Written on November 18th, 2005 at 08:11 pm by Darren Rowse

12.2% Of ‘Top’ Blogs use RSS Advertising

RSS 13 comments

Peter has been digging around the Feedster Top 500 list (a list of ‘top blogs’ that was going to be updated monthly but hasn’t changed since August) again and has an interesting statistic - 12.2% Of the List have RSS Advertising in their feeds. This is in contrast to the 65% of this same list that Peter previously found to have some sort of Advertising on their blogs.

I’m not convinced by RSS Ads to this point. I have them operating on a few of my blogs (including enternetusers) but I find that in comparison to other forms of advertising they are pretty low on the conversion front.

I’m interested to hear how others find them though.

update: RSS talk must be in the air because no sooner had I published this that I found Nick’s post exploring the age old question of whether to post full or partial RSS feeds.

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Written on November 18th, 2005 at 08:11 am by Darren Rowse

Linked in

Blogging Tools and Services 15 comments

Dave Taylor has a post on “Etiquette for LinkedIn and the Professional Networking World” which I found interesting.

I’ve actually been using LinkedIn for a few months now and while I understand it’s features and functions I’m yet to find that it’s actually been much use to me. I’m interested to hear how other people have used it. I can see it’s a pretty powerful tool on many fronts - but I’m just curious to see if people actually use it for much more than just seeing how many people they can connect with?

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Written on November 17th, 2005 at 11:11 pm by Darren Rowse

Chitika eMiniMalls - How to Increase CTR

Chitika eMiniMalls 48 comments

One of the common comments that I’m reading in discussion forums about Chitika eMiniMalls is that they are not converting well in terms of CTR. There are a number of threads recently about how publishers have very large levels of traffic but are seeing very very few click throughs - especially when comparing their figures with other Ad programs.

This was something I spent a bit of time talking about in my initial review of eMiniMalls - my own Chitika CTR is running at a bit under half of my Asense CTR (keep in mind you’re not allowed to reveal specific CTR of either program). Disappointing to say the least.

Of course when comparing click values the shoe is on the other foot for me with Chitika out performing Adsense (it’s paying me about 3-4 times higher on most of my blogs per click).

While it would be easy to get down and depressed about the CTR I decided to do something positive about it and surfed through some of the sites that I saw in forums reporting low CTR this morning. My conclusion is that while eMiniMalls definately have room for improvement with CTR that in some cases, publishers could make improvements also in the way they are using Chitika ads.

The following are some of the suggestions I would make to the publishers I saw today that might be helpful to other Chitika publishers also. Please note that these are suggestions only and I can’t guarantee anything - but since playing around with some of these elements I’ve seen my own CTR on the rise a little since starting my own use of eMiniMalls.

1. Poorly positioned Ads

Tangent time - on our recent weekend away we were passing through a small country town and as we were coming out the end of it I noticed a small sign off on the side of the road in the middle of a field that was advertising a motel. The ad had some things going for it - it was in the vicinity of the motel, it advertised their very reasonable price and it managed to get my attention - however there was one thing that was not it the ads favor. The way it was positioned was so that only people leaving town would ever see it and it was actually on a pretty small and lonely road which few cars used. The positioning seemed all wrong and I wondered what it’s conversion rate would be.

As I surfed around eMiniMall publishers sites this morning I noticed a very similar problem - poorly positioned ads. Some of the main mistakes that I saw included:

• ads too low on the page - this is a positioning that that many publishers using all kinds of ad systems have trouble with. When the only ad you have on your page is at the bottom of your page where few people ever look you’ll generally find that your CTR is going to be pretty low. Don’t hear me as saying ads towards the bottom of pages NEVER convert well - there are exceptions to every rule - however studies show that in general design element above the fold (the part of your site that people view without having to scroll down) get people’s attention a lot more than those below the fold.

• ads cluttering each other - a trend I noticed this morning was people using multiple chitika ads all in a row next to each other at the top of a page. On one site I saw 10 eMiniMall ads - all above the fold! While I don’t mind the eMiniMalls design - it’s not designed to be used 10 times in a small space. The effect is clutter and in the case of the site in question - dizziness on my part! Chitika recommends 3 ads per page as a maximum. In most cases I would agree. I am experimenting with a few ways of using more than this - but only on large/long pages. I’d encourage people to experiment with more than one ad per page - but be open to the idea that one or two well positioned, well designed and relevant ads can actually be much more effective in terms of earnings than lots of ads.

I wrote extensively about ad positioning in my previous tips post so I won’t go over it all again now - but I would identify positioning as being the biggest mistake that publishers are making.

As an example of this - I spoke a few days back with one of the publishers that I referred to the program who had previously had only one ads on his pages - at the bottom of each article. He added a second ad towards the top of each page and saw his earnings almost triple overnight.

2. Using default keywords:

Chitika has a default setting where they load eMiniMalls with the following keywords/phrases:

• digital cameras
• ipod mini
• sony playstation
• dell laptop

I was surprised how many pink ipod, dell laptop, canon powershot and playstation ads I saw around the web this morning. Obviously a lot of people are just going with the default setting and in doing so are probably decreasing their potential CTR.

While these are probably reasonably high paying keywords per click - unless your site is a gadget blog that talks about these topics you’ll find that they will not perform as well for you in terms of CTR as the ads are just not relevant.

3. Other Irrelevant Ads

I was quite puzzled by some of the choices of keywords that some publishers were targeting on their sites. Perhaps they were trying to find the most bizarre ads known to humankind in the hope of attracting curiosity clicks - but in many cases the ads had little (if any) relevance to the site at hand. I won’t pretend that finding relevant ads for every site topic is easy (it can be a challenge) but I would highly recommend you put some serious time into at least attempting to find ads that are on a related topic to your site.

I’d rather 4% of readers on my site click on a 0.35 cent ad than 0.01% clicking on a $1.50 ad.

One of the traps I see many publishers falling into is searching for the highest paying keywords. There are many discussion threads in forums that start with a question about this. I think asking about keyword value is starting with the wrong question. Rather start by asking questions about who your readers are, what they’ve come to your site looking for, what you’re writing about etc and you’ll be on a better path. Once you’ve answered these questions and identified your niche then you can begin to look at the different values of ad options within that niche.

How do you get relevant eMiniMall ads for your blog?

There are a number of ways - most of which I’ve written about previously in my eMiniMall tips post. But let me highlight a few that you might like to experiment with (please note that not all of these tips work on every site or with every ad unit on a blog. Try a variety of things and see what works well for you):

• use titles as keywords - my best converting blogs use this principle. I use the blog title tags to trigger the keywords on these blogs. This works especially well on product related blogs where the title of your post is predominantly the name of a product. This strategy would NOT work well on a blog like enternetusers where I’m writing about ideas, concepts and bigger topics than product.

• use categories as keywords - I’ve seen a number of publishers deciding against using titles as their keywords but instead using the categories of their blogs to do the same job. Once again this will be most effective when your category names are product related or happen to trigger relevant ads. Test this out simply by going to the Chitika home page and putting your cursor over the ’search’ tab in the eMiniMall they have there and typing in the name of one of your blog categories. Do this with a number of your categories. Are the results relevant? If so this might be an option for you.

• manually insert keywords using plugins - there are a number of plugins being developed for blog systems that allow publishers to insert eMiniMalls into individual posts and to specify keywords for those ads. This is perhaps a bit more of a time consuming option (although I suspect in time it would speed up) but could well be the most accurate way of getting highly relevant ads to appear where you want them in posts.

• manually insert keywords in sidebar/banner position ads - this is the approach I’m taking here at enternetusers at present. I’ve got just the one ad unit on this site at present (positioned above comments at the end of articles) and its rotating through some keywords that have some relevance to the topic of this blog. I’m still not satisfied with the keywords I’m targeting but am narrowing in on some that are better than what I started with. The key is to not just assume that because my readers are techy that they’ll be into gadgets - but to find a more specifically related topic (so at present I’ve got some ads on laptops, podcasting equipment and a blogging/podcasting book). As I say I’m still testing on this blog and rotate new keywords through from day to day to help combat ad blindness.

• consider contextual mode - eMiniMalls started out as a contextual advertising system (like Adsense, YPN etc). Of course in more recent times they’ve switched off contextual mode as the default to allow publishers to use it in conjunction with Adsense who don’t allow publishers to use two contextual systems on the one page. While most Chitika publishers do use another system like Adsense on the same page - I’ve talked to a number of publishers who have made the decision to run solely with eMiniMalls in contextual mode because the results of doing so out performed their previous contextual system. This is not something I will be doing in a hurry but it might be an option for some.

4. Poorly designed ads

Most publishers seem to design their ads reasonably well in terms of colors however I have noticed quite a few making a couple of mistakes:

1. Default Settings - once again Chitika give you a default setting that will be served to your blog unless you change it. It’s got blue text and white background. While this is not an offensive color scheme, unless you happen to have this color mix on your blog it might be in your best interests to change it to something that matches and looks more integrated with your site. Once again studies show that blended ads tend to perform better than non blended ads.

2. Outlandish Ads - my ‘blended theory’ is one that there is of course another school of thought for and I see that some publishers are doing there best to design the most ugly ads in the universe in an attempt to draw their readers eyes to the ad. My own personal experience with bright, contrasting ads is that they just don’t work on most sites and that in using them you run the risk of annoying readers more than anything else.

5. Not using Channel Tracking

I was quite surprised by the large numbers of publishers that were not tracking their eMiniMall ad units with channels (I can tell this by looking at a page’s source code). I won’t go into how to set them up here (I’ve done that previously) but would highly recommend that publishers consider using them. I’ve been tracking my blogs with channels since they went live last week and have used them to identify a number of under performing ad units that I’ve now reformatted in terms of keywords and positioning in attempt to increase CTR and click value. The results have been very encouraging. Channels enable you to take out a lot of the guess work about which ads perform best and worst.

6. Stale Ads

One of the things I’ve noticed on some publishers sites is that their ads never change. They’ve chosen one keywords and in the month or two that they’ve run eMiniMalls on their site they’ve never changed it. This means that if someone surfs into your site every day and/or views multiple pages on your site in a session that they’ll just see the same ad served over and over again over time. The result of this is most definitely ad blindness. More innovative Chitika publishers are experimenting with a variety of ways of keeping their ads fresh which include:

• using the rotation (I talked a little about this in my tips post

• manually changing ads every few days

• rotating Chitika ads with other types of ads (ie every second ad might be a fastclick ad - this is what the big blog networks do using ad server technology).

• triggering different ads for different days of the week (I saw a plugin for this somewhere)

This is more important for publishers with sites that have a lot of repeat readers. If your site is more reliant upon search engine traffic it might be better for you to find the keywords that work best for you and to stick to them - perhaps just having a light keyword rotation so that every second or third impression shows a different ad.

There’s no doubt that eMiniMalls do have a lower CTR than Adsense on most sites that I’ve seen. Disappointing but not the end of the road in my opinion. Since working on some of these areas my own figures have continued to make eMiniMalls work on most of my sites to an degree that makes them my primary earner. I wouldn’t argue that it’s the ideal ad system for every blog - but it’s definately worth experimenting with.

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Written on November 17th, 2005 at 03:11 pm by Darren Rowse

Sports and Mommy Blogs Launch

Blog Networks 5 comments

Blog herald reports that there’s a new sports blog network launching at Sports Cartel with NHL, NFL and NBL blogs - lots of them.

And for something a bit different but still sure to be popular - Duncan also emailed me a link to a press release of a new Mommy blogging collaboration over at Mommy Bloggers.

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Written on November 16th, 2005 at 10:11 pm by Darren Rowse

Google Base

Blogging Tools and Services 30 comments

Google have launched another new product - Google Base - a place for submitting content. I’m still trying to get my head around so here’s how they describe it themselves:

‘Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content that we’ll host and make searchable online. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle, Google Base and Google Local.’

One of the keys to Google Base as I see it is the ‘attributes’ feature (looks a lot like ‘tags’ to me).

Content seems to last a maximum of 31 days

The content already submitted includes reviews, car sale ads, recipes etc

They have the ability to upload content a page at a time or many pages at once - and it seems via RSS. What is uploaded can end up in Google’s main index, Froogle or Google Local depending what it is. I’m interested in the RSS feature but a little unsure why anyone would want to upload large amounts of information in this way if they already have a feed being published elsewhere.

A few other questions spring to mind that I can’t see answers to yet in their FAQs.

• How will the index these pages in the normal Google index. Will they be ranked highly quickly? Will this crowd out SERPS?
• How long will it take for spammers to find ways to manipulate this? It seems to be that Google is almost inviting it. Could the new sploggerss be sBasers?
• How long they’ll slap their own Adsense ads on them :-)

I can see how people without a website might find Google Base useful in getting their message out - but I need to dig around a bit more before I can really comment on it and how it might be used for or by bloggers and how it might impact us.

update - I’ve just tried adding a page and am waiting for it to be processed (15-60 minutes is the wait apparently). The page I made was a ‘people profile’ and it was pretty easy to make - a matter of filling in feilds (or deleting ones I didn’t want). I could add a picture and a variety of sets of information including a URL to a website. I’ll show you my page here when it goes live.

The only problem with it was that as with AdWords, AdSense and Analytics Google seems to be having trouble keeping me logged in with my Google ID (which is neccessary to use Google Base). It keeps automatically signing me in with an old ID that they previously asked me to change. This is quite frustrating and I can’t seem to rectify it even with deleting cache/cookies etc.

Another small issue - it won’t let you publish anything with a lable this isn’t spelt ‘right’ - I tried to add ‘enternetusers’ and ‘Darren Rowse’ as a lable and it wouldn’t allow it. I had to apply for an exemption which was going to take a manual approval from a Google staffer before it would allow me to go live with the page.

update II - Well that’s a surprise - my page is up afte just 3 minutes. You can see it here.

Be a bit gentle with me - I put it together in two minutes (I guess that says something about ease of use) and copy and pasted the description from my linkedin profile.

update III - more ‘discoveries’:

- html code is not possible. This means no formatting, no links etc. I guess this helps cut down on spam.
- no RSS feeds to track tags. This would be a useful addition.
- InsideGoogle reports that some words seem to be banned and are changed. They write:

‘That means that my article, by listing the banned items, was unfit for publication. Read it, and you’ll notice that “mod chips” has been replaced by “modification chips”, “cable descramblers” is “cable box descramblers” and “fake documents” is “falsified documents”. Additionally, I had to remove the exclamation point from my title.’

Others are writing about Google Base at:

- Search Engine Watch - Google Base
- CJ Online - New Google service allows anyone upload most anything to a publicly searchable database
- Danny Ayers - Google Base RDF Lite Solo
- Google’s Blog - First Base
- The Kelsey Group - Google Base Is Live
- John Battele’s Search Blog - All Your Base Are Google, The Launch

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Written on November 16th, 2005 at 10:11 pm by Darren Rowse

Pajamas Media Launches as Open Source Media

Pro Blogging News 8 comments

Associated Press have news of the long awaited Pajamas Media’s impending launch. They’ll be known as OSM (Open Source Media) and launch with 3.5 million dollars of venture capital behind them.

I’m not sure what their URL will be - osm.com and opensourcemedia.com are both taken. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

update - thanks to Andy for pointing out in comments below that they are at osm.org.

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Written on November 16th, 2005 at 09:11 pm by Darren Rowse

Yahoo to Distribute Gawker Blogs

Blog Networks 4 comments

More big blog network news today with Yahoo agreeing to distribute Gawker Media’s Blogs. Reuters reports the news:

Yahoo said it will post “dozens” of stories per day from Gawker Media’s blogs, including New York-media gossip blog Gawker, U.S. political gossip-focused Wonkette, Hollywood insider’s guide Defamer and popular technology blog Gizmodo.

The deal follows Yahoo’s decision in October to begin displaying commentary from online journals or blogs alongside traditional news stories.

Pretty significant news.

More on this here

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Written on November 16th, 2005 at 04:11 pm by Darren Rowse

YPN adds RSS Feed Ads

Yahoo Publishing Network 0 comments

Loren has news over at Search Engine Journal about Yahoo Publisher Network adding RSS Ads to it’s beta test. We spotted the advanced warnings of this a few weeks back but now it seems to have become available to all beta testers in the program.

It’ll be interesting to see if it has any better results than Adsense RSS ads which for me have been quite a non-event.

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Written on November 16th, 2005 at 03:11 pm by Darren Rowse

Google Analytics Starts Working

Blogging Tools and Services 26 comments

After 48 hours - my Google Analytics stats look like they are finally coming to life with some actual information.

It might be time for me to go do some Analysis…

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Written on November 16th, 2005 at 03:11 pm by Darren Rowse

Good News and Bad News for Chitika Publishers

Chitika eMiniMalls 26 comments

Chitika eMiniMall publishers - Do you want the good news or the bad news first?

The Bad News
Chitika have just announced on their blog a few minutes ago that today they’ve had to make a few changes to their eMiniMalls system in response to working with their advertisers.

It must be a fine balancing act looking after the needs of advertisers and ensuring that they’ve got good conversion rates and responding to the needs of publishers who want good click through rates.

It looks like things might have been tipped a little in favor of the publishers because they’ve just announced that some of the text previously on Chitika eMiniMalls as a live link to advertisers (and therefore a paying link) will be made into static text. This is to combat the curiosity clicking that some advertisers are getting which don’t convert to sales.

The upside of this is that advertisers should see an upswing in their conversions - the downside is that publishers will no doubt see a downturn in their CTR.

The Good News
On the upside of the equation Chitika have announced a two week bonus for publishers. Starting today they will be giving publishers a 10% bonus on top of their normal earnings until the end of November to help compensate for the changes.

This means that while CTR will decrease that the already generous click values (update: this is my experience in my niches where click values are pretty good - I’ve been reminded in comments below that in some niches this is not the case - point taken) will increase for the next 2 weeks - especially timely at this time of year which is usually a good time for publishers of ad systems like Chitika and Adsense.

Other good news is the announcement of coming features in the coming weeks:

1. An option to set alternate urls - this means those of us with a readers from non supported countries (clicks from many Asian countries are not accepted) can set things so that when someone from a country not supported by Chitika reads your blog they don’t even see the Chitika ads but instead could get an ad served that has more chance of conversion.

2. Geo targeting: Visitors from UK will see matching deals from UK merchants - this should lead to better conversions for advertisers and publishers alike. There’s nothing like seeing a pound sign instead of a dollar sign next to a price if you’re a UK reader.

Balancing Act
As a publisher I’m a bit disappointed in the news of an impending decrease in CTR - I’m hoping it won’t be too much. But on the flip side (my wife calls me the eternal optimist) keeping advertisers happy is a key ingredient in any advertising system - without them we earn nothing so hopefully this will not only retain current advertisers in the system but attract new ones in which in turn should increase the bidding price for ads and increase the long term profitability of participating in the program for publishers.

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