Written on July 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 08:07 pm by Darren Rowse

Google Displays Dual Language Ad Units - Glitch or Test?

Adsense 11 comments

Rajesh has a screen shot of a dual language AdSense ad unit which displays one ad in Englishh and one in Hindi.

I’ve seen dual language ads before and always thought they were probably a glitch in the system but in the last few days I’ve talked to a number of people who think that it could be more than that.

Whether they are a new feature, a glitch or a test AdSense are doing is anyone’s guess really.

Found via Amit

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Written on July 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 09:07 am by Darren Rowse

coComment Adds New Features

Blogging Tools and Services 6 comments

coComment has announced an update to their blog comment tracking system. The improvements include:

• The cocoCrawler - keeps an eye on your conversations for you
• Track This Conversation - track conversations even if you don’t participate in them
• Meta Conversation - Lets you comment on a web page that has no built-in comment functionality
• New Interface, Site Structure and Navigation - new home page and stuff
• Try the Service without Registering - try before you give them any information
• Filtering of Conversations - filter conversations by type
• Other new features - including five languages, capture-compatible platforms (including YouTube) etc

It seems like the developers of coComment have been listening to their users and adding features. I’ve not used coComment myself but know of a few readers of enternetusers who do - I’d be interested in hearing some reviews of what your think of the new features.

found via Easton

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Written on July 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 05:07 am by Brian Clark

How to Sell Niche Products With Your Blog

General 14 comments

Back when my wife and I lived in a hip loft on the east side of downtown Dallas (read: back before the kids came), I used to take the dog for walks in our funky little neighborhood just north of Deep Ellum. There resided an artist who worked and lived out of his studio, where he crafted eccentric sculptures out of recycled iron and steel scrap.

I’d often wonder as I walked by his place if it was worth his while to have a website to gain a wider audience for his work. Back at that time, just after a monumental Internet bust that resulted from outrageous amounts of money being spent to promote sock puppets, I wasn’t sure if the guy could attract enough traffic from a web presence to actually make sales, no matter how good his work was.

Fast forward to 2006.

The Rise of the “Catablog”

John Unger is an artist in rural Michigan who works and lives out of his studio along a lonely highway, or as he puts it, “dead center of the middle of nowhere”. John makes eccentric art and sculptures out of recycled scrap materials, such as propane tanks, old cars, rivets, and bottle caps.

Here’s the cool thing. John sells quite a bit of his work thanks to his blog.

Why? Well, when other little blogs like Boing Boing (and many others) take notice, amazing things start happening in terms of traffic and sales. That’s something that the e-commerce people of the late 90s just never got — it’s the little guy with the unique product that can gain the most benefit from worldwide exposure.

Basically, anything that can be sold by catalog is a perfect candidate for Internet sales. And when you create a “catablog,” you have no worries about printing, distribution, copy space, or often even advertising costs. You don’t even need a fancy $10,000 ecommerce site or a merchant account thanks to PayPal.

Why John Unger’s Product Blog Works

John Unger basically uses a “two blog” structure powered by TypePad. One blog is more of a general nature about what’s going on with his studio, and the other is his catablog of items for sale.

John not only makes unique products, but he knows how to present those products via photography and copy that sells. Let’s take a look at one of his items and how he presents it.

John’s Pot-de-Feu (pot of fire) grill is hand-cut from scrap 20 lb propane tanks, and is a miniature version of his extremely popular (and much more expensive) Great Bowl O’ Fire recycled fire pits. These more affordable grills are an attrActive summertime backyard item, and that’s the story John tells with his copy.

• His headline “A Hot Little Portable Grill for Summer” is nicely done, engineered for humans as well as the search engines.
• The copy is very specific about the materials John uses, and hints at exclusivity and scarcity by mentioning right away that each piece is hand-made and one-of-a-kind.
• John then begins to allow the reader to imagine the grill in use, which is essential. A prospective buyer must imagine the grill in her own backyard, and John evens adds in tasty menu suggestions that allow the reader to imagine how well the item will reflect on themselves when entertaining.
• Next, the reader is presented with pricing and multiple purchase options. People love choice, as long as the choices do not prompt “analysis paralysis.” John might want to test various other ordering menu options to see what works best.
• John then presents more photos, and even more useful, descriptive copy, testimonials, reviews, features, and even safety tips. Remember, people love to get as much information as they can before committing to a purchase. This is another big advantage catablogs have over paper catalogs, and you should definitely take advantage of it. Only stop giving information if you no longer have anything pertinent to say.

Filling in the Narrative Gaps

When it comes to eclectic consumer products, one must remember that we don’t buy things because we need them. We buy them because they help tell a piece of the story we want to tell about ourselves, or as Hugh MacLeod eloquently says:

If people like buying your product, it’s because its story helps fill in the narrative gaps in their own lives.

Help people tell their own stories better, and your product blog can create a wonderful story for you as well.

Brian Clark teaches his readers how to blog (and sell) more effectively at Copyblogger.

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Written on July 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 03:07 am by Darren Rowse

Speedlinking 21 July 2006

Pro Blogging News 1 comment

I’m slowly getting through all my RSS feeds from being away - almost there! Here’s some more posts that caught my eye from the past couple of weeks:

• Cybercafe Experiments provides a tutorial on how bloggers can use the Lightbox script to ’snazzy image loading effects’ on your blog with Lightbox JS and Zoomr.
• Scott Karp picks up on the latest Pew study that finds that 7% of bloggers list making money as their major reason for blogging. A further 8% list making money as a minor reason.
• If you’re looking for a web based way to get a screen cap of a website you might enjoy ThumbPress - found via Cameron
• While looking at ThumbPress I also found Paparazzi! - a Mac OS X utility for making screenshots of webpages - very nice.
• Yaro is looking for two bloggers to blog on the topic of Small Business Branding and Marketing - there’s talk of sharing profits but only after those who are recruited prove their worth.
• I love a good ‘How to’ post so Brian’s post on How to Write a Killer “How To” Post That Gets Attention is right up my alley.
• Typepad Hacks has another good hack on how to place AdSense in a TypePad blog header which I’m sure some of you will find useful.
• Chris Garrett posts a helpful list of tips on how to write a post when you know what you want to say but don’t know how to say it (happens to me everyday!)

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Written on July 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 12:07 am by Darren Rowse

What would I do different if I had to start my blog over? - Jeremy Schoemaker

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 8 comments

The following is an answer from Jeremy Schoemaker from ShoeMoney and Webmaster Radio’s Net Income Show responding to my one question interview question of what he’d do differently if he had to start his blog over again.

First off - Great question! If I could go back to last summer when I started blogging I would have redone my url structure. Right now its / %year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ but I would have liked to just have done /%postname%/ I could always change it now but the redirecting urls and all that is such a pain in the butt. There are really so many things that come to mine that I would like to do different but then maybe my blog would not be what it is if it was different? Maybe my bad grammar and bad web design makes it what it is ?

Read the responses of other bloggers to this 1 Question Interview on what they’d do differently in their blogging

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Written on July 20th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 04:07 pm by Darren Rowse

Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic to Your Website

Blog Promotion 12 comments

SEOmoz Blog has a worthwhile read titled 10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic which explores the following methods of traffic generation:

#10 - Targeting Unmonetized Searches
#9 - Creating Controversy
#8 - Maps & Mashups
#7 - Event Coverage
#6 - Top Ten Lists
#5 - Online Tools
#4- Graphic & Web Design
#3 - Leveraging Social Networks
#2 - Blogging & Blog Comments
#1 - Reporting Remarkable News
#0 - Offering Something Incredible

All good common sense tips. randfish gives the ingredients, process, results and examples of each in his article.

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Written on July 20th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 11:07 am by Darren Rowse

Gawker Yahoo Partnership Terminated

Pro Blogging News 6 comments

Nick Denton has announced that the content sharing partnership that Gawker had with Yahoo has ended.

The reasons - it didn’t generate them much traffic, didn’t seem to convert them many new readers, the demographics of Gawker and Yahoo didn’t really match up and Valleywag’s coverage of Yahoo Media head probably didn’t help.

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Written on July 20th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 12:07 am by Darren Rowse

Linkers Anonymous

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 17 comments

A few weeks back I wrote a post titled No-one links to the linkers. It had quite a few comments left on it but one (it was one of the last ones left) caught my attention above the others and as I read it I knew instantly that I could not possibly leave it as a comment hidden away on an old post. It was left by Tony Lawrence (who comments here as pcunix) who has given me permission to ‘promote’ it to be a guest post here on the main blog. Here it is:

My name is Tony Lawrence and I’m a recovering linker.

Like most of us, it started out with a friendly “links page” - just a little something extra I added to my site to list other related sites of value. Today we’d call that a “blogroll” but back then it was just a “links page”, and every site had one. Not wanting to be different, I had one too.

As time went on, I added a lot of content to my site. I mean a LOT. I worked hard at it and really made it a very useful resource for my niche. I built significant traffic and although I really paid no attention to such things back then, I started getting a lot of affection from the big search engines. Life was good.

Then one June morning in 2003, I discovered Adsense. “Cool”, I thought, “I’ll

make a couple of extra bucks from the site. Why not?” I applied, was approved, and started running ads. Cool beans, I thought.

Imagine my surprise when I woke up the next morning and found $40.53 in my Adsense account. Wow. It wasn’t millions, but it wasn’t just pocket change either.

The next day was $51.95. There were $60.00 days, even $70.00 and $80.00 days. This Adsense stuff was great.

I wanted more.

Well, how do you get more? Obviously, more content. So I stepped up the pace of my writing. Where I had been posting perhaps a few times a week, I now wanted to post a few times a day. Many times a day, lots of posts, because posts carry ads and ads mean money. Post, post, post.

But these weren’t like my my previous posts. Oh, some were, sure. But a lot of them were just empty links: “Hey, look at this:” posts.

What was I thinking? Hours spent searching the web, often stumbling into seedy and disreputable sites trying to find something to link to. It got harder to find anything of interest, and my standards slipped. I’d wake up in the morning and stare bleary eyed into the mirror: “I can’t believe you linked to that”, I’d say.

But I had. I was ashamed, but I could not stop myself. Links, links and more links. A long chain of empty posts that were really nothing at all. My once proud site was starting to look a bit sploggish at the edges and I hated it. But the driving need for post after post after post kept me doing it.

And then..

One morning I looked in the mirror and said “No more”. No more would I post empty links. If I didn’t have useful content to add, I wouldn’t link at all. My posting frequency would suffer, but it had to be done. I had to return my site to quality standards, and I was going to do that no matter how hard it was. Cold turkey.

I was done as of that day. No more empty links.

It is hard. Sometimes I see a juicy web page that really is relevant to my niche but I have nothing to say about it other than “Look!”. My fingers hesitate, wanting to type in that href. I take a deep breath and steel myself: I will not link without additional value. I will not link without additional value. I will not link..

Well, Adsense isn’t what it used to be anyway. A good day is $40.00, and a lot of days are in the thirties. Weekends plunge even lower. It’s still nice money, of course, but I don’t think about it as much anymore. I think about content, and value, and that’s what I should be thinking about, isn’t it?

I shook the empty link habit. You can too.

Thanks Tony - you can read Tony’s blog here.

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Written on July 19th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 10:07 pm by Darren Rowse

The Dawn of Professional Social Bookmarking

Pro Blogging News 9 comments

Jason Calacanis has posted a post that could be the begin of professional social bookmarking (someone better register prosocialbookmarker.com). He’s offering to pay 12 or so top users from sites like digg, reddit, MySpace, Newsvine, Delicious and Flickr to submit posts to Netscape.

Read about it at his post at - Paying the top DIGG/REDDIT/Flickr/Newsvine users

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Written on July 19th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 09:07 am by Darren Rowse

Speedlinking 19 July 2006

Pro Blogging News 4 comments

I’m not back yet from my couple of weeks off (the interview series and guest blogging will continue) but have started wading through my bloglines account to see what I’ve been missing. Here are a few posts that have caught my eye from the last week or so so far:

• Nick posts some useful tips for avoiding Summer Blog Death
• CyberNotes has a useful analysis of the Digg Effect
• Stephan Spencer has released a new WP Plugin called SEO Title which helps you optimize your title tags for search engines
• This new WordPress PayPal looks like an interesting one to me. It’s one of the first plugins that I’ve seen that costs something - but allows you to make your blog a membership site using Paypal - found via BlogHelper
• Web Jillion analyses the layout of the top 100 blogs at Technorati
• The Independent publisher writes about how to pitch stories to fellow bloggers - here’s a few of my own tips on the same topic.
• Andy Merrett posts 7 reflections upon his first days as a enternetusers

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