Performancing Services

Today, we are glad to open up PerformancingAds to the public. PerformancingAds is an ad marketplace for the 125×125 format, which has slowly become the format of choice for bloggers.

Although there are many new features in the pipeline, and improvements are being made daily, we have been successfully running the network in private beta on dozens of high-volume blogs and websites for months and are glad to open it up for public use.

Here are 10 reasons we think bloggers should give PerformancingAds a try.

1. It’s open to all publishers

That’s right. We accept popular, well-established blogs as well upcoming blogs. If you have a blog or website and want to feature 125×125 ads on your site, you can join PerformancingAds. And the more your site grows, the more exposure it gets in the marketplace.

2. Create and book your own ads

In addition to selling ads, all blog publishers can book their own 125×125 ads. You can use PerformancingAds to promote affiliate offers on your site. Or maybe even promote flagship content like this:

3. Expose your site to more advertisers

We chose to have advertisers buy in 1 week increments for a reason. It lowers the thresold for advertiser entry, increasing the number of advertisers in the system, and ultimately making you more money.

4. Be part of the largest 125×125 marketplace on the Internet

We are quickly becoming the largest (and most diverse) network of publishers for the 125×125 ad format. Get exposure in the very first place that advertisers will go when looking to book 125×125 ads. Some of the great sites in our marketplace include Freelance Writing Gigs, Geeks are Sexy, Candy Addict and Business Pundit.

5. Free ad space through our publisher exchange program

All publishers in our ad network earn credits either by A) selling ads or B) showing other publisher ads in empty spots. Credits are then spent by getting free ad space on similar sites. It’s a win-win situation. Everyone gets more exposure.

6. Built by publishers for publishers

PerformancingAds was designed from the ground up by established publishers. We built it with you in mind.

7. An amazing affiliate program

Can you say recurring income? Did you know that the vast majority of affiliate programs on the net only pay you a flat fee. Each month you have to start over from scratch. With PerformancingAds affiliate program, you have the opportunity to build the ultimate source of passive income.

8. We are working for YOU

We have a professional ad sales team in place that is agressively pursuing ad partnerships for the sites in our network. Joining PerformancingAds is like getting your own direct ad sales team.

9. Get paid quickly

You get paid on the 1st of the month immediately following the advertisers’ purchase. No waiting for 30 or 60 days.

10. Make more money

It’s simple. You want to make more money. PerformancingAds gives you the chance to get the most exposure possible for your 125×125 ad space.

Get started with PerformancingAds today!

Performancing has spent the first half of 2008 building strong relationships with advertisers across a variety of niches. We are now in a position to offer certain blogs and other websites direct ad sales representation.

Requirements

• Topics: Tech, Entertainment, Auto, Business/Finance, Sports
• Traffic: Minimum of 100,000 pageviews per month

What we offer

• We go direct to the advertiser and you get more money
• High quality, big brand advertisers
• We optimize the ads you run to get you more money from your traffic
• Non-exclusive: you are free to run ads from any network you’d like

Interested?

If you have a website that meets the requirements listed above and are interested in having Performancing sell ads for your site, please contact Ryan Caldwell to get the ball rolling – [email protected]

According to an article in the NY Times, Google is finally taking steps to use some of the massive amounts of data it’s collected on users online behaviour to serve up ads. Instead of relying on data that is a few days or perhaps a month old, Google is now stepping it up a notch by serving ads which are relevant to the last 3-5 search queries a user has submitted.

For example, if I performed a Google search for “Caribbean”, then 5 minutes later, performed a search for “scuba gear” Google would begin to display ads related to vacations in the Caribbean or for scuba diving equipment. Cookies need not apply here as the browser usually contains data related to previous search queries as well as previously browsed websites during it’s session which is the data Google is tapping into.

This is certainly one way of showing relevant ads, but its kind of creepy if you ask me. It’s only a matter of time before we go to Google.com, begin typing a search string into Google and in real-time, advertising pops up based on keywords and the entire search string.

What do you folks think about this experimental new way of advertising? I don’t use Google Adsense so I’d like to know, does the technology Google use to increase its ad revenue trickle down into Adense and Adwords? If so, wouldn’t this increase your revenue?

What is the problem with having an account on MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr, Pownce ect? You have to update each account manually, one by one. Thank goodness Ping.fm is around to take the hassle out of individually updating your status on these social networking, publishing platforms.

Ping.fm is a service which makes updating your social networks a breeze. You can update your status from anywhere using AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, WAP, iPhone, SMS and E-mail. So far, the services Ping.fm supports are Xanga, Plurk, Plaxo, MySpace, LiveJournal, LinkedIn, hi5, facebook, brightkite, blogger, bebo, twitter, tumblr, pownce, Mashable and Jaiku. This pretty much covers the gamut in terms of popular social networks/publishing platforms right now.

The service is currently in beta, but if you would like to signup and give it a try, use the beta code “tastyping” and this will allow you to create an account.

Once inside Ping.fm, you’ll see a list of social services. In order to automatically ping these services through Ping.fm, you’ll need to setup each individual account. This mostly consists of typing in your username and password for each service. While setting up your account, you can choose whether to use that specific service for Status updates for for micro blogging.

According to Ping.fm,

Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and LinkedIn do status. If you are using these services, you should be doing status updates.

If you were using blogger, livejournal, pownce, and tumblr, you would be doing a microblog.

It is very unlikely you would want to send the exact same message to a microblog and a status service. Even if you wanted to update both, the wording of the message should be different.

Ping.fm also has something called a Trigger system. The trigger system gives you the ability to post to specific services without broadcasting to all of them at once. When crafting your message within the Ping.fm web interface, keep these triggers in mind:

@s message – Posts a status update
@b title^body – Posts a blog
@m message – Posts a micro-blog

If you are posting a blog, be sure to include the ^ seperator in your message or it won’t be delivered to your blogging services.

As far as links go, if you don’t want your links shortened, you can put a * before the link. Links shorter than 20 characters will not be shortened no matter how hard you try.

When testing out the service using my Twitter account, I noticed it took at least 60 seconds for the post to show up. However, once the Ping.fm queue was processed, the message showed up within Twitter with no problem.

For those of you with multiple social networking accounts, this service is most likely a god send. The Ping.fm team has vowed to continue to add support for new services as they become popular. A good example of this development is their recent added support for Plurk and MyMashable. Considering you can configure a number of different tools to post updates, keeping everything synched up between the different sites and services should no longer be a problem. Excellent tool to use if you are a blogger with a substantial social networking profile.

PicApp—an Israeli startup owned by PicScout with staff in San Francisco and Toronto—wants to provide bloggers with free high quality images while protecting photographer’s rights as well. The startup has been making some noise recently—PicApp was recently featured on TechCrunch. Coincidentally, all seems to be going well for PicApp.

However, I still had questions. David Peralty, Community Manager for PicApp, had answers:

James Mowery: So, David, what is it that you do at PicApp?

David Peralty: I am the Community Manager for PicApp. Basically, they hired someone from their target audience to be the bridge between the company and the potential user base.

I work on the forum, communicate via e-mail, and work with bloggers interested in PicApp to provide them the best experience possible. I also work within the company making sure the right people see the feedback being submitted and pushing to make sure it is all acted upon.

JM: Can you please explain to everyone what PicApp is aiming to accomplish?

DP: PicApp would like to become the number one source for bloggers looking for free, high quality stock images. They especially see themselves as an amazing source for editorial images, as well as creative images.

JM: There are many sites available that allow the uploading and sharing of images. This forces me to ask the question of what makes PicApp different from other services like iStockPhoto or Flickr?

DP: This question sort of connects to the previous question, as the differentiation is part of what PicApp is aiming to accomplish. Flickr provides bloggers with a vast number of creative images, which are useful, but dealing with proper attribution and licensing can be frustrating. Also, Flickr doesn’t have many editorial images.

If you need an image from a recent event, or of a celebrity, it can be very difficult to find what you need, when you need it. iStockPhoto has the same issue when it comes to editorial images. And did I mention that PicApp is free? Not having to purchase credits and keep track of such things is a godsend in my opinion.

JM: Previously, I have noticed some resentment by some photographers towards bloggers. Bloggers frequently use images without asking for permission or providing credit—it is illegal, after all. Does PicApp help resolve this issue, and if so, how?

DP: PicApp definitely helps deal with this issue by having Getty Images, Corbis and other great partners allow us to use their images inside of our flash embed system. We work to protect their images, and they provide us with the best image content in the world to distribute for free.

JM: In what ways would your typical blogger benefit from using PicApp?

DP: There are so many great ways bloggers can benefit from using PicApp, the first thing that comes to mind is the lack of licensing or copyright issues that PicApp has, reducing the amount of worry that bloggers will have when finding images.

The second great way that PicApp can benefit bloggers is the speed in which they can get our editorial images, as our providers are always sending us new images, allowing bloggers to get images of events in the same day. This was very apparent to bloggers who covered the Cannes Film Festival as we were providing same day images to dozens of bloggers covering the event. This made their posts more relevant and interesting.

The third, and in my opinion, the coolest way that the typical blogger can benefit from PicApp is to sign up and then subscribe to RSS feeds of their searches. Say you are a celebrity blogger talking about Britney Spears every day. You can do a search for Britney Spears and subscribe to an RSS feed in your favourite feed reader, and then whenever we have a new image of Britney Spears, you will be notified.

This could help bloggers know about an event before others, and provide them with a complimentary image quickly.

JM: Which blogging platforms are supported, and is PicApp restricted to being used on blogs only?

DP: We have been continually testing and improving our support for various blogging platforms, and so far the only limitation has been with blogging platforms that don’t let JavaScript and Flash embed systems like WordPress.com.

We are hard at work on extending our support though, so we can be as inclusive as possible. We are even working to support desktop blogging applications in a better way, and we are really excited about that.

JM: I have noticed that membership is optional on PicApp. Are there any advantages to signing up?

DP: Signing up to PicApp allows you to create lightboxes, or basically folders of images you like, as well as the ability to subscribe to the RSS feeds of your searches like I mentioned above. It will also give you special access to any events we hold, and plugins we create for various publishing software as we release it.

JM: What has been the general reaction by photographers that have had their photos displayed on blogs through PicApp?

DP: We did have an issue where images not wholly owned by the various image company were shown, and photographers were not impressed, but most are excited to see their images get wider exposure.

Since fixing the issue with the images, we now only show images wholly owned by the various providers. We would love to see photographers working with us to continue to expand the reach of their great images.

JM: How are photographs selected for inclusion within PicApp?

DP: The images that we show in PicApp are provided by our partners like Getty Images, Corbis and others. We don’t pick and choose between the images that they send us as we want to create as large of an image inventory as possible.

We are continually looking for new image partners to expand our library and want to find images to fill just about every niche online.

JM: In your opinion, why do so many people enjoy seeing images within blog posts? What is the point?

DP: Images attract attention. Images can easily convey emotion, and, of course, there is that old saying that images are worth a thousand words. Images are also very necessary for certain types of blogs, as text alone can’t convey the situation that an image can easily show.

Events, sports, and celebrities are things we like to see with our own eyes, rather than just having them described to us, and I think images are a great way to show such content in an easy and accessible way.

JM: What enhancements can we expect in the future from PicApp?

DP: Like I mentioned before, we are always expanding our image sources, adding new providers, and finding images for pretty much every bloggers need. So if we don’t have the image you need today, we might have it tomorrow.

Also, we will be working on better support for desktop blogging applications like Windows Live Writer.

I can’t say too much yet, but we aren’t out of beta yet, and our next major release is due out soon.

JM: How confident are you that PicApp will succeed?

DP: I wouldn’t have left a perfectly good job as the Head of Marketing at Splashpress Media if I didn’t know that PicApp could be very successful. I think they have found an area that bloggers needed a solution for, and they only need to listen to bloggers to make a business for themselves.

I am very excited about how fast everything is moving in the company, and after my first idea was positively received and implementation began, I knew I had made the right choice joining the PicApp team.

JM: Is it really true you spend around 14 hours a day blogging?

DP: Before joining the PicApp team, my average day required me to be working on blogging for an average of twelve hours a day, with my longer day going upwards of sixteen hours.

This was in part due to the work I felt compelled to do on my own projects as well as work related projects.

When you are passionate about something, the amount of time you have to put into it each day doesn’t matter.

David Peralty was a full-time professional blogger for the past three years. He previously worked with Bloggy Network, dailypixel, and Splashpress Media before joining PicApp. A proud Canadian, he went to college for Computer Network and Technical Support. He is also a big supporter of WordPress.

David still manages to put in time towards blogging and the occasional podcast. He writes at EXtra for Every Publisher (XFEP), and XFEP is a great resource that the Performancing community should check out and subscribe to. He also has his own personal blog—DavidCubed. The WordPress Podcast missed David after he moved on from being a co-host, but he has recently appeared on WordPress Weekly. Finally, David previously wrote for our sister blog Blogging Pro.

If you own websites/ blogs and plan to maybe sell them someday, here’s something sobering. Google keeps flexing it’s muscle, and engineer Matt Cutts (the closest thing to a Google PR person and public “voice”) is saying that if you sell your site, there’s a consequence to the buyer: Google will cut the ranking down to zero.

Since Google has been registered as a domain registrar for a while now, they have access to your domain’s whois records. So they know when a domain changes hands. Even if you use “privacy” on whois records, they can track you through use of Google Adsense, (Google) Feedburner, Google Analytics, and who knows what else. Unless your sites are Google-free.

Is It a Big Deal?

Now keep in mind that this is apparently only being done if a domain changes hands AND changes topics. Whether they should be doing this or not is a moot question. They can and are. However, there are ways around this, something Gabriel Goldenberg at SEO ROI discusses.

However, as many top bloggers will tell you, good content is really what you want to focus on, not page rank. Even if you buy up a site, don’t worry about the Google’s declaration. Focus on the content. Supplement your text with images, diagrams, podcasts, video. Divide up your longer articles with h2, h3, h4 headings, and bold/strong your keywords. All of these help contribute to your content being deemed “of quality”. Your readers are ultimately going to decide whether or not that’s true. So the actual content has to be of value to someone, but not necessarily everyone. (Tangent: a bit of advice from Cynthia Morris at Copyblogger for finishing work.)

Building Your Site’s Profile

On the promoting side of things, check out the great audio interview that VKI Studios did with Todd Malicoat, aka Stuntdubl. It’s about 45 minutes but it’s worth listening to Todd’s expert linkbuilding and baiting advice.

Top blogger Guy Kawasaki briefly echoes the “good content” angle in a print interview at TopRank. (He also talks briefly, in response to a question, about he’d run Twitter if he owned it.)

Finally, if you’re using social media, take in Elizabeth Able’s guest advice at SEO Scoop, about building a social media profile. Her V.A.S.T. (Visible, Available, Social, Trustworthy) advice is aimed at Stumbleupon users, but is valid for other social sites. In fact, just the section headings alone lit a bulb over my head, making me realize how incorrectly I’ve been using social media. If the latter isn’t working for you, maybe the article will shed some light for you.

Do you love Twitter enough to write mini-stories with it? If you can produce a story (not poetry) in EXACTLY 140 characters, Twitter it, then post the link to it at Copyblogger’s Twitter Writing Contest page. You’ll be eligible to win a 4Gb iPod Nano. If you want to donate prizes to this contest, you can post info there too.

Twitter is becoming so popular that it’s gaining converts in droves, creating buzz in the blogosphere, and spawning popular Twitter apps/clients such as Twhirl (and serving up 500 errors at times – presumably when it can’t handle the load). One of my Hive colleagues, Brian from Candy Addict, is being interviewed by Donny Deutsch for The Big Idea TV talk show this morning. So he set up Twitter on his mobile phone so that he could Twitter the experience before and after the interview. You can go one step further and livecast. And then there’s Twitpitching to propose an idea to someone.

Or if you’re into infosumption via Twitter, you could use microblogging to build presence – especially if you’re an entertainer – hunt for jobs, or track who is promoting your articles or otherwise  linking to you, track poltical events, of get the news before big media gets it. If you’re addicted to data, you might simply want to visualize the Twitter universe.

If you’re not sure who to follow, visit Favrd, Who Should I Follow,  Twitterholic for starters. Twitterholic lists the top 100 Twitterers (based on number of followers). Who Should I Follow makes suggestions after you supply your Twitter name. It also has a location slider, so that you can supposedly filter the member list down to people near to you (based on your IP address and where that maps to geographically). Favrd lists “interesting things” based on Twitter members/ threads that have been favorited.

So how are you using Twitter to be more productive or build your presence online? If you aren’t using it yet, choose a Twitter client and give it a go.

If you’re not going out this weekend to see The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, maybe you’ll want some reading material. (Or you could go see a recent release like Iron Man – but skip Speed Racer, in case you’re expecting it to be as good as the Wachowski Brothers’ earlier effort, The Matrix.)

It’s still arguable whether or not bloggers are generally opinionated, but some are definitely introverts. Chris Garrett gives some advice on breaking out of your solitude – something that’s necessary for online success.

One way to ease into being less introverted is to speak in front of people. (I was incredibly shy before becoming a teaching assistant in college.) If you don’t want to do that, try talking to a video camera set up on a tripod. (Or just start with podcasting. Both are less intimidating than public speaking.) Start with product or movie reviews, or a simple vodcast about something you know. (Write a rough script, to keep yourself focused.) Review the recordings and if something’s good, pop it up on YouTube. (Then use Google’s new YouTube Insight tool, to study the breakdown of viewers.)

You could also combine web cam video of yourself with screencasting, to educate your readers about blogging, how you produce content, how they can comment constructively, or even request information from you. Or do an excercise where you answer 20 questions about whether to stop blogging. As before, set up a video camera on a tripod, then review the recording sessions. Other things to talk about: whether the recession has hit the Internet [via Xfep], whether you should self-brand yourself as a freelancer,  getting naked as a blogger, or how great Twitter is as a broadcasting tool.

Another outlet for being outgoing is to drop video comments on the sites that allow it. Thanks to Disqus and Seesmic, there’s a WordPress plugin that allows WP blogs to enable video commenting (or use Magnify to create a video community). Personally, I’m not big on the idea of video comments, but if you are, don’t forget to brush your teeth first – in case you have some chive stuck in your gums.