Written on November 19th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 12:11 pm by Darren Rowse
The Cheaters Way to Add Screencasts to Your Posts
The following reader quick tip was submitted by Jon Symons from Step by Step Blog:
Tired of trying to get the kml flashembed plugin to work and not wanting the standard, pop up window anymore, I decided to figure out a low-tech way to embed Camtasia style screencast videos into a blog post.
Make your screencast in the normal way and upload it to your server. You’ll end up with something like:
http://stepbystepblog.com/howto/video/BasicInstallPlugin/BasicInstallPlugin.html
As the address of the video. Then go to code view, in WordPress for your post that you want the video to show up in and add this:
<iframe width=”430″ height=”500″ FRAMEBORDER=”0″ SCROLLING=”NO”
src=”http://stepbystepblog.com/howto/video/BasicInstallPlugin/BasicInstallPlugin.html“></iframe>
Just swap out the URL in the example with your actual video and tweak the size to fit the size of your video and size of your blog page width and you’re in business.
Written on November 19th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 02:11 am by Darren Rowse
More Chitika Ad Optimizing Tips
This post is a continuation of my previous post on optimizing Chitika Ads in which I spoke largely about ad targetting.
Positioning Ads
Good positioning of Chitika ads is similar to that of AdSense in that in general they work well above the fold (with some exceptions - see below) and in areas of your blog where people will naturally look (ie near content).
RPU ads do particularly well at the end of posts and above comments as they are a logical next click once people have finished reading your blog.
SPU (single product units) and MPU ads (multi product units) - my strategy with these two units is to use both on the same page. I generally use a small SPU at the top of posts and MPUs at the bottom of them (where readers might be looking for other options).
Sidebars - I find that Chitika ads don’t tend to work well in sidebars. If you do use them in this position use them at the top of a sidebar where they’ll get more attention than the clutter of the middle of a sidebar.
Cloud Tag Units - These are new units and I’ve not used them but they could be another useful unit to place down the page at the end of posts. I’ve not used them simply because I already have enough ads at the end of my posts and they do not actually earn anything for the first click but instead lead people to your Shoplinc Shop where they earn you money if people click on a product (whereas eMiniMalls, RPUs and AdSense ads earn money on the first click.
Read more on Optimizing Chitika ads in a previous post on the topic here.
Stay tuned for the next post in this series where I’ll talk about using Chitika’s Shoplincs.
This post has been a part of the How to Fine Tune your Blog for Christmas Series.
Written on November 18th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 12:11 pm by Darren Rowse
Be the First to Comment
The following quick tips was submitted by Jarkko Aho from loghomescabin.com.
Be the first to comment on new posts. Just make the post meaningful and everybody who comes to read those comments will see your take on the matter.
People appreciate information that you provide and will visit your site.
Written on November 18th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 06:11 am by Darren Rowse
MyBlogLog Sold to Yahoo! for a reported $10m
TechCrunch is reporting that MyBlogLog (a social media site for bloggers) has sold to Yahoo! for $10m.
This is a pretty impressive sale as MyBlogLog has transitioned from being a blog metrics package to a social media one in a relatively short time. Congrats to the MyBlogLog team.
Update - TechCrunch have posted that they may have been premature in their claims and that MyBlogLog and Yahoo! are in the early stages of negotiation rather than the end ones.
Written on November 18th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 02:11 am by Darren Rowse
How to Improve Your Chitika Ads Performance
As I look towards the end of the year earnings across my blogs I’m particularly excited about the potential for my Chitika Ads. They continue to be my equal highest earner (with AdSense) and this will only increase over the coming weeks.
Chitika (aff) have been providing publishers with advertising options for over a year now and now offer a range of types of ads including:
- eMiniMalls (single product and multi product units)
- Relevant Product Units (RPU)
- Shoplinc
- ShopCloud$ (very new)
What I like about this range of ad units is that between them there is bound to be a format (or more than one) that fits with the design of most blogs and websites.
Note - Keep in mind that Chitika ads are very much ‘product focussed’ and work best on sites that have a topic that is directly related to topic (for example gadgets and consumer electronics, clothes, home and garden, toys etc)
So how do you optimize Chitika ads?
Many of the principles that we talked about with AdSense ads in previous posts are also relevant for Chitika ads (particularly those on Positioning, Design) however there are a number of things that you can do to help with Chitika ad performance (I’ll particularly focus upon eMiniMalls and Relevant Product Units here). First lets take a look at the art of targeting Chitika Ads and the next post we’ll look at some other Chitika optimization techniques:
Targeting Ads
As with AdSense, one of the keys with Chitika advertising is that you get ads that are as relevant as possible to the content that you have on your blog.
I cannot emphasize this enough, the blogs where it works best for me are where I write about a particular product and where Chitika ads for that exact product appear around it. Obviously these work well because readers are Actively seeking information on the product and once I’ve given them information they are naturally curious about how much it costs and where they might buy it - when they see the ad they naturally click.
Targeting particular ads with Chitika takes a little more work than it does with AdSense as in most cases you won’t use Chitika in contextual mode (for example on pages where AdSense also runs you are not allowed to use another contextual ad system). This means you need to manually target ads to the topics that you’re writing about using their ability to add keywords.
This sounds quite an involved process - however it need not be if you don’t add individual ads on each post but rather insert the ads into your blog’s templates.
Use Titles to target Ads - the most effective way that I’ve found to target relevant Chitika ads is to use the titles of your posts as a keyword for the ad (this works for both eMinimalls and RPU ads).
To do this on a WordPress or Movable Type blog you simply use the title tags in the keyword part of the Chitika ad code and insert the code in the relevant parts of your individual post templates. Then as you write posts you need to keep in mind that your titles trigger ads for posts - this means your ads will have to include good keywords (product/brand related ones work best).
Categories - note every post you write will have a title that directly triggers ads. As a back up choose a category for your ads that is relevant to your blog. Chitika have added quite a few categories to choose from in the past 12 months so hopefully there is something there that is relevant.
Tomorrow I’ll continue with more tips on optimizing your Chitika ads but in the mean time you might like to see my previous post on the topic of Chitika eMiniMalls Tips.
Written on November 17th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 10:11 pm by Darren Rowse
5 Essential OSX Blogging Tools
Glenn Wolsey, writer for Macguide Magazine and author of http://www.GlennWolsey.com expresses his views about the top applications for blogging on the Mac. - Thanks to Glenn for this guest post.
Blogging can be a hugely rewarding and satisfying hobby, or in some cases job. But it does have it’s tough times, especially when it comes to composing, publishing, and announcing your posts. Fortunately for those users on the Mac platform there are some great tools to streamline your blogging process - let’s take a look.
Step One. Collect News - NewsFire
NewsFire is one of the best looking application on the Mac in my opinion. My RSS reader of choice, NewsFire is one of David Wants many applications, and in my opinion, his best.
NewsFire’s layout is very simple and easy to use, which allows you to streamline your RSS reading process and flick through hundreds of feeds seamlessly.
Step Two. Compose - Ecto
Ecto is my most valuable blogging tool that I have, and it’s Darren Rowse’s too. Without this application blogging would take much longer, and be much harder. With all the small yet great features it will end up saving your hours of time, especially if you manage multiple blogs.
If you are not familiar with Ecto, it’s an application which allows you to compose blog posts locally, then save them as drafts to edit later. You can use Ecto while you offline so it’s a great way to store loads of material ready to post when your creative side doesn’t feel like coming outside.
Ecto also features some nice time saving features such as drag and drop image placement and uploading. While your editing your entry simply drag images from your machine into the text area, place them as you like, and when you hit publish the images will be uploaded to your server and placed just as you had them into your blog post.
For those lucky enough to be on an Intel Mac, there is a specific Intel build of Ecto you can download here.
Step Three. Resize Images - ImageShackle
When I’m blogging I like to include images in posts. They can be very handy to help explain steps I’m explaining to the reader, and they make the post much more appealing for the “scanner” type reader.
Image Shackle lets you resize an image quickly, and is the easiest way to make your photos the right size.
Step Four. Announce - Pukka and Pingoat
After you’ve written and published your blog post you need to get the word out. The first step is to go over to Pingoat.com and ping your blog, Pingoat will ping around 30 different sites from one universal location, saving you time from traveling to all the sites and pinging yourself.
Pukka is in my opinion the best tool to post to your del.icio.us account from OSX. Simply drag the URL of your post out of Safari (or your chosen web browser) onto the Pukka icon in the dock, add a title, description, and tags, and click done. Your link will be submitted to del.icio.us with a satisfying “ping” sound.
So there you have it, 5 Mac OSX application which will help you blog more quickly, more efficiently, and with more fun.
What blogging tools do you like to use? Let us know in the comments below.
Written on November 17th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 03:11 pm by Darren Rowse
Speedlinking 17 November 2006
A few links from the last few days RSS feeds:
- Ben Bleikamp writes about how to setup WordPress locally on your Mac
- David Peralty writes a post asking how much is a post worth? and gives a few different options on how bloggers ca be paid
- Brian shares 10 ways to get more blog subscribers
- Over at b5media we launched a new business channel this week - more relevant to enternetusers readers is the launch of a new Business and Blogging blog by Des Walsh and two of my favorite blogs being added to the network - CopyBlogger. So far the channel is just 7 blogs (some fun ones in the list) but there’ll be quite a few more in the coming weeks
- Insightful post by Scrivs titled - Eating your own Dog Food - and asks whether you are someone who actually uses your own blog?
- Instablogs launched it’s new communities section this week and is on my list of things to check out when I get home.
Written on November 17th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 01:11 pm by Darren Rowse
Introducing ChickAdvisor and Throng
Jeremy, Mark and I spent a pleasant evening tonight with the founders of ChickAdvisor (Ali and Alex de Bold). I’d not come across the site before but it’s an innovative and fun site for women looking for reviews and looking to review products, services, restaurants, deals etc - all for women (ie it’s advice FOR ‘chicks’ not ON how to understand them ‘chicks’ (although that’s a whole other niche).
While ChickAdvisor isn’t really a blog as such it does involve blogging and shares a lot of the same space. It’s a pretty interActive space with readers able to vote on each others reviews and add their opinions on what others have said.
While quite different in many ways - it sort of reminded me of another site that I’ve recently come across - Throng.
Throng is run by another husband wife team (Rachel and Regan Cunliffe - Rachel designed this blog) and is a community site that involves it’s readers in generating content around the topic of New Zealand TV shows.
Throng users get blogs, there are bookmarking features and a forum.
It’s nice to see these sorts of sites popping up around the blogging space and gaining traction. I suspect we’ll see more and more of this in the coming year or two - as blogging, social bookmarking, social media and more collide around different verticals.
Written on November 17th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 12:11 pm by Darren Rowse
The Most Important Thing a Semi-enternetusers Should Remember
The following reader quick tip was submitted by Bald Man from baldness.
Let’s face it: Most of us aren’t enternetuserss. Some of us don’t aspire to be. We’re students or home makers. We’ve got day jobs we love. For whatever reason, we’re semi-enternetuserss. We’re not after a new career; we just want a little extra money on the side.
For us there is one rule to rule them all: Have fun. A successful blog is one to which you post regularly over the long haul. It is essential, therefore, to keep your blogging in perspective. If your blog adds stress to your life, then you won’t keep at it.
So, listen up, semi-enternetuserss. When blogging for fun and profit, remember:
Fun first! (The profit will follow.)
Written on November 17th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 06:11 am by Darren Rowse
Mesh Meetup
I had a great time at the Mesh meetup last night in Toronto.
It was great to meet a few old friends and a few new ones - putting a lot of names to faces including Tony from Deep Jive Interests, Sacha Chua, Stuart MacDonald, Mark Evans (whose office I’m writing this from at the moment), Rob Schaumer (who hugged me - because I in my previous post about the event I asked for hugs due to the coldness), Leesa Barnes, Vince Chan, Rob Hyndman, Yaro Starak and more.
Canadians are a friendly bunch!
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