Written on 1/27/2006 at 4:12 pm by

AdSense tests Rich Media and Change Referral Rules

Filed Under: Adsense

Two important posts over at Jensense today (why news break every time I go away):

1. Google AdSense begins rich media beta test – very interesting news. Google are going beyond just text ads and are testing a variety of other types of ads including interstitial (I’m not a fan of these – they are an ad page that sits between the actual page people want and where they came from that often make you click a link to continue on to the page you want), expanding ads (when you scroll over or click on an ad it expands) and floating ads (those that seem to hover over the page). This is sure to cause a real stir among both publisher and those who hate online advertising – especially any kind that might have an increased annoyance factor.

Jen says these are likely to be site targeted ads (not contextual). If you spot any of these ads I’d love to hear from you.

2. AdSense silently adds a 90-day time limit on AdSense referrals – Previously if you referred a publisher to AdSense with one of their buttons you’d earn $100 when they got to their first $100 of earnings. Now they’ve added a clause that says you only get this $100 commission if they make the $100 in the first 90 days that they are a publisher. I have to say I’m not at all impressed by this development. I’ve referred a number of people to Adsense in the past few months (20 or so) but am yet to see any earnings from them which indicates that none have hit the $100 mark. Last time I checked with readers they hadn’t had any payments either (let me know if you have). To me it just seems like they are changing the rules mid stream and that 90 days is quite a short time frame. In my experience as someone who consults with AdSense – it’s not uncommon for publishers to take longer than 90 days to get their first cheque. I’m pretty disappointed in this finding – and to see that they seem to have made the change without making any public announcement just seems a little underhanded.

Written on 1/27/2006 at 3:50 pm by

Reader Submitted Links

Filed Under: Pro Blogging News

I’m just back from 24 hours away to escape the heat which Melbourne has been having (it’s been in the 40′s a bit this week – with lots of bush fires around our state adding a slight smokey smell to everythng). We stayed with the in-laws (who have air-conditioning) which was cooler until the electrical storm which brought a power blackout!

Anyway – here’s a few links that readers submitted while I was away:

Written on 1/27/2006 at 1:38 pm by

Google Update (sort of)

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization

Lots of webmasters are reporting changes with Google referral levels this week. Many believe it’s not a new update but a rolling out of changes already made in one or two datacenters. If you’re into tracking Google changes you can try make sense of it at the WMW discussion at Google Datacenters Watch. All seems normal on my blogs – although I know of a few ProBlogger readers who’ve had some big shifts in the last day or two.

Written on 1/27/2006 at 8:45 am by

Names

Filed Under: Pro Blogging News

Yesterday one of the bloggers on our b5media discussion forum asked for the rest of our opinions on how its best to display your name on a blog. The discussion was interesting with a variety of approaches put forward. Some bloggers preferred their first and surname, others a nick name and in an IM conversation afterwards on the same topic I talked to one blogger who wanted to keep their name off the blog all together (not a b5′er). My reply in our discussion (written on the run on the way out the door to a BBQ to celebrate Australia Day today) was as follows:

“I vary mine from blog to blog but on ProBlogger always use my full name because of the goals of that blog. ie there the blog is at least partially about building my reputation and profile on the topic.

On some of my other blogs I do not want to be as prominently featured because the topic and ad revenue are more central and I don’t want them to be dependant upon me as such.

Also consider privacy/security in your decision. Sometimes a little anonymity (at least keeping your surname out of it) could be a good thing.”

How do you display your name on your blog? Do you use your full name, just a first name or a nickname or are you an anonymous blogger? If you have multiple blogs do you do it the same way on all of your blogs? Interested to hear how others do it and why.

Written on 1/27/2006 at 12:06 am by

Should Bloggers Write for Humans or Computers?

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization

I’ve been toying with writing this post for a number of weeks now after reading a number of posts on the death of Search Engine Optimization for Bloggers.

Nick over at Performancing kicked it off (at least it was the first one I’d read for a while) with Why Bloggers Don’t need SEO which I think is a great post making some valid points.

His main argument, as I read it, is that if you write for humans instead of computers that you’ll find you’ll build traffic, get subscribers, get links from other sites and as a result you’ll grow in your Search rankings.

In a sense by writing for humans you ARE doing a very organic SEO as one of the main things SEO experts teach is to get relevant, one way links from other sites.

It’s a pretty strong argument for ‘writing for humans’ and a similar one to what Steve wrote in his recent post (point 4) where he argues strongly that you should write for humans first and computers second.

While I don’t think either Nick or Steve would argue that SEO principles should be ignored completely one might conclude from reading posts like these that SEO is a waste of time and should slip off the radar for bloggers.

I am one blogger that does not believe this. My Dad always used to teach me that when there are two arguments on a topic that in many cases the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

My recommendation is that there is a middle ground and that writing for humans and writing for computers are not mutually exclusive things (and I’ll note that I’m not accusing either Nick or Steve of saying that they are).

Here’s a number of random thoughts that I’d keep in mind when exploring this topic:

1. I would argue that the degree that you write for humans/computers will need to vary from blog to blog somewhat. As I wrote a few posts back here – as I look at my blogs I see some that need SE traffic more than others. ProBlogger is one that does not rely heavily upon SE traffic (although I’ve noticed more of it of late) while my gadget blogs do. This is because of the nature of what people are looking for on those blogs.

Here at ProBlogger people are looking for community, a learning environment and fellow travelers/teachers to explore a topic over time. On my gadget blogs people are looking for information on a particular product for a particular time. A much smaller percentage of them want to build community around those products – instead they want to make a decision on what to buy and their first point of call is a search engine where they’ll type in ‘product name review’. While writing for humans is still important in these blogs SEO is still worth exploring – in fact as I look at the traffic on some of these blogs search engines account for the vast majority of visitors.

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Written on 1/26/2006 at 7:20 pm by

How to bring your blogging productivity levels to 0 in one simple step

Filed Under: Pro Blogging News

b5media’s blogs have come to a standstill today.

No its not server problems and no our bloggers have not started a mutiny. No it’s much more evil and sinister than that.

In our private bloggers internal bloggers communications one of our bloggers, Jesse, introduced everyone to Escapa!

Before you visit the link – be aware you could be about to destroy your productivity for the day.

Let me know your record time – I’m at 21.12 second but there are b5′ers who’ve gone way past that :-)

Written on 1/26/2006 at 2:20 pm by

Blog Resolutions

Filed Under: Pro Blogging News

Evan Schaeffer posted a good list of blog resolutions back on 2 January that I only just spotted (via LexBlog). In it Evan gives 10 resolutions with quite a few good sub points under many of them. The only resolution I’d add to the list is ‘don’t post such a great post so early in the year when I’m on holidays!’. It’s well worth the read in full but here are his heading to give you a taster:

Resolution 1: Mix It Up
Resolution 2: Prove You Have a Personality
Resolution 3: Be a Better Writer
Resolution 4: Write for the Computer Screen
Resolution 5: Use Photos
Resolution 6: Don’t Be Obscure
Resolution 7: Build a Community
Resolution 8: Experiment with New Weblogging Ideas
Resolution 9: Don’t Let Your Weblog Make You Crazy
Resolution 10: Learn from Other Weblogs

Written on 1/26/2006 at 9:52 am by

WordPress Feedburner Plugin

Filed Under: Blogging Tools and Services, RSS

Feedburnerjpg
Rachel just pinged me on IM to let me know of post she’s just writtten which I really wish she’d written a year ago. It’s about a WP Plugin called WordPress FeedBurner Plugin which makes your Feedburner RSS feed (if you have one) the one that is autodiscovered by feedreaders like Bloglines when people want to subscribe to your blog.

So here at ProBlogger for example I’ve long had a Feedburner RSS feed (it’s the orange button with the number towards the top of my sidebar) but being the untechie guy that I am I had never changed my blog to make it the one that readers find when they use an RSS auto discovery tool. As a result readers were subscribing to my default ProBlogger RSS feed.

Now in lots of ways this doesn’t matter – both feeds get the information to readers which is the main thing. The only real negative is that it has meant my feedburner statistics that tell me how many subscribers there are and which posts they click through onto has been inaccurate.

Needless to say – I’ve just installed the plugin (a very easy set up) and any new subscribers that I get should be on the new feed.

Of course if you’re not using Feedburner this will be a bit of a useless post to you (and if you’re not using WP it might just frustrate you unless you find a plugin for your own platform).

Update: The cool thing about this plugin is that it converts any existing subscribers to my old feeds to the feedburner one. As a result my stats button has gone from around 1700 earlier in the day to over 3000 in just a few hours. No I have not just had an influx of new readers – it’s just starting to count them accurately for the first time ever.

Written on 1/26/2006 at 5:55 am by

High Traffic Blogging Steve Style

Filed Under: Pro Blogging News

Steve Pavlina has another good blog related post on How to Build a High-Traffic Web Site (or Blog) which has some sensible advice in the form of a list. His points are interesting because they are very untechnical and illustrate his own strategy (a successful one from what I can see) to focus very hard upon creating high quality content. Almost every point on his list touches on content creation as being the main focus:

1. Create valuable content.
2. Create original content.
3. Create timeless content.
4. Write for human beings first, computers second.
5. Know why you want a high-traffic site.
6. Let your audience see the real you.
7. Write what is true for you, and learn to live with the consequences.
8. Treat your visitors like real human beings.
9. Keep money in its proper place.
10. If you forget the first nine suggestions, just focus on genuinely helping people, and the rest will take care of itself.

Keep in mind that the focus us Steve’s blog is personal development and so some of these posts come out of that experience and probably relate more closely to that than for some other topics.

For instance in #3 he writes:

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