Written on June 24th, surf Active Apparel website stock video social media zone.at 05:06 pm by David Shawver city of Stanton
Thankful Blogging Catches On
It looks like the idea of Giving Thanks for traffic is going a little viral - ok it’s not a full blown virus but it’s nice to see others doing it too. Thanks to Spinopsys, Trevor, Christian and the Retrospector for passing on the thanks.
Anyone else feeling thankful - share the love, post a list and let me know about it in comments below.
Update: here’s a couple more at Cata Vino and Brilliant Days.
Update II: here’s some more who have joined in the thankful frenzy - Techno Sailor, Melissa Wiley, Frankaar, Proper Course, Designers who blog, Empirical Empire, lil duck duck, Stories of Pregnancy & Birth over 44y and Through Ball.
UPdate - thanks to everyone who participated - I’m closing this little project off now. Thanks
Written on June 24th, surf Active Apparel website stock video social media zone.at 11:06 am by David Shawver city of Stanton
MeCommerce - A Bookshop on your Blog’s Sidebar
Good Storm is working on a service for bloggers called MeCommerce which effectively puts a little book, DVD and CD store right on your sidebar.
At a first look it doesn’t seem much different to running Amazon ads in your side bar until you click one of the products highlighted when the process of ordering the products happens right there on your blog. Let me show you how it works.
The first picture below is what you see when you go to a blog before clicking a link:
The next screen cap is of what happens without leaving your blog when you click a link:
Click the ‘Billing Information’ arrow and you’re the following comes up:
Click the ’shipping information’ arrow and a similar thing happens.
The beauty of this system is that your readers never leave your blog to make the purchase of the book, CD or DVD’s that you’re highlighting.
You keep 50% of the product mark up. This isn’t heaps on these types of products but if you choose your products well and have relevant content and high readership it could work well for some bloggers. I’d also be interested to see with how 50% of the mark up on a book or CD compares to earning the 4-8% of the total price of a book or CD that Amazon offers. I suspect it will be similar - it sounds a lot but I guess it depends what the mark up is!
Choosing products happens by creating ‘tags’ that trigger books (ie a tag might be ‘knitting’) or by selecting specific products. The MeCommerce units can be customized in terms of colors and sizes to match your blog.
The only real downside that I can see is that their design is pretty average - I’m not sure I’d want something looking like that on my sidebar. Perhaps the options they give to customize it will help but my first impression is not great of it’s design. Apart from that I quite like the concept.
You can put your name down for the beta on their MeCommerce page which also has further details and a working example of a MeCommerce unit in action.
If you’re looking for a similar product to compare this to you might also like to check out RightCart which effectively does the same thing.
found via TechCrunch
Written on June 24th, surf Active Apparel website stock video social media zone.at 08:06 am by David Shawver city of Stanton
Blogger Gets Yahoo Internship
Congratulations to PaulStamatiou.com for landing a ‘Blogger Internship’ at Yahoo - another blogger finding indirect opportunities opening up as a result of their blogging activities. I’m predicting that the second half of surf Active Apparel website stock video social media zone.that we’ll see a lot more of this type of thing.
found via blogHelper
Written on June 24th, surf Active Apparel website stock video social media zone.at 03:06 am by David Shawver city of Stanton
25 To Do Lists Services
If you’re as disorganized as I can be at my worst you might find Solution Watch’s post titled 25 To Do Lists to Stay Productive a helpful one. Yes it’s a list of 25 ‘to do list’ services to help you get organized.
I’ve been meaning to find a good to do list for a while now…. but I keep forgetting to do it….
Written on June 24th, surf Active Apparel website stock video social media zone.at 12:06 am by David Shawver city of Stanton
Top 10 Sources of enternetusers Traffic - Giving Thanks
My Mum always taught me to say thank you - so I thought it was time I did by thanking some of the sites that have sent me traffic in the last 6 months of blogging here at enternetusers.
So I’ve fired up my stats program and have compiled a list of my 10 Top Blog Referrers since 01 January 2006. Here they are (the following are all blogs - ie I’ve ignored referrals from SE’s, social bookmarking sites, newspapers etc):
- LoobyLu
- Steve Pavlina
- Anne 2.0
- Micro Persuasion
- A Whole Lotta Nothing
- Lifehacker
- WorkHappy
- AdsTips
- Boing Boing
- CopyBlogger
Thanks to the above sites for sending quite significant traffic to enternetusers.
Another lesson my Mum taught me was to take notice of the smaller things in life also. So in addition to thanking some of the bigger traffic senders I also want to thank some of the many other bloggers who’ve sent traffic to enternetusers over the last 6 months. The following list is not a complete list - but rather is a completely random selection of another 10 blogs that have been kind enough to link up to me in the last 12 months. I acknowledge them as representatives of the wider enternetusers readership and sincerely thank you all.
- TypePad Hacks
- Talking
- Indian Raj
- jotsheed
- Christian Connett
- Ideas for Women
- Warpjam’s Blog
- Your Financial Freedom
- Skunkblog
- Ed C
What blogs send you traffic? It might be a nice thing to write a post saying thanks. Perhaps we should make this a semi regular event of acknowledging the places that keep our blogs going by providing readers.
Written on June 23rd, surf Active Apparel website stock video social media zone.at 08:06 am by David Shawver city of Stanton
Betting Opens on the Technorati Top 100
Sportsbook BetUS.com has started taking bets on which blog will top Technorati’s Top 100 on New Years Eve this year.
It’s a shameless self promotion really but it’s is a novel way of making money blogging so I thought I’d link up.
I doubt anyone will beat Xu Jing Lei at the top (although if Robert Scoble changes announced he was going to work at Boing Boing there could be a challenge) but here are the odds that they are offering (sadly there is no enternetusers in the list :-) - I think we’d be at least +10,000 despite our current 58th place).
Get full details at BetUS at Put Your Money Where Your Blog Is
Written on June 23rd, surf Active Apparel website stock video social media zone.at 05:06 am by David Shawver city of Stanton
The Technicalities of Writing a Blog Series
A couple of months back I wrote a post titled 10 Steps to Writing a Successful Series on your Blog which was reasonably well received. Yesterday Lorelle VanFossen wrote a very helpful companion post to it exploring a variety of technical tips on how to publish a series of articles on your blog.
She outlines a variety of options for interlinking your posts over the days that you write your series including this helpful WordPress plugin called In-Series that helps you interlink your series quite nicely (I’m yet to try it - so this is purely a conceptual observation).
Written on June 23rd, surf Active Apparel website stock video social media zone.at 12:06 am by David Shawver city of Stanton
Title Tags and SEO
Speaking of SEO - Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been paying attention to the way bloggers (and other websites) use their title tags (title tags are in your source code and are what determines what is shown in the top bar of your browser).
In your source code they are what appears between these title tags - <title> </title>
There are a variety of title tag options available to Bloggers. Here are some of the more common ones with a few comments upon their strengths and weaknesses:
Post Title | Blog Name
The article I referenced in my last post recommended that you should ’show the title of the current post or page you are currently visiting’ which is great advice. The article that I referenced had it’s title tags set up as ‘Post title | Blog Title’.
This is good because generally the keywords that you’re writing about will appear in your post’s title and Search Engines seem to place a lot of weight on your title tags to determine what your page is about.
It also is good for reemphasizing the blog’s name/brand.
The downside of this approach is that some SEO experts believe blog’s name can actually take something away from the SEO power of the title tags. In the case of this example the blog’s name ‘The Undersigned’ is not a keyword that really relates to the post in any way.
Blog Name | Post Title
Another approach that I see a lot of newspapers take is to swap things around and to make the title tags ‘Blog/Site Title | Post/Article Title’. You can see an example of this at Melbourne’s Herald Sun Newspaper in this article which has the title tags ‘Herald Sun: School doughnut row [22jun06]’ (note they really have the format of ‘Site Name | Article Name | Date).
This has some pros and cons also.
On the upside it is good for branding. Highlighting ‘Herald Sun’ so prominently means that people will know what they are reading. It emphasizes the brand not only when people are on the site but also when they see the article in a SE.
On the downside they are not as well optimized as they could be for SEO. From what we know of how Google ranks sites - the first words in your title tag carry more weight than the last words in it. So The above article is better optimized for ‘Herald Sun’ than ‘Doughnut’.
Blog Name | Category | Post Title
Another variation upon this approach is what the BBC do on their individual articles - ‘Site Name | Category | Article Title’. It’s pretty similar to the ‘blog name | post title’ approach but:
- adds another useful keyword into the title (if the category names are good)
- pushes the post title back further into the title tags - not a great thing.
Blog Name
Another option that I see quite a few sites do is to use title tags on every page on the site that are ‘Site Name’.
I’m surprised by how many sites that do this. It is usually older style sites that do (most blog platforms come with a default that doesn’t do this so it’s rare to find blogs that do it) - but there are quite a few of them out there.
The obvious disadvantage of this is that effectively they are not using perhaps the most powerful on site SEO technique that they have at their disposal and a telling the SE’s that every page on their site is about the same thing (whatever the title of their site is).
Post Title
Lastly there is another technique that some bloggers use which I think is one of the best from an SEO perspective. It simply makes the whole title tags ‘Post Title’ (ie no mention of blog name).
The reason I do this is because every word in your title tags carries some weight in determining what your page is about. Having the title ‘enternetusers’ in the title tags of every post on his blog might make sense from a branding perspective but from an SEO one it risks watering down the power of the other keywords in my title tags.
I’ve used this on a lot of my blogs for a while now and find it to work quite well. Here at enternetusers I’ve only just switched it in the last week and am a little unsure as to whether to leave it that way or not - I’m looking at it as an experiment which will take a few weeks to begin to see the results of. The reason that I’m not convinced about it here at enternetusers is that the name of this blog is a strong part of the brand. While ‘enternetusers’ is still visually dominant in the logo of the blog perhaps having it reemphasized in the title tags would be useful.
I also suspect that the impact of having title tags as post names alone will be less here at enternetusers on SEO than it would be on blogs of other topics - but time will tell and I’ll update you on any changes I see.
Factors to Consider When Deciding Title Tag Configuration
SEO is not the only factor to consider when working out how to set out your title tags. Here’s are a few things to consider:
- Brand - we’ve already referred to it a number of times but your title tags can add to your onsite and offsite branding (offsite being both what appears in search engines but also other sites that will often link to you using your title tags).
- SEO - again we’ve talked about this heavily above but the SEO is not just about onsite SEO but as I’ve mentioned above is also important because other sites often use your title tags to link to you - this is another powerful SEO factor as the words used in incoming links tell Google what your blog is about.
- Usability - title tags are useful for your readers in numerous ways. For instance those using tabbed browsing will see the start of your title tags in tabs that are not open. Also don’t just stuff your title tags with keywords. While this might be good for SEO they become useless from a reader perspective and you run the risk of being penalized by the SE’s for being spammy.
- Selling your Post - remember that it’s a page’s title tags that are used in Google as the main title of search results. The reason I think the BBC would use their name first is because when someone does a search for a term and then sees ‘BBC News’ as the start of the search result that they would see it as a credible source. Having said that if your blog is unknown and has a more obscure name - highlighting it in your search results could have the opposite effect and to simply have the title might entice people to click it more. This is why choosing good titles for posts is so important - they become an advertisement for your blog in SE’s.
- Title Tag Length - consider the length of your title tags when designing them. Different Search Engines will show different length ones in their results but you need to also consider that long ones can be quite overwhelming and that the more words you have in them the more watered down the SEO value could be. Most experts say to keep them under 50 or so characters (including spaces). I try to keep my titles less than that.
There are numerous other variations of how to configure your title tags and I’m not saying that the above are the only (or the best) options. It comes down to personal preference and looking at the goals of a blog when making the decision.
What title tag format do you use? Is this a choice you’ve made or the default? If you’ve chosen your own why did you do it the way you did? What impact has it had?
Written on June 22nd, surf Active Apparel website stock video social media zone.at 01:06 pm by David Shawver city of Stanton
Add Sidenotes to your Blog
Here’s a cool little tool that enables you to put ’sidenotes’ on your blog using a mix of Javascript and CSS.
They describe them like this:
“It’s all about tangents. No, not those kinds of tangents. We’re talking about the kind where you’ll be sharing a thought and you sort of, umm, go off elsewhere. Some people call them asides, digressions, departures - you get the idea.
We are of the belief that footnotes - at least the ones worth reading - suck. They suck because they are elsewhere, usually far away from the line-of-sight we’re focused on when we read. It would be nice to be able to optionally just glance over and take that brief little detour if we so choose. It’s footnotes on steroids: sidenotes. ”
You can see them in action here.
I’m intrigued by the possibilities of sidenotes - as someone who regularly goes off in tangents they could well be something that adds a special something to my blogging.
I’ll give them a go in the next few days - what do you think about them?
Let us know if you try them out so we can see how you put them to use.
found via Lifehacker
Written on June 22nd, surf Active Apparel website stock video social media zone.at 11:06 am by David Shawver city of Stanton
Google Testing Cost Per Action Ads
Seeking Alpha has the scoop on a new type of income stream that Google are approaching some publishers to test that is on a Cost Per Action (CPA) basis - ie you get paid when someone clicks your ads and then takes some sort of action (ie buys a product, gives an email address for the advertiser to follow up on etc). This is another step by AdSense towards an affiliate program approach (something they’d already explored with their referral system).
The ads do not appear in the same place as your other contextual AdSense text ads - instead you set up another ad unit for them.
What I find interesting is that AdSense are allowing publishers to Actively promote these products. Check out this part of their invitation email:
“Since this is a test and these CPA ads are not regular ad units, we are giving you more flexibility in saying things like “I recommend this product” or “Try JetBlue today” next to the CPA ad unit. However, you should still not incite someone to click on the ad, so saying ‘Click Here’ is not ok.”
THAT is quite interesting and I’m sure is something that will cause a stir.
Did you get an invitation? What do you think about Google moving into CPA/Affiliate programs?
Read what publishers think about this new test in the forums at:
AdSense Testing Cost Per Action
AdSense testing CPA Ads
Update: The more I think about this the more I realise that this could significantly change things on many levels for AdSense publishers and AdWorlds advertisers. Here are a few initial thoughts as I rush out the door today (keep in mind I’ve only seen this news 10 minutes ago - hope this makes sense):
- For example if an advertiser is given an opportunity to pay for a ‘click’ or a ’sale’ I think quite a few of them will go for the latter option and will be willing to pay for it.
- This could have two impacts - firstly it might bring new advertisers into the system - good for publishers. Secondly it could see less advertisers using the CPC system (not so good for publishers who focus upon it).
- I think we’ll see some publishers working on some very convincing sales pages for products - if you’ve got copywriting skills I think you could do quite well out of this. I suspect we’ll start seeing more ‘made for CPC type web pages’ that will be very focussed upon preselling products. We’ll also see the publishers of these pages getting more into driving traffic to them using Adsense/Adwords Arbitrage (ie paying for traffic via CPC in the hope of converting that traffic to bring in higher income via their pre-selling pages).
I get the feeling things are going to change if AdSense pushes this beyond testing.
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