the temptation.

• Timely
• Informative
• Well written (seemingly)
• Authoritative
• Factual

.. most of all it’s news.

So what is the problem? What’s wrong with that?

For a start, every other blogger has the same press releases so your reader will have seen the self same post for the Nth time today. You are not going to get the reputation as a “go-to blog” just repeating verbatim what everyone else has already regurgitated.

Secondly by just repeating what someone else has said you are just buying into their marketing spin. Is it really a revolution? Or is it more likely the CEO and board are hoping it will revolutionise their creaking bottom line?

Thirdly, if search engine traffic is something you care about, you are not going to show up for this content. PR syndication services are regularly indexed by search engines for their own news services, they will get there first.

Fourth and most important, it’s boring. A press release, no matter how well written, is not a good blog post.

I am not saying you should ignore the press releases, they are often the main source of news in your industry or niche.

Solution?

The answer? Add value!.

People visit your blog to hear from you. They can go to Canons own site or PRWeb to find press releases. Add commentary. Counter the spin. Say why this piece of news is important, or why it’s not important. Start bursting some PR bubbles or hype up the good stuff that you are really excited about.

If you are only going to copy and paste then your blog is spam. Do what you set out to do – write. You have your opinions, share them!

I find it interesting that as bloggers we try to create the best content, the most welcoming and usable designs and more reasons for visitors to return but the majority of us get the best adsense rewards by efficiently driving visitors away.

Nick has touched on the strange relationship bloggers have with adsense but it has started to really concern me.

In the past I created affiliate marketing sites and drove traffic to them with every SEO trick in the book (most of the “tricks” not worth the bits and bytes they were written with). While I made the sites initially to push affiliate products I soon started earning “easy” money from adsense. My whole goal changed to getting traffic in to the site and out through my adsense ads. I quickly learned that I was most successful when people saw my snippet in Google and thought my content would provide what they were looking for but really didn’t. Visitors arriving at the sites would make me most money if they quickly left. My efforts switched from good content to good advertising placement. From quality traffic to maximum traffic. At the point where I peaked in earnings was when I felt the worst about what I was doing.

Writing was what I had got into producing my own websites for. I enjoyed the creativity of it and the feedback I got from people enjoying what I wrote. It wasn’t all bad, I still wrote articles for magazines and online publications, but it still nagged at me that my websites were dangerously approaching spam.

We don’t want spammy blogs do we?

If you follow our advice on metrics you will have installed an adsense tracking script so you can see which pages get the most adsense clicks and where the traffic comes from that converts best. Look at your stats and you will probably see what I do. The majority of your adsense-clicking traffic will be from search engines. You are earning most from turning your site into a revolving door. I don’t know about you but I want to produce valuable blogs. I’m starting to think adsense might be bad for bloggers.

So what’s the answer?

I don’t want to be a profit of doom, it’s more in my nature to be positive so presumably I have an answer?

Actually I do but it’s not easy.

I think we as bloggers who care about quality need to wean ourselves off the GoogleCrack. OK, I don’t mean cold-turkey, and no need to remove it entirely. Just as we don’t agree with building your blog with search engines in mind I think building your blog with adsense in mind might be just as detrimental. Again though, I don’t advocate removing search engine traffic, I don’t advocate removing adsense completely.

The solution seems to me for you to find an income stream that goes against the turnstyle philosophy and fits more with the ideals of a content creator. What revenue can you produce from long term, loyal, motivated fans, rather than transient here today gone tomorrow search visitors?

Going back to my affiliate sites has the answer. The times I made most from affiliate schemes was when I posted good, useful content that customers used to make purchasing decisions. People would buy from newsletters and reviews. Often they would have to see these product mentions several times, they must have been repeat visitors.

I know I have mentioned it before but I think ebooks and other content products are a natural fit, and probably the best bet for writers. It’s a natural progression for a visitor to enjoy your content and then upsell to buying your premium content.

What do you think?

I might feel differently tomorrow, although I doubt it. You might have had similar thoughts already or you might disagree with me. I would be really interested in your thoughts on this, is adsense bad for blogs?