Art, Technology & People

This is a great article I received from Sitepro, and I thought I would share it with you guys to show you how constant the need for new advertising venues are being exploited and how nothing is really that safe. I personally think that ads within RSS feeds themselves is a bit much and I can honestly say you won’t be seeing those inside the feeds on P2L any time soon! Are people really so desperate? I guess it’s all a matter of one’s personal taste… I was recently asked why I wasn’t running ads in my journal blog. I guess this is my personal space and I’d rather not have ads playing around in my space… you need to draw the line somewhere after all.

Anyhow, enjoy this article written by Sharon Housley and don’t forget you can subscribe to great articles like this in your inbox daily by visiting Sitepronews.com.

As publishers have moved towards monetizing RSS feeds, there have been vibrant discussions as to whether advertisements in feeds are viable or whether they will drive subscribers away. At the end of the day while it appears that many are discussing the philosophical approaches to ads in RSS feeds few are taking the time to examine the options available for inserting advertisements in feeds. Ultimately the advertisements served are going to determine the success of RSS as an advertising medium. The ads served must be related to the content contained in the feed. If the RSS feed contains quality content, the ads are relevant, and the volume of ads is in balance with the volume of content served, advertising in RSS feeds will succeed. Take a closer look at some of the ad serving options currently available for RSS feeds.

Review of Current Options

Google AdSense for Feeds

Google’s AdSense for Feeds offers contextually targeted advertisements, with a wide selection of advertisers. Google chooses not to divulge the percentage of revenue that is shared with the publisher, so it is difficult if not impossible to predict monthly revenue. The current Google AdSense system for feeds is tied to blogs and does not appear to be overly flexible.

Pheedo

Pheedo displays categorized advertisements rather than contextual advertisements. The upside to this is that Pheedo’s advertisements can be used in conjunction with Google AdSense or AdSense for feeds without violating Google’s contract. Pheedo works with the publisher to serve advertisements from similar or related categories associated with the feeds contents.

Pheedo’s system allows for advanced ad filtering, giving publishers control over keyword ad filtering, specific ad filtering or url filtering. Pheedo’s system also allows publishers to sell ads to existing advertisers with whom they already have a relationship. The revenue split is 50% and feeds can be a sponsored flat rate advertisement or a pay-per-click advertisement, where the publisher is only paid if the advertisement is clicked.

Kanoodle for Feeds

Kanoodle’s systems for providing advertisements for feeds is similar to Google’s but they do not have the breadth of advertisers that Google boasts. Advertisements are served based on topics, not keywords. Kanoodle shares 50% of the revenue generated from the advertisements with the publisher serving the ad.

Evaluating Options

When evaluating feed ad serving solutions consider the following:

1. Ad Relevance
In order to generate revenue from RSS advertisements or for an advertising campaign to succeed using RSS as a channel it is absolutely critical that the advertisements served in the feed contain related content, the more related the content the higher the likelihood that the advertisements will be of interest to the reader and clicked. Also, the closer the content relates to the feeds theme the higher the likelihood the reader will have genuine interest in the product or service being advertised.

2. Ad Ratio
Publishers need to retain control over the frequency of advertisements. Advertisers may be happy because they are reaching a targeted audience and publishers because their advertisements are being clicked and generating revenue, but readers will become frustrated with feeds that are too heavily laden with advertisements.

3. Clearly Denoted as Ads
The debate over editorial control and advertisements rages on. It is generally considered proper net etiquette for publishers to clearly mark advertisements to distinguish them from editorial web content. When selecting a RSS advertising partner consider the context in which the advertisements are displayed. Does it blend with the feed or site, while still being clearly marked sponsored material? Or does the content blend so well that it appears as a product or service endorsement from the publisher? Credibility and reputation online matter, and the segregation of advertisements and ensuring they are properly denoted as such will go a long way to enhance credibility with readers.

Clearly as RSS increases in popularity, publishers will be looking for ways to monetize their content. RSS in advertising is a logical step, and striking a balance between quality, consistent content and occasional related advertisements will lead to the success of advertising in RSS feeds. If the balance is not found, publishers may be forced to move to a subscription RSS feed model.

The Wall Street Journal was one of the first content publishers that announced a subscription model. Rather than embedding advertisements in the RSS content feeds, the Wall Street Journal provides teaser copy and if the subscriber wishes to view the expanded content they are charged a subscription fee.

Time will determine the long term viability of advertisements in RSS feeds. If RSS advertisements perform like the contextual text based ads currently served on websites, RSS advertisements will likely become common place. While the content publishers who specialize in unique, consistent content might find the subscription model more effective.



About The Author
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for FeedForDev an RSS component for developers.

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This is another article I published on P2L last year that was just a really fun little project I did on using traffic generating services. This was a real service I tried out and all the content below is based on my personal experiences. Enjoy!

Does it work?

My quick answer to this is no, it doesn’t… not even a little bit. As the owner of P2L, one of my many jobs is to make sure people know about the site and that I develop it’s affiliate and partner programs. I have seen literally thousands of traffic scams, ranging from viral marketing programs to wholesale traffic buying.

Well I’m a curious guy, so I decided to nibble at a few of these programs and see what kind of results I would get from them, especially the cheap yet “Reputable” solutions. In this article, I’m going to talk about wholesale traffic… You’ve probably seen it before: 15000 visitors to your site for $9.99! Guaranteed!

Well, they’re not lying, but the traffic is completely worthless. As an experiment, I purchased 1 package from 3 different traffic whole salers. All of them were pretty much the same thing – 15000 to 25000 visitors for $9.99 to $12.99 guaranteed.

Now even if you decide to try one of these programs, here is a HUGE difference… you will notice an enormous price difference between “traffic” and “targetted traffic”. Targetted traffic is about 10x the price, but obviously targetted traffic would be quite a bit better than god knows what, which is what I’m buying.

So I tried out these guys and 2 of them actually had no tracking of any kind on their site. How the heck was I supposed to know how much of the guaranteed traffic was delivered?? I asked them and they told me to look for a certain referrer URL in my logs. I did notice tons of traffic in the logs coming in, but not from their URL. The fact is, they were resellers for another company.

So anyhow, my stats go way up and the traffic seems to be pounding at the door of P2L. Now here’s the interesting part… with all 3 programs, the web stats were the only numbers that went up. There was ZERO increase in tutorial views, submissions of any kind, new user signups on the forums etc… absolutely no sign of a burst of activity. Whats more interesting is that my Google Ads did not record any increased impressions!

For those of you that don’t know, each time a site page loads with the google ads, it’s considered an impression. Isn’t it interesting that these people were sending me thousands of people a day to my main page yet my impression numbers stayed the same?

I was also amused at how vague they are about how your traffic is delivered.

here is my communication with one company regarding the topic:

My Email to them:

Good afternoon,

I just bought a 20000 visitor package, and I am now wondering how are these visitors shown my site? Is it in a small pop-up, text ad etc… I dug around the site but I don’t see anything about how sites are brought to the potential visitors.

Their response:

The webpage that the URL you supply us points to will be shown in full. I see that your homepage will be shown. We supply hits through our network of partner sites. If you have anymore questions, feel free to reply to this email.

So I wrote them back and continued to get the “We show it through our partners” routine… they all answer that way.

Another good one was after I paid for the service, I never received any confirmation except for my paypal receipt, saying that the campaign will start in 24 hours. A couple of days later, still nothing, so I write them asking what was going on… here what I got:

Hello and thank you again for your order. Periodically, when network volume is down we wait until the volume is up again to start your campaign. It has now started. Feel free to reply to this email if you have any further questions.

Hmm.. so the network traffic went back up just as I happened to ask about it? Interesting…

Anyhow the nightmares are many and it’s obviously a business that is completely full of manure.

Buying 20K visitors for 10 bucks truly is too good to be true. If you’re ever debating to try this kind of campaign, hopefully you read this and forget the idea entirely. I am looking at some other interesting “Traffic generators” that are actually free, and I will let you know how those experiments work out. As it stands though, there’s just no matching the quality traffic you get from your affiliates.

All the best,
Dan

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This is actually an old article I wrote last year that received tremendous feedback, so I’m re-posting it in my journal.

You’re all pumped up! You’ve been working hard on a new layout and have tons of ideas and wonderful miracles to show the online world. One problem, how do you let people know you exist?

When I first started Pixel2life.com back in January 2004, I already had a large amount of friends in the gaming community that I knew would visit my site to check it out, but I wanted to get a targeted audience of visitors. People that would be interested in the content I had to offer them. I love my friends in the gaming community (some of which I’ve known for over 6 years), but only a small portion of them really cared about design. So through trial and error, I’ve found ways to increase my traffic by targeting the proper audience without having to pay for it. These methods don’t compare to buying targeted traffic, but it’s the next best thing. P2L is not a profit oriented website, so I don’t exactly have tons of cash to spend on Ad campaigns.

First off, I must stress the importance of a quality design and quality content. You can draw as much traffic as you want, but without a quality website that will interest your guests, you’ll never make it to their coveted Bookmarks. In the case of design oriented websites for example, there are millions of personal websites that have a few wallpapers, a personal portfolio a shoutbox , and loads of spelling errors. What makes your site better than the rest that would warrant someone to re-visit? Be original, provide quality content, and update often. It’s that simple. If you’re not willing to commit to those rules, don’t bother trying to be the next DeadDreamer or Shiver7. I may write an article in the future regarding this topic in a bit more detail, but for now, I’ll assume your site is a smoking gun and ready for the eyes of the world.

Before you start anything, optimize your site for search engines. You should have a title, meta keys for keywords and description, and nice full sentences in the body of your site. Keyword density is important and with proper SEO techniques, hits from search engines will grow quite a bit. Make sure you customize each page as required. A page about 3D Modeling should not have the same keywords as a page about your graphic portfolio. And remember to include the main keyword(s) in your title. If you’re not sure what exactly to do, check out these results on Google for keyword optimization: Keyword Optimization

For Pixel2life.com, our first month of operation (January 2004) yielded about 200 hits from Google. After spending a week or so correcting my lack of meta keys and keyword density, I received well over 28000 hits from Google in June. This isn’t simply because I worked the keywords, but it had a large hand in it. The other part of the puzzle is reciprocating links.

Now I don’t work for an SEO, nor do I pretend to be an expert in the field, but in my experience, the more reciprocating links to Pixel2life.com on other websites, the higher my Google ranking climbs. In some of my main keywords, I wasn’t even in the top 1000, but after a few months of affiliating and spreading the word, I place in the top 5 in many principal keyword searches. Examples include:

Cinema 4D Tutorials
Swift 3D Tutorials
Corel Photopaint Tutorials

You can check your google rankings for your choice of keywords at http://www.googlerankings.com

AFFILIATE! It’s important to affiliate and get the word around about your site. Do a search on Google for sites similar to your own or have something to do with the topic your site is about and ask the webmaster if they would like to exchange 88×31 pixel banners or text links. If you have a good site, then many webmasters won’t care about your traffic, because they know it will climb in fairly short order if your site is obviously a quality link. I have affiliated with many sites that do not get the same traffic as I do because I love their site and I think my visitors will enjoy it too. So don’t be shy – just ask! It’s not like they’re going to sue you for asking. The worst that will happen is you won’t get a response or you’ll be declined. I’ve been declined many times… it doesn’t hurt, trust me. Don’t send a generic cut and paste email to the webmaster either. Send an email addressed to them personally and let them know you’ve actually checked out their site and why you think you could mutually benefit from exchanging links. Be polite, check your spelling and make sure you send them your details including a short description of your site, current traffic, URL and how you can be reached.

So, affiliation is extremely important. Not only will the visitors of an affiliate see and possibly visit your link, but you’ll increase your search engine ranking as well.

SOTM, SOTW features! There are tons of websites (Pixel2life.com included) that have a featured Site of the Month or Site of the Week section, usually on the main page. This is a great way to get some free exposure, assuming you have a site that would earn this kind of regard. If you’ve got quality, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t win a few of these features. How to find them? Easy as pie! Get on Google and do a search for any of the following:

“Site of the week”
“Site of the week” subject*
“Site of the Month”
“Site of the Month” subject*

* Customize subject with whatever your site is about – like graphics or programming etc…

Here’s a little cheat for you… I won Site of the Week at FTP Planet (www.ftpplanet.com) and received 3000 unique visitors the day it was posted in their newsletter, and I still get hits from the archived link. You can post your entry at FTP Planet SOTW Submissions

Innocent advertising is a non-obtrusive way to plug your site IF you do it properly. Check out www.big-boards.com for large forums that are in line with your interests. Sign up and check the signature guidelines… staying within the guidelines, plug your site in your sig and start posting! Now, here’s the catch… post relevant information to the forum and genuinely contribute to discussions. Don’t just fly on there and start plugging your site or you’ll probably get banned. Just go shoot the shit with the forumites and let your sig do the rest. This is guaranteed to get you additional traffic. Same thing with every place you would leave a signature. Email, forums, blogs, newsgroups etc… but actually post something worth reading, otherwise you’re just another spamming asshat.

The bottom line is that you need to get involved in the community that your site revolves around. Talk to people, learn about your community and make adjustments as you go. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, so you have to work at it. The harder you work at it, the better the results. You’re not paying for anything money-wise, but you will be spending quite a bit of time in front of the screen, especially at first.

Sign your work! If you create wallpapers or post photography (YOUR photography) sign your work with your website address. If people like what they see, they know where to go for more.

Tell a friend script, and a newsletter is also important (Yeah, I know I haven’t got one, but we’re working on it). Tell a Friend is a little script that allows a visitor to send a pre-made email to someone he or she knows that tells them about your website. The person just types in the email address they want the notice to go to and click submit. This is a nice simple way for your guests to share your site with others if they like it enough and want to share their find 🙂

A newsletter is a great reminder tool to previous visitors to come check out your site for new features and content. Many of your visitors will visit your site and forget about it, even if they really enjoyed their first look. This is natural and a common internet fact. By keeping an opt-in newsletter, you can send a monthly email to anyone that has joined the list and that will remind those “one night stand” people that you’re still around and the site is better than ever.

Well, that’s about it for the time being, I hope this helps you get your new site off the ground, or lift your old site even higher. Feel free to post your own traffic grabbing suggestions or comment on the pointers in my article.

Remember, be polite, be personal, get to the point, and don’t be shy. If your site has quality content updated on a regular basis, there’s no reason why you should feel intimidated when trying to share it with others. Just don’t spam and annoy people, and you’ll be amazed at what happens over the next few months.

All the best,
Dan

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I was approving tutorials this afternoon and I came across one of those “Too Cool for IE” sites that are cropping up all over the internet, and it just pushed me over the edge and I had to write this article… granted this is more of a rant.

Have people completely lost their minds? Or perhaps some webmasters are getting way too pompous? Personally, I suspect stupidity or perhaps plain ignorance and laziness. Now, before you “Too Cool” people start throwing up your shields, let’s see if you fall under my wrath of blind judgment.

Let’s start from the top! For those of you that have no idea what I am talking about, there is a relatively new movement among the Internet Explorer bashers (The reasons WHY they hate IE are not part of this debate, so spare me) where they are branding their websites “Too Cool for IE”. Here are the folks that started it all: W3Junkies.com

Now don’t get me wrong here folks… there’s nothing wrong with promoting your favorite browsers on your website or letting the world know how you feel about Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer etc. You have every right to do it. But the practice of FORCING people to download a particular browser to view your website is nothing short of asinine. Let me make this perfectly clear: If you are a webmaster, you are selling services or information (whether you charge or not is irrelevant). The people that view your website are your clients. Who are you to tell your clients how and when to view your site!? It is YOUR job as a webmaster to ensure that your clients can view your website in whatever browser they use in today’s current and common offerings. Especially considering IE still has over 70% browser market share.

Imagine a world where car dealerships dictate to you how to get to the dealer to pick up your car, or McDonalds tells you how to eat their food. Just what I need… a clown over my shoulder telling me how to eat my Big Mac. Have you ever been to a shop that only accepts cash and has no way to process debit or credit cards? I don’t know about you, but I will walk out of that shop and never come back. The excuse of debit “fees” is called the price of doing business. If you design websites, cross-browser compatibility is YOUR “price of doing business”.

Now, I know that W3Junkies.com’s intent of this program is to help promote alternatives to Internet Explorer, which I am totally cool with. Unfortunately there is a wave of webmasters bastardizing the campaign and popping this “Too Cool” logo into their sites because they’re either too lazy or have no idea how to code for cross-browser compatibility. If this is the case, you should NOT be designing and releasing websites. PERIOD. This morning I found a site so poorly coded, that the infamous “Too Cool for IE” banner wasn’t even displaying properly! Are you not embarrassed?! Promoting your favorite browser or bashing a competitor’s browser is no excuse for ignorance and I like, many others, will simply move on to another site and never come back. Cry about the lack of support for CSS in IE all you like, there’s still a way to code your stylesheet so that your site renders properly. Don’t know how? LEARN! Unless of course you don’t want traffic and have no clue how to value customers.

For those of you running the “Too Cool for IE” banner to promote alternatives, but still have a properly coded website with cross-browser compatibility, GREAT JOB! It’s a shame that your example doesn’t reach further. For those of you running the banner because you’re too ignorant or lazy to code a website properly and are forcing clients to change browsers, you should be ashamed. Same for those that are the rampant bashers of IE that simply do it on purpose. Good luck running a business by treating customers that way. You provide a service and visitors are your customers. If you make a service unattainable, your service is useless and you’ve wasted your client’s time and yours. As a webmaster, it is your responsibility to know the basic principals of web design and the business/customer relationship. Good luck succeeding if you do anything less.

And for those of you that are IE junkies and you’re snickering behind your sleeves at this rant, there are “IE only sites” out there that more or less do the exact thing. IE users are plumetting, so you’re just as naive and irresponsible if you think that designing by checking your site in IE only or putting up “IE required” is acceptable.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m off to eat my Big Mac. If you see the dude with red hair, tell him to bugger off.. I always eat my fries last.

Dan Richard