Archive for Advertisement
Doing crap vs Changing the world
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been thinking about this for over a week now and it really obsesses me. Do you sometimes have the feeling your online journey won’t bring anything good to this world? I am not talking about blogging or running a website for a purpose or to give tips and tricks on a specific subject, I’m talking about building websites or blogs on a subject you have absolutely no clue about just to get money through AdSense or whatever affiliate program?
Crapternet (aka Internet filled with crap)
Both my parents went through health issues this year (no worries, it’s all fine now) and one thing you do (at least most people) when having health problems is a Google search. You know, when you build websites just for money, you don’t really think about the end user and what kind of information you are going to put out there: you just pray for a good CPC. But when I learned my parents were using Google to find more information, I immediately felt bad because they didn’t know a 15 years old kid could write health articles and get a decent ranking on Google. Honestly, the more I think about it, the more it pisses me off. Most people don’t realize that by building a website or a blog you can have a direct impact on people’s life. This is particularly true in health or finance niches and unfortunately there are too many people in that business just for the money.
Imagine you have cancer. It is not a very nice thought to have, but that’s the only way to really understand the impact we have as bloggers, internet marketers or whatever you like to call yourself. You will Google about your specific cancer and find some information, but who actually published that information? Is it a 15 year old kid? Is it a doctor? Is it reliable? Was it built just for the money? Is there a full time SEO person working to get that website on top of Google? Imagine the information you just found says that most people die of the type of cancer you have…I think it’s freakin’ important to know if the person who wrote that is a 15 year old crapternet marketer or a doctor. Unfortunately, there are good chances it’s a person like you and me.
Google keyword tool and the crapternet
Most Internet Marketers only think about finding good keywords in Google keyword tool and don’t care about the end user. “Oh, look! ‘Breast cancer’ average CPC is 20$, let’s start a breast cancer blog”. Yeah, let’s pretend you know what you’re talking about. That keyword tool is responsible for a lot and I mean a lot of crappy content in all niches on the web and it’s really sad.
30 years of crapternet domination?
I think about my career all the time and one of the thing that obsesses me (and you know there’s a lot) is “Will I be able to do this for the rest of my life”? I also think about when I will meet new friends in my life and tell them what I do for a living. Something that is important for me and that I hope is important for you as well is to be proud of what I do everyday. I love blogging and Internet Marketing and I wouldn’t have any problems with saying that’s what I do for a living, but Internet Marketing is very vague.
“Oh Internet Marketing sounds good, what kind of website do you promote?”
“Well, I build about a hundred websites every year about whatever hot subject and suck money out of it.”
“Oh, I see, so you must be a guru in a lot of fields!?”
“No, I usually don’t have a clue what I’m talking about: people just end on my websites because I’m on the first page of Google”
Could you?
I’m guilty
Yes I already built crappy websites just for quick cash and AdSense. We are all (mostly) guilty of the quick cash trap, but it always takes an important event in your life to realize the impact you might have on other people’s life.
I’m just sayin’
I’m not saying to anyone to stop their online business, I’m just saying it’s important to think about the impact you might have. You can build a weight loss blog, a cancer blog, a debt relief blog or whatever, but do you bring anything to this world?
Bring back ethic
Unfortunately there is not much ethics left in this Internet Marketing world. Everyone wants a share of the pie no matter what it involves. I say bring back ethic and try to actually do something that will help people around you.
With a long term vision you might win. So, what do you guys think?
Advertisers: wake up! The real subscriber count
Posted by: | CommentsI am not going to make friends with that one for sure. As most of you know, I published an article last week about how you could artificially inflate or fake your Feedburner subscriber count and strongly advised you not to do it for obvious reasons. Now, do you think I would let you guys get away with it that easy? Of course not!
Wake up!
By exposing how easy it was to fake the subscriber count, I guess I wanted to say a little something to every advertiser out there: “Wake up!”. If you think this doesn’t apply to you because you’re not an advertiser you are wrong because the minute you comment on other blogs, you advertise your website. Advertising doesn’t mean paying money for an ad spot: to me it means having your brand displayed elsewhere. What I am about to say does apply to paid advertisement, but I’ll explain why it does apply to you also.
The main reason I think people are faking their RSS Subscriber count is to sell advertisements or reviews for more money. You know, some people will ask 25 or 30$ a month for an ad on their website simply because the feedburner chicklet shows 600 subscribers: it’s a common thing. Of course, you can check out some Alexa stats to make sure that number is real, but ShoeMoney has an Alexa Rank of 101,291 which makes me think Alexa is mostly crap. I also have another blog getting about 50 times more traffic than this blog with a crappy Alexa Rank as well. If we can’t really rely on Alexa Rank - and I’ve talked about it in the past - it all comes down to the Feedburner subscriber count, right? Well it pisses me off because a lot of bloggers fake it and there is NO, absolutely NO return on investment when advertising on their blogs. It’s important for every advertiser out there to know what the real numbers are and I’m about to show you how (mostly).
I hope advertisers will read this because it will help them maximize their return on investment (ROI). The same applies to you, the average blogger with not so much money to invest in advertisement. I want everybody to make the wisest choice when it comes to advertisement and trusting the Feedburner chicklet is probably the worst decision of all.
I don’t pay for advertising, how does this apply to me?
You comment on blogs, you advertise. Whether or not you pay for it, every single time your link appear on a blog, it’s called advertising. Now, why does it matter? When you comment on blogs showing 600 subscribers, you’re actually making that blog a little more powerful because you’re advertisers more reasons to think the blog is active with real readers.
Can’t we use comments as a metric?
Unfortunately no, a lot of popular blogs out there don’t receive a lot of comments even if they have an impressive REAL number of subscribers. Take John Cow for example, he doesn’t receive 50 comments on every post, but he has a pretty good subscriber count and pretty good traffic. It’s a good indication, but we can’t use it as a very good metric.
Google Reader is the key
Not many people know that with Google Reader, you can get the number of subscribers subscribed via Google Reader for a particular feed! It doesn’t show you the real numbers because it only displays the number of subscribers subscribed using Google Reader, but this can give us a pretty good estimate. Where is that feature? It’s hidden a little bit, but when you select a particular feed in your Google reader, you will see a little “Show details” link and this link is the key! As an example, here’s are feed details for The Net Fool:
How can this help me get the real numbers?
Let’s do some maths here and compare the Google Reader count with the Feedburner chicklet on some blogs I have in my Google Reader:
| Blog | Google Reader Count | Feedburner Count | Google Reader Market Share |
| The Net Fool | 139 | 685 | 20% |
| IM With Joe | 60 | 182 | 33% |
| John Cow | 510 | 10,128 | 5% |
| The University Kid | 217 | 1029 | 21% |
| Dosh Dosh | 6,712 | 19,249 | 35% |
| ShoeMoney | 1,094 | 24,999 | 4% |
| SlyVisions | 117 | 333 | 35% |
I tried to include some well known sub 1000 blogs as well as some bigger blogs like Dosh Dosh, ShoeMoney and John Cow. There’s only 7 blogs in the list as I only took some blogs from my Google Reader and didn’t do an extensive search for feeds. While some might say it’s not that much and we can’t really get any statistics out of that, just check your Google Reader and you’ll notice it’s around 25% for a lot of blogs. So you guys can basically do your own investigation, but you get the big picture and you know where I’m going with this.
What’s a “normal” ratio?
You’re the judge on that one, I don’t want to go out and say “Anybody under 10% is a cheater!”, I just want to raise a flag. I strongly encourage you to go through your list of feeds in Google Reader and check who looks suspicious. I unsubscribed to A LOT of feeds, especially in the MMO niche because of that and trust me, I know who’s faking it out there. I won’t point the finger at anyone as you’re all able to figure it out on your own.
I also want to point out that anybody with 300 Feedburner Subscribers and 15 Google Reader Subscribers is extremely suspicious. But as I said, you’re the judge.
Contests brings the ratio down
BS. While I agree contests are extremely popular and one of the requirements to get entries is to subscribe by email, I don’t think it would impact the count that much. I think most people will unsubscribe after the contest and subscribe to the feed via a reader if they like the blog. Even if people don’t unsubscribe, I’m not sure it can cause the ratio to go THAT down. The Net Fool ran a lot of contests and still has a pretty decent ratio. John Cow ran a lot of contests and has a pretty low ratio, but with 10,000 subscribers it really is a different game. We all know John Cow is getting traffic so there’s no question there.
I’m not saying ShoeMoney is cheating
Some might say, Shoe is at 5%, is he cheating? I don’t think so because if you check ShoeMoney, TechCrunch and big blogs like that the ratio is very low, mostly because the subscriptions come from so many different sources. For sub 1000 subscribers, it seems that the stats are pretty accurate. I also made some research online and it seems to be a well accepted fact that the Google Reader market Share is around 20-25% (That’s what it is on frogstr…)
Feedcompare.com
Another method Chris at chrisguthrie.net mentioned me is to actually have a look at feedcompare.com. It really is a nice website that let you have a look at how Feedburner feeds evolve into time. With it, you can actually see if there’s anything unusual on a feed if the feed in question has the “Awareness API” enabled. Mine isn’t enabled as I don’t like other websites and outside sources to have access to my feed without me knowing, but here is an example of a suspicious feed:
I’m not saying this guy is faking it, but going from 395 to 690 in two days is very suspicious…
You’re the judge
As I said, you’re the judge on this. I’m just saying you should be careful with the Feedburner count and don’t necessarily take it as a very good metric until you confirm the numbers by yourself. Google Reader is a good way to estimate the numbers and I honestly think 10-25% market share is a pretty accurate number. So, be careful when you buy advertisement, the Feedburner subscriber count shouldn’t always justify a higher price.
Prove me wrong
If you’re an honest blogger with 300 subscriptions and something like 15 Google Reader subscriptions It would be great if you could share some detailed stats. I would be more than happy to blog about it and say I was wrong! 
Share this
I hope you guys will share this. Not because I want some link love, but because I want the community to know. I personally think the Google Reader subscriber count is a much better metric simply because Google Reader is the most popular reader out there and it’s a lot more harder to fake.
125×125 advertising experiment
Posted by: | CommentsJust like I tried to sponsor a category in BlogCatalog some time ago, I am experimenting with buying 125×125 ad spots in order to drive some traffic. In fact, there’s no such thing as ad spotS…I’m buying a single ad spot.
The winner
The blog who received my 10$ for this experiment is LinkersBlog. Danny Cooper is doing an awesome job to drive his website to the top and it looks like the blog is rising fast. It seemed like a good investment to me when looking at the money vs the quality of the traffic I would be getting.
You know, I’m saying “experiment” here, but this experiment might turn into full time advertising if it brings some good results and that the ROI is decent.
The 125×125 banner
Here’s the banner I’m putting on LinkersBlog:
125x125 frogstr banner
“A frog makes million online?” WTF Ben? I know…I love it No seriously, this advertisement is a bet. You know, I’m so sick of the banners like “21 years old makes thousands online, not you”, “I’m rich, you’re not”, “Work at home and make million in 3 easy steps”, etc. You know what I’m talking about, right? I didn’t want to have a banner that looked like every other banner out there so I decided to have some fun. Why not something as ridiculous as a frog making money online? I’m sure some will click because it’s so weird and just want to see what this is all about. Will they stay on the blog for more? We’ll see.
The experiment
This is a 30 days experiment, but it could turn into a lifetime experiment if it turns out to be working good. I’m planning to make a more serious 125×125 banner for the future as I don’t consider this blog to be a 100% MMO blog and it’s not the image I want to sell. The frog making million is good to catch attention, but I’ll be considering something a little more professional and more general for the future.
I will be providing some stats to you guys just to let you know how everything is going and from this you can yourself decide if it’s worth it to pay 5, 10 or 15$ to advertise your blog on another blog.
Google monopoly - Don’t blame big G
Posted by: | Comments
Google monopoly
The recent deal between Google and Yahoo means that Google ads will now be displayed on the whole Yahoo network. Some say it’s good news, some say it’s bad news and some really don’t care. The biggest issue with that deal is concerning the monopoly Google would get in the Internet ads market. You know, they already owned a huge part of internet advertising and on top of that this year they aquired DoubleClick and signed a deal with Yahoo. It’s as close as it can get to a monopoly I agree.
The Google monopoly
People fear that a too strong presence of Google on the market will make the prices of advertising go higher for advertisers and down for publishers. That’s what having no competition usually does: you try to cash in the maximum you can before some other company come and take some of your market share. Google made sure to confirm the prices won’t go up because buying advertisements with Google is based on an auction system. I agree, I agree…But big G…You wrote that auction system, you can do whatever you want! Anyway…At least they tried.
It’s not Google’s fault
I’m really neutral when it comes to Google, I both love and hate the company. I’m just sick of people bashing Google on the monopoly issue because of that new Yahoo deal. We have to understand the core reason why Google is in a monopoly situation: there are no decent competitors! Google dominate the market simply because they are the best at what they do! I wouldn’t mind using another CPC system on my websites, but they aren’t as good as Google! I tried some other CPC programs, but none of them even come close to Google’s Adsense/Adwords system. I would put the pressure on companies to come with a decent system that can beat Google Adsense/Adwords. But for now, as a publisher, I only want Google to loose its monopoly if there’s a better alternative out there. Otherwise, they give me too much money for me to hate them and say go away!
I would do the same
We would probably be doing the exact same thing Google is doing right now. Let’s say you develop an advertising system that is so damn good it beats every other system out there. It’s also so good that publishers can put little code on their website to earn money easily. Nobody is able to beat your system, what would you do? Spread the damn thing! That’s what Google is doing my friend.
Come with a decent alternative
I put the pressure on other companies, not Google. Come up with a decent system able to beat Google’s system and we’ll open the monopoly debate again. Until then, they just do what every corporation would do.
Adsense clickers group & Understanding the business
Posted by: | CommentsI just visited DigitalPoint and was shocked to see this post:
Adsense clickers group.
messege me for info
Hurting the business
Less money
Top of the week
Posted by: | CommentsLet’s stop talking about me and let’s talk about other great bloggers! I read a lot of interesting stuff this week and I’d like to point you a couple of articles I enjoyed (in no particular order):
1. How to destroy your blog competition
First of all, JK from imwithjoe.com is a great blogger and always have great thoughts to share, so keep that in mind and subscribe to his feed. This week, he posted an article called How to destroy your blog competition. Friend or Foe?. It definitely is an interesting article and it shows you how to properly interact with other bloggers and how to deal with competition among bloggers in your particular niche. Enjoy!
2. 6 Step Checklist for On-Site Search Engine Optimization
Another friend of mine, JR from JR’s Internet Marketing Strategies posted an extremely useful article for everyone not familiar with “SEO on page optimization”. The article is called 6 Step Checklist for On-Site Search Engine Optimization and there’s not much I could add to this list. It’s pretty complete and extremely useful for beginners. Remember that on page optimization is extremely important if you’re trying to get good rankings in Google. Read this article, your website will thank you!
3. Blogging is like running a marathon
Tom from standout blogger really hit the target with this article called Blogging is like running a marathon. I mentioned it so many time: blogging is hard and it’s a long term run. Here’s a quick preview of the article and the idea behind it:
Have you ever wondered why so many bloggers start off with a bang, just to disappear as soon as it seems like they are just getting started? This is happening all to often and I think it has a lot to do with people treating blogging like a 100 meter sprint. When in fact they should be treating it more like a marathon.
That’s all
That’s all for this week. Making a top of the week is a thing I will try to do every week. I like sharing what I’m reading and giving you the best of it, so stay tuned!
Sponsoring a category in BlogCatalog
Posted by: | CommentsI’m a big fan of BlogCatalog and I actually much prefer it to MyBlogLog but I won’t go into details as to why I prefer it as it’s not the purpose of this post. I actually want to talk about sponsoring a category into BlogCatalog to get more exposure. I was interested in sponsoring a category to increase my visibility but I’m not sure it’s really worth it.
The price
The rates to sponsor a category are actually pretty good for a website like BlogCatalog which is receiving thousands of visitors everyday: it goes from 8$ to 25$. Prices depend on the category you want to sponsor. For example, a scrapbooking category will cost you 8$ while a Finance category will be 25$. It just goes with popularity.
What do you get?
Here’s what BlogCatalog gives you for sponsoring a category:
BlogCatalog’s Sponsored Category program is a way for you to get more visitors to your blog by taking advantage of BlogCatalog’s traffic of over 45 million annual visitors.
- A premium position in BlogCatalog’s Category specific directory
- Your blog will show up in one of the top 5 positions in the category you select
- Your sponsorship links to your BlogCatalog description page which links to your blog.
Worth it?
Well, with BlogCatalog, you can actually see the number of recent visitors on the website’s BlogCatalog profile and from what I’ve seen from other sponsors, I’m not convinced. The amount of recent visitors was similar to my profile’s recent visitors count and I wasn’t sponsoring any category which makes me think it’s not a big traffic source. These are only assumptions as I’m not sure how reliable the stats ar.
These are only assumptions, let’s try it!
Anyway, I don’t like to assume things so I decided to sponsor the SEO category on BlogCatalog for the next 30 days. So, if you search into the SEO category, you’ll see me appear in the first five listings:
So I say, if you were thinking about sponsoring a category to increase your exposure, just wait a week or two. I will provide some feedback in the next weeks as to wether it’s giving good traffic or not so this way you will be able to make a good decision and won’t throw away 10-25$. Let me do the dirty work!
More ads, less money
Posted by: | CommentsA common thing to monetize your website is to flood it with AdSense ads. While AdSense ads are a great way to monetize a website, more ads doesn’t necessarely mean more money. Many people think that by flooding the website with AdSense, they increase their chances of receiving clicks and thus, maximize their profits. We’ll have a look here why it is not always the case.
Why?
Let’s start with the base principle of AdSense. Google actually “read” the content of your website to figure out what your page is about and deliver ads accordingly. For the particular subject your website is about, Google has a pool of potential campaigns to show. In these campaigns, certain have a high CPC (Cost per click), certain have an average CPC and others have a very low CPC. Google wants to make you and their advertisers happy, so that’s why they’ll try to provide you with ads having a good CPC, but if you offer enough ad spots on your site, they’ll definitely provide you with some crappy ads as well.
Now, let’s say you display 25 text links on your page from Adsense. For the particular subject your webpage is about, Google may only have something like 5 extremely good targeted ads with high CPC, 10 average ads and 10 crappy ads. If you display these 25 text links, there are good chances someone will click on one of them because there are so many, but there are 80% chances that the clicks you receive will have an average or very low CPC.
Now, let’s say you only put 5 text links. There are less chances for you to receive clicks, but the clicks will usually be worth more money! This is for the simple reason that google won’t display (Well, not every time) 5 crappy ads on a total of 5 possibilities.
So what’s the perfect balance?
You have to test a lot of different ad placements. For some websites, having more ads might bring more money and for some other sites, a single ad might do the job. On another website I worked on, I displayed only two ads and this was giving me more money than when I was displaying three or four. I received less clicks, but the clicks were actually giving me more money.
This trick won’t work if you don’t optimize your ad placement. Less ads will only be efficient if you know precisely where to place them to get clicks. I usually achieve this by “flooding” the page with ads and then analyzing the ones with the highest CTR (Click through rate). When you know the top spots on your page, it’s time to get rid of the poor performing ads. This way, your top spots will always receive the best ads and you’ll make more money out of the same traffic.
If a page full of ads does the trick for you, keep it this way. It depends a lot on the type of website you run and the type of traffic, so that’s why you have to test a lot of different scenarios. It is not science, but this technique works for me most of the time.
