Written on November 16th, 2005 at 02:11 am by David Shawver Stanton
Freshdaily Blog Network
Yet another new blog network is launching - this time a Canadian (and rather pink) one called Freshdaily. No real details of what the network will include but so far they publish four city blogs. One to watch - if only to see if the whole network will be in pink!
found via one degree
Written on November 15th, 2005 at 10:11 pm by David Shawver Stanton
Two Top Ten Articles from Chris
Chris is in a blogging frenzy over at Performancing (in fact the whole blog is quite frenzy like - I literally cannot keep up with it!):
They are both good posts - well worth the look.
Written on November 15th, 2005 at 02:11 pm by David Shawver Stanton
Jason Calacanis on Podcasting Business Models
I just watched this 12 minute video clip of Jason Calacanis talking about 6 business models around Podcasting which was recorded by JD Lasica from Engadget.
It’s an interesting piece that I think is not only quite helpful for those experimenting with podcasting but those looking for blogging networks as well. The six models he talks about for podcasting all have been explored with blogging (or are being explored).
Worth a listen if you’ve not seen Jason talk before just to have a bit more of a look at how a professional blogging guru thinks and presents himself.
Written on November 15th, 2005 at 12:11 pm by David Shawver Stanton
Six Apart’s offers “Choose your Own Compensation”
Six Apart took the step of offering Active TypePad users affected by recent problems compensation today. Rather than compensating everyone the same they actually left the level of compensation somewhat up to the bloggers themselves and gave them the following options:
- While the performance issues caused me some inconvenience I mainly found the service acceptable last month.
Give me 15 free days of TypePad.- The performance issues made it very difficult for me to use the service on multiple occasions during the month.
Give me 30 free days of TypePad.- The performance issues affected me greatly, making my experience unacceptable for most of the month.
Give me 45 free days of TypePad.- I really wasn’t affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month.
Thank you for the offer, but please don’t credit my account.
I’m sure that some will be cynical about this approach but I think it’s an innovative way of going about compensating their users in a way that not only gives something to users but Actively involves them in the process of determining the impact of the problems. I’ve seen a few bloggers already choose option 1 and comment that it was above and beyond what they thought Six Apart would do.
Read more about it at Six Apart
Written on November 15th, 2005 at 10:11 am by David Shawver Stanton
Daylight Savings and the Pro Blogger Rhythm
Daylight Savings has had a significant impact upon my blogging activities.
A few weeks ago we put our clocks backward forward an hour to get an extra hour of daylight over our upcoming Summer. The same weekend much of the Northern Hemisphere put their clocks forward backward (signifying the end of their warmer months).
An hour here - an hour there - it doesn’t really make much difference does it?
Initially I didn’t think it did but today I realized that there are quite a few people who I used to regularly talk to on IM that I haven’t seen or heard from in weeks. That hour or two window of opportunity in the evenings or first thing in the morning has now shifted.
It also impacts my blogging rhythm in other ways including a new time of the day to check earnings stats (instead of Adsense starting a new day at 5pm now it’s at 7pm - other stats packages have shifted from a last thing at night check-in to a first thing in the morning one).
It’s not really a big deal - but enough to put me a little out of whack and become even more aware of my location in the world.
I was listening to an interview with Richard McManus a few days back and he talked about a trip he did to Silicon Valley earlier in the year. One of the things that he said that he found surprising was the amount of real life contact some of the Web 2.0 people there had with one another. A lot of it seemed social - but the opportunities that must come from such interactions, from actually knowing those you work with, must be significant.
As much as people talk about how the web is making the world a smaller place and that it breaks down the barriers to opportunity in business (and it does in so many ways), I’m still keenly aware of how distance impacts those who are not physically at the centre of the action. While I can think of places that are a lot more isolated than Melbourne - I suspect there are quite a few bloggers around the world who from time to time feel the isolation from the rest of their species.
It’s a pity we can’t all meet up on some tropical island once a year for a year’s worth of networking, BBQ’s, parties and talking about the Pro Blogger life.
Written on November 15th, 2005 at 08:11 am by David Shawver Stanton
Google Analytics - First Impressions
I turned on my computer this morning looking forward to checking out my first statistics with Google Analytics (which apparently takes up to 12 hours to see it’s first stats come in).
Unfortunately they seem to be having some ‘issues’ - probably due to the number of people signing up for the service. I’ve had a number of problems so far with it:
1. I recently was asked to swap my AdSense and AdWords login email addresses to a gmail one which I did. I signed up for Analytics with this gmail email but it’s constantly trying to get me to log in with the old login and sometimes halfway through a session (after having logged in previously with my gmail one) it will suddenly swap me to my older login which means I need to login again.
2. Logging in is a hit and miss thing. I’m either timing out, seeing a maintenance page or taking a few minutes to get logged in. Similarly after logging in I click on a link within the page and either time out, get switched to my old login which asks me to sign up again, see a maintenance page or have a very slow transition to the new page.
3. When and if I do get logged in I’m still seeing no data - 17 hours after adding the code two of my blogs.
So all in all - my first impressions of Google Analytics are that it has potential (the glimpses of the stats that it’s supposed to give me look worth having) but that it’s slow and incredibly frustrating. I expected more from a Google product to be honest - I know there are always bugs with new things but if I’d been them I would not have promised a 12 hour delay if there was any chance at all that it might be longer.
I’m going to stop trying to use it for another day or two til they get the bugs out of the system.
update: while the US sleeps it seems that Google Analytics has sped up a bit. Logging in is possible and it’s all loading reasonably quickly. Still no actual stats/data yet though after 24.5 hours so far.
Written on November 15th, 2005 at 12:11 am by David Shawver Stanton
What to Do when Your Google Traffic Disappears
I’ve had emails from a number of enternetusers readers in the past week who have each told me that at some point in the last month they’ve seen drastic falls in their Google SERPs and as a result their referral traffic from Google. In each case their page rank has remained at the same level but they’ve plummeted from ranking in the top 10 for their keywords to almost disappearing (or being the 320th ranked site). In each email there is a little panic, desperation and the question ‘what do I do?’ This post is an attempt to give some advice on this topic.
What’s going on?
Without getting into all the technicalities (something I’m not really capable of anyway) Google have just completed (or are getting close to finishing) the 3rd phase of their latest series of updates. This latest round of updates was informally called ‘Jagger’ by SEO experts.
Google employee, Matt Cutts, has been writing about Jagger on his blog (you can see them in his Google/SEO category).
Much of how Google determines who ranks how in their index is kept secret by Google but periodically they do an update like this that gives some sites a real shake up - for some it brings drastic improvements in where they rank and for others it unfortunately sees them seemingly fall out of the rankings completely.
This is what happened to me a week out from Christmas last year when I lost two thirds of my sites traffic (and daily income) to my digital camera blog in the period of an hour or two. Ouch.
What should you do when you lose your Google ranking?
The following advice is not official Google advice - it’s my advice which I gleaned from more experienced online entrepreneurs when it happened to me last year and I went into panic mode and started emailing people. Don’t take it as gospel - I’m not pretending to understand Google or how it works (people who I know work there say they don’t even understand it) - rather this is simply what I did and learned.
1. Don’t panic - while I totally understand this reaction it is not going to help anyone for you to get panicky and depressed. One of the first things I realized when I started asking around about this last year was that it happens to every online entrepreneur at some point or another. Almost everyone I spoke with who had been in this game for longer than a year or two had a story to tell about when they’d fallen out of Google. The reassuring thing was that in most cases they also had a story of when Google re-ranked them as high as they were previously (or close to it).
2. Wait - The main advice I was given by my more experienced colleagues was to take a deep breath and wait. Google tends to do updates every couple of months (give or take a month) and many of the people who I spoke to said that they returned to their previous rankings after a fall in the very next update when Google made adjustments to their previous changes.
3. Don’t give up - a couple of the bloggers who have emailed me are talking about throwing in the towel. My advice is to take a day or two off to think about this before you delete your blogs and disconnect your broadband. Give yourself a little time to put things in perspective.
4. Don’t make major changes - The temptation when you fall badly in your Google ranking is to completely rework your site. A lot of theories fly around discussion forums and blogs on what Google’s updates mean and how to ‘fix’ your site. Some of these theories might have some validity, others do not. The thing to remember is that no-one outside of Google (and many inside it) ‘know’ what changes were made in an update and how to ‘fix’ your site. I would recommend you leave making any major changes in your blog until you see what happens in the next Google update. If at this point you still rank low it might be worth considering a few changes.
The only exception to this advice of not making big changes is if you know you are doing something spammy or outside of Google’s rules or regulations. If you are doing something dodgy then you probably deserve to loose your Google ranking and I suggest you get your act together and develop a decent and honest site.
5. Work on improving your site - Probably the best advice I was given by a couple of wise experienced friends was to take the opportunity to work hard at lifting my blogs to the next level. I actually took the six weeks that my blogs fell out of the Google rankings to do a number of things to my blog. I decided that I wanted to come out the other side of the experience of being de-ranked in Google with a better quality blog. The things I did included:
- tweaking design - while I didn’t do any major changes to design I did a spring clean of my blogs and freshened things up a bit in terms of both how they looked and what their back end code looked like. Over time it’s easy to add lots of little features to your blog (buttons, pictures etc) - these can clutter the look of your site and slow it down a bit. Every now and again it’s worth getting ride of some of the clutter.
- writing a series of fresh and link worthy posts - I admit I wallowed in a little depression for a few days but once I pulled myself together, got some perspective and decided to move through it I decided to knuckle down and write some quality content. As I wrote it I let a few other key sites in my niche know what I’d written in the hope that some would link up (remember inbound links to your site are very powerful in terms of search engine ranking).
- developing relationships with other relevant sites - in addition to letting other sites know about some of my key posts I also decided to get to know a few other bloggers and web masters in my niche. This brought some interesting opportunities for collaboration and a few more inbound links which would not have hurt my SEO.
- working on SEO - again, I didn’t make major changes, but there were a few things that I did in terms of basic Search Engine Optimization - all of which can be found in my SEO for bloggers series.
- develop loyal readership - while I did lose a significant level of traffic from Google I also realized that I had quite a few regular readers who were coming to my blog through bookmarks, RSS and from other sites. I came to the realization that perhaps I’d been taking this traffic for granted previously and that I should put some effort into it. I increased the numbers of newsletters I was sending to subscribed readers and did a few meme type things that helped build community in this group.
6. Diversify - Another big lesson from the whole experience was that I had too many eggs in one basket. From this point I vowed that if I ever was de-ranked from Google again that I would have other income streams to sustain me through the low times. I began a process of diversification that has included:
- new blogs on different domains - up until this point I’d only ever had a very small number of blogs, all sharing the one domain. The Google update impacted the whole domain and I realized that in future it would either be feast or famine for me. The result was since this time I’ve started a variety of new blogs on a number of domains.
- new collaborations - out of building relationships with other bloggers and webmasters came a number of opportunities to start new projects and work together on existing ones. b5media is probably one example of this - a whole new collection of blogs that emerged out of collaboration.
- new revenue streams - up until this experience I’d not really experimented with too many other income streams than Adsense. While Adsense is a wonderful system - I decided to branch out and find what else I could find.
- other search engine optimization - I’d never really thought much about optimizing my blogs for anything other than Google before - the past year has seen me looking at MSN and Yahoo a little more as traffic sources. Similarly I’ve worked harder on finding traffic from other sources such as RSS, other sites and loyal readers.
- non blogging income - I took on a part time ‘real job’ this year for six months simply as a back up plan to get us through the decline in income in the short term. I also developed the six figure blogging course as an income that didn’t directly come out of my blogging and took on some consulting work.
I hope that that helps those who have suffered in the latest Google Update. I’m really sorry to hear of it and hope that something in my above experiences gives some comfort or help in getting things back on track.
Written on November 14th, 2005 at 04:11 pm by David Shawver Stanton
Google Analytics
Google have just made Google Analytics available for free to Adwords advertisers. Google Analytics is a re-branded ‘Urchin Analytics’ which previously costed $199 per month. Google bought Urchin out in March of this year.
Here’s how they describe it:
“Learn how visitors interact with your website and identify the navigational bottlenecks that keep them from completing your conversion goals. Find out how profitable your keywords are across search engines and campaigns. Pinpoint where your best customers come from and which markets are most profitable to you. Google Analytics gives you this and more through easy-to-understand visually enhanced reports.
Available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Russian, and seamlessly integrated with AdWords, Google Analytics provides the actionable information you need to improve your site content, optimize your ad campaigns, and boost your ROI.”
I’m yet to dig too deeply into Google Analytics yet myself (I’m currently installing it) but it tracks the ROI of your Adwords campaigns (if you have any) but from what I understand also will track other traffic also.
I’ll write more as I analyze (sorry) the service and learn more about it but I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be very very useful.
Read more about it on the many articles appearing on Google News.
update: It looks like they’re under a lot of load in terms of traffic because it’s all running incredibly slowly at this stage. What I’ve seen so far is that once you’re registered it is a matter of installing some javascript between your head tags and then waiting up to 12 hours for the statistics to start to come through.
They also seem to allow you to track multiple sites through the one account. No real information in mine yet but I’ll be watching what they give me in the next 12 hours.
Written on November 14th, 2005 at 12:11 pm by David Shawver Stanton
Hypocritical Blogging
Robert Scoble posted over the weekend about whether there should be more debate or critique over the use of ad programs like Adsense or Chitika by bloggers (as there was earlier in the year with Marquis paying bloggers to post about them. His post caused a bit of a stir among some publishers who didn’t feel the comparison was fair.
I’ve been mulling the issue over in my mind the past few days since reading his post and would respond with a few brief points:
Firstly I welcome the debate, critique, discussion and feedback on all types of income earning possibilities for bloggers. I think the professional blogging community is strong enough to take a bit of constructive robust discussion on the topic and would probably grow and be strengthened through more talk on ethical topics.
Secondly as I’ve reflected upon Robert’s comments (he wrote “no one complains about bloggers taking a similar deal from advertising companies like Google and Chitika.”) my mind goes back to the many times that I’ve seen discussion, critique and complaints on the topic over the past two years. Now this could just be that I write on the topic and have keyword alerts on terms like Adsense - as a result I see quite a bit of debate and critique that might go under the radar of other bloggers.
Thirdly - Part of Robert’s critique is that there is pressure to give advertising networks what they want to hear if you’re chasing dollars on your blog. I would respond to this by agreeing with him in part - every day I see bloggers doing things that I believe compromise themselves in the chase of the dollar. I constantly see certain bloggers recommending products that they show no evidence of using and reviewing products that they could not possibly have had a chance to get their hands on (recently I saw a ‘review’ of a camera that hadn’t even been officially announced yet).
Having said this I would argue that all media that runs advertising actually face the pressure of presenting content that panders to advertisers. Last week I watched a lifestyle show on TV that had a segment was so obviously just a marketing spin for a particular product - it gave a glowing review with no critique or downsides mentioned. Of course in the next ad break there was an advertisement for the very product.
In fact it’s a problem that goes beyond media and advertising. How many businesses feel the pressure to recommend certain products above others because they get a higher commission or because their profit margin is higher on those products. I know of one camera sales guy who admitted to me recently that his boss tells him to recommend one brand of camera because of the increased profitability of it even though it’s not as good a quality as another brand.
Bloggers who don’t run ads fall into the same temptation - how many smaller bloggers pander to the opinions of larger ones in the hope that they’ll get the attention of the big blogs and possibly get a link.
I guess my point is that Robert makes a fair point but that it is not just entrepreneurial bloggers that face these types of pressures.
Robert himself has been accused numerous times over the past 12 months of pandering to his employer in his blog. While I don’t agree with the criticisms he’s been on the end of - I’m sure at one time or another the temptation to put a spin on something might have entered his mind if he’s human.
So we all face such pressures to compromise from time to time - it’s part of life. I’m not arguing that this means we shouldn’t discuss it as it pertains to blogging (or that just because some people do it we all should) - just that we need to do it acknowledging that it’s something that most people struggle to find a reasonable place on in life - not just those pesky unethical bloggers with ads.
I’ll be honest and say that I’ve felt the temptation to give advertisers exactly what they want all the time over the past couple of years. It would be a lot easier to write glowing reviews of every camera that comes my way and put an affiliate link next to all my false recommendations - however I have come to my own position on this and have chosen to only give genuine recommendations and critiques (I doubt I’ve ever reviewed a product that didn’t have something wrong with it) of products or services. This decision is based upon both my ethics but also business sense. Readers see through one sided reviews and it’s not in my best interests to only give the positive spin.
I’m still thinking this one through (in fact it’s been something I have pondered on a regular basis since I started blogging - and maybe even before) but would be interested in others thoughts.
Written on November 14th, 2005 at 08:11 am by David Shawver Stanton
Stephen Discovers the Power of Blended Adsense Ads
Inspiring comments from Stephen in the last post:
‘Up until last weekend, my adsense in-page banners used my site colors, but had a complimentary color border to make them stand out more against the content. My daily average for October was just over $2 a day - I had good traffic, but an awful CTR. I was getting far more cash from Chitika.
Last weekend, I followed a tip I read here to make the border the same color as the background color so they blend in better, as Darren does here on the site. I also implemented channels to track better what was going on
In the last seven days, my adsense revenue alone has jumped to over $220 - an average of over $30 a day. HUGE difference. And my channel data has suggested which type of banner dramatically outperforms the other, so now I can optimize even more.
So let’s see, I spent an hour doing it, it brought me an extra $200 a week in revenue. I guess in a year’s time, I might well look back and call that a $10k hour.’
Wow - that’s an increase from just over $2 per day to over $31 per day! That was a pretty worthwhile hour of work!
PS: I talk about blending your ads in part 7 of my Adsense tips - the same principle applies for all types of contextual ads that I’ve come across.
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