Everybody wonders what s bubbling away in Google Labs to the point that we sometimes forget that other major search companies boast their own research and development departments. To wit Microsoft Research began offering its own variation of social search in October 2 8. Dubbed U Rank it s an interesting experiment….
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Everybody wonders what s bubbling away in Google Labs to the point that we sometimes forget that other major search companies boast their own research and development departments. To wit Microsoft Research began offering its own variation of social search in October 2 8. Dubbed U Rank it s an interesting experiment….
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It’s time for another annual poll here at ProBlogger - this one asking readers how much they earned in October 2008? I’ve run this poll a number of times over the last couple of years and the results are always interesting.
Just to qualify it - I’m asking about ALL blogging revenue that you can tie to your actual blog. Advertising, affiliate revenue, revenue that your blog might have brought in in terms of consulting etc. As long as you feel your blog drew the money in then I’m happy for it to be included.
Looking forward to seeing your results.
Tags: Reader Questions
This session, International Options for US Affiliates, took place Tuesday, August 12, 2008 at Affiliate Summit East 2008.
Session description:
Discussion of expanding business internationally.
Presenter: Jim Mansfield, CEO, Intela
More Affiliate Summit East 2008 audio is available at http://geekcast.fm/archives/category/affiliate-summit/ and video is at http://www.affiliatesummit.tv.
Many bloggers and website owners like to greet visitors coming from specific websites with a tailored message. There are many plugins that will make this for you on WordPress, but a cool one that I came across recently is called Referrer Detector.
It basically allows you to create messages that will be displayed to visitors that come to your website from a specific place, say Digg.com or Google. Right after installing the following places will already have a custom message:
The plugin also comes with many customization options, including the ability to select if you want the message to be displayed before or after the posts (which is something I found problematic on related plugins).
Finally, there are many things that you could accomplish with this piece of code. For example, you could display an advertising box with AdSense just for the visitors coming via Google search, which would increase your CTR and remove the annoyance for loyal visitors at the same time.
Searching for a definition for the word “sluice,” I naturally turned to my trusty friend, Google.
A not unfamiliar sight appeared in the right rail: one of those irrelevant AdWords ads that just shows up out of the blue because I’ve typed a word that appears in a dictionary.
Sluice
Sale on Sluice!
Compare Sluice prices.
www.Shopping.com
Sounds yummy. And we know why the ads appear. Either it is pure arbitrage, in that the comparison shopping engine shows ads on their site or expects to otherwise induce enough revenue-generating clicks from each such ad, that it is a net gain on average if they can get those clicks below x cents on AdWords;…
or it is seen as a nice little brand booster — dirt cheap clicks.
That’s less feasible in the States, where Quality Scores are tuned to price those kinds of low quality ads higher, even in empty keyword categories. But in other markets the arbitrage (or cheap branding) game is still playable.
But it makes me wonder. If it’s about building the brand, isn’t it really doing the opposite?
At trade shows and in professional industry publications, the differentiators among all these comparison shopping tools are explored in detail. One has a better catalog; the other shuns ads; etc.
But all the consumer sees, over a several year period, is all these stupid annoying ads for Donkey, Angst, Holocaust, Sluice, Rhinoceros, and Mausoleum. Instead of being portrayed as rational shopping engines, these companies come across as used car salesman or trinket hawkers (or perhaps more accurately, robot trinket hawkers from a bad sci-fi movie, where we haven’t trained the robots to be either respectful, contextually relevant, or persuasive), something search engine users came to Google to avoid.
Have years of these silly ads actually been a negative for the brands of eBay and Shopping.com and the like? There’s no question in my mind. Instead of describing a benefit offered by these sites, they spew nonsense and do more harm than good. Unless pure arbitrage (milking what’s left of these sites’ equity) really is the goal.
Facebook had a “malfunction” today that reset all my email notifications. All of a sudden, I am getting Facebook notifications in my email inbox about all manner of things.
A conspiracist will claim this was on purpose. I’ll explain why in the next post.
It has been a quiet week, search engine wise, but there is still a lot of interesting stuff online: Google violated iPhone development terms on voice search app Google admits to violating the iPhone’s developers’ agreement by using undocumented APIs to create its groundbreaking voice search mobile app. (itWorldCanada Nov 29 2008) Microsoft Now Preaching Black Hat SEO [...]
It has been a quiet week, search engine wise, but there is still a lot of interesting stuff online: Google violated iPhone development terms on voice search app Google admits to violating the iPhone’s developers’ agreement by using undocumented APIs to create its groundbreaking voice search mobile app. (itWorldCanada Nov 29 2008) Microsoft Now Preaching Black Hat SEO [...]
Vigilantes are roaming Chinese cyberspace, laying the identities of perceived wrong-doers bare.