blogvp

There’s some news in the pipeline that Chitika will be expanding to the United Kingdom on Monday, Nov 27.

They’ll be using geo-targetting to pull that off.

France, Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands coming later in the week.

chitika, eminimalls, uk, england, France, Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands

Don’t ask me how I found this, but domenica is blogging directly from church:

Hello…I’m writing this while the preacher’s giving his sermon. Yes, I’m at Church right now. I’m supposed to listen to his words, but the sermon is so plain BLAH..BLAH..! The preacher just put overhead projector slides, telling all sort of plain practical jokes, which are not
witty at all. Jesus why you let him be a preacher?He’s just a wannabe stand-up comedian.
Lol…I’m commiting sin while at Church! To help my self so to stay awake, I’m blogging from my Nokia and I’m doing blah..blah…like him, the boring preacher

Maybe the preacher needs to subscribe to her blog and take some advice.

church, blogging, blogging3.0

I’ve found the biggest mistake you can make that will get you screwed with Google. Basically if you do this one thing, you’re pretty much out of Google.

What am I talking about?

Spamming Google with Keywords

What makes me so sure? Well I’ve been following Matt Cutts for a while now and that seems to be THE thing that ticks him and the google people off.

Your best bet then is to just focus on delivering good content, and forget about all of the keyword stuffing tricks.

Good Titles + Good Text Copy = Success with Google

Also, that goes to say with all of the sites that run AJAX, where Google can’t read the text because it’s only activated when the user clicks on something, you aren’t getting the best of google either. Give google what it want: nice text.

google, seo

So I’m browsing the regular blogs that I read and I was thinking… what’s a good idea to blog about. A lot of different thoughts went through my head and then I thought about doing a local blog and seeing how that turns out.

What I’m starting is the Boise Real Estate News with the focus on the local real estate market.

Thoughts to keep in mind:

• Visitors - there will be visitors that are local, but I’m betting that a big chunk of the traffic will be people from out of town who are looking to get into the hot Boise real estate market.
• Existing “market” - Overture keywords tells me that there were 5108 for “boise real estate” last month, and this is only for that keyword and only on that engine. How much traffic is google sending?
• Domain name - a quick search revealed that the domain boiserealestatenews.com was available. This was a good choice because it has the main keywords that I’ll be optimizing for in the domain name and the “news” implies something fresh and new all of the time, it’s “news” right?
• Always updating and fresh - I’ve set up a script to automatically pull news from Google:News and format it nicely and put it up on the site. I’m currently sticking to “boise” and “real estate” from the news section of Google. This will make sure that I always fulfill th “news” portion of the domain.
• Original content - I’m thinking of how I might do this. One idea that seems like a good idea is to contact the local real estate agents and ask them to submit article for us to publish and include their information at the bottom after the article. I’ll also look into getting real estate article from ariticle databases.
• Competition for #1 spot - because the real estate is really hot in the boise area there’s a lot of competition, but I’m not worried. Most of the sites are home-brewed with Frontpage or something similar to that. The only thing that is going for the existing sites is that they have been around longer then my site.

Doug Edwards, “From 1999 to 2005 was Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management for Google” is wrring a blog on his time at Google. It is a really interesting read.

He was friendly and relaxed and didn’t laugh at the scraps of the conversational Russian I was able to summon when he asked about my time in Siberia. Finally, he leaned forward for the big test.

“I’m going to give you five minutes,” he told me. “When I come back, I want you to explain to me something complicated that I don’t already know.” He then rolled out of the room toward the snack area. I looked at Cindy. “He’s very curious about everything,” she told me. “You can talk about a hobby, something technical, whatever you want. Just make sure it’s something you really understand well.”

I would recommend you go and read it all.

Xooglers, google

Just received notification from Google Analytics that they are not able to add new account or new profiles at least until the end of November. Here’s the actual email:

First, due to extremely high demand, we’ve temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. This allows us to focus on our primary objective–to provide a great user experience for our existing users.

Next, here is current information on the most common questions we’re receiving:

1. The ‘Check Status’ button is being reworked to check for properly installed tracking code. This should be fixed by the end of November.

2. The ‘+Add Profile’ link has been temporarily removed until we increase capacity. We’ll alert all current users when the feature is restored.

3. While we increase capacity, you may see longer than normal delays in data showing up in your reports. All data continues to be collected and no data has been lost.

I’m glad I signed up right away and added many of my sites, but the performance is very slow. Maybe they should start putting out those trailer server farms out there.

google+analytics

Happy Thanksgiving and God bless all of my readers!!

It’s been a great year and the next one should be even better.

Chanding places, changes your thinking…. Darren mentioned some places where he blogged from:

- friends houses - I have a mate’s house who I occasionally spend the day at so that we can work in the same room - it’s nice to have the company - even though he’s not a blogger I find our conversations lead me to try new things on my blogs
- net cafes - I did this for a day recently when my broadband went down
- public libraries - I did this for a week 18 months back and it totally gave me a new perspective on blogging - once I got past the frustration of having to book a computer and blog in one hour blocks of time
- other rooms in the house - I have a bit of a daily rhythm now where I move rooms during the day to keep things fresh - bed, office, couch, kitchen table, back yard - wireless is my friend
- local cafes - I have one cafe that i regularly take my laptop to. They don’t have wifi but I just write there (offline) and upload later. I find it’s a great place to blog without the distractions of incoming email and IM.

So I’m going to add some of my favorite place to blog or just bring my laptop to:

• College Libraries - this is always a fun place, although it’s usually very quite, during the two weeks leading up to the finals it’ll be pretty full. The atmosphere is usually really good for writing.
• Starbucks - They have the T-zones provided by T-Mobile, and if you’re already a customer of Tmobile, it’s only $19 per month for any of their access points for unlimited usage.
• Bookstores - Most of these have internet already also, and usually you can get some nice coffee too, and if you need to look something up or stir your brain cells, you can browse different subjects to get the mind going.
• Wardriving - I don’t know if this is legal or not where you might be living, but you can just turn on your laptop and drive around seeing what networks you can pick up and where you can just park and have net access for blogging.

What places do you go to get away and blog/use the net?

wifi, blogging, places

Technorati has launched their Mini version.

What does it do?

Basically it searches Technorati every 60 seconds and displays the results in a small window so you can stay on top of the latest updates as they come in. Pretty Interesting.

Per SolutionWatch

technorati, mini

This kind of reminds me when I was in my teens and was not sure who I was, but Open Source Media has changed their name back to Pajamas Media.

I’m not a big fan of their site no matter what they call themselves, “dry reading” comes to mind when I think of them.

open+source+media, pajamas+media

The way Click-To-Call works is you click on the little “phone” next to an ad, enter your phone, Google calls you and connects you to the advertiser.

I wonder if they are going to have these on the Adsense ads. Probably after they see that it works on their searches, the greed will drive them to release it to all of us.

google, adsense, click-to-call

You can now add to your site. Google has added a page with more information here.

UPDATE: I have modified the image that Google provided to be the size like all of the other buttons. You can go ahead and copy it and use it on your site.

google

Chitika writes:

First things first:

What do we mean by “curiosity clicks”?

So called “curiosity clicks” are those clicks generated by users more interested in checking out the eMiniMalls interface, or just curious about the products being promoted, etc., as opposed to clicks on merchant links leading to the respective merchant sites where users can directly purchase the product if they choose to.

So, does this mean we are now filtering and/or discounting “curiosity clicks”?

No. We are not filtering or rejecting any curiosity clicks. To help minimize (please note, not filter or reject) potential curiosity clicks we recently updated the eMiniMalls units by removing the link from the product title in the eMiniMalls interface. Why? Because initial data on the resulting sales conversions suggested that clicks on product titles and product images are leading to very low sales conversions when compared to the clicks on the merchant listings.

If the service is based on a cost-per-click model why are “tweaking” the system to increase the “sales” on the merchants’ side?

Our goal is to make this impulse-merchandising model based eMiniMalls program the leading source of revenue for publishers and also the most effective channel for merchants to promote merchandise online. Merchants who see good return on investment (in the form of sales conversions) will be motivated to add additional product inventory to the eMiniMalls service and will help expand the program enabling us to in turn better help our publisher clients monetize the traffic to their respective websites.

That’s all fine, but what are we doing NOW to address the resulting dip in click-through rates and hence revenue?

We already completed updating the units to promote the revenue-earning merchant links more prominently resulting in significant improvements in the CTR (after the initial dip due to the first round of optimizations to minimize “curiosity clicks”). We are monitoring the effects of each and every update to the service and we will continue to explore ways in which we can help maximize the revenue to our clients.

Does this mean we are not interested in encouraging “curiosity clicks”?

No. We are very much interested in giving the users as much information as possible about the product being promoted. However, our goal is to leverage the interactive nature of our eMiniMalls to help summarize as much information about the product as possible to the end users (i.e., the visitors to your website).

To start with, we are working on optimizing eMiniMalls layout such that users will be able to access product related information directly within our interactive eMiniMalls units.

chitika, eminimalls

There is a lot of talk on the web currently about Chitika eMiniMalls and the recent news from the company. They are implimenting “curiosity clicks” elimination.

To help filter out so-called ?curiosity clicks? that typically do not lead to conversions on the merchants? side, we updated the eMiniMalls units to drive qualified clicks. Hence, eMiniMalls users will notice a dip in the overall click through rate (and hence the overall revenue).

Which I’m not sure what it means except that there are a lot of webmasters and publishers that are not happy. I pulled them from two of my blogs because they were not worth the small dollars I got from them. And it reduced the “spammy” look. Once they improve, I’ll test them further.

It would be really nice if they keep the publishers in the loop and were more open.

chitika, eminimalls

So I got the email today from YPN, and they are telling me that since I’m already in their beta program I can now add ads to my RSS feeds.

We’re pleased to announce another method for you to maximize your revenue and bring value to your content properties: Advertising in RSS feeds is now available through the Yahoo! Publisher Network.

This new product feature allows you to place Yahoo! Search Marketing ads within your RSS feeds. The ads that appear may be relevant to a specific article or post, or to your content in general.

So I did some reading, and they only display ads when the full post is being shared, not just the summary. I’m not sure how I feel about this, since I don’t send full text on any of my blogs. YPN RSS ads can only be displayed on Movable Type and Wordpress platforms.

YPN, Yahoo+Publisher+Network