problogger – Page 2 – Practical Blogging

July 12, 2007

How To Price Advertising On Your Blog

I got an email from a friend last week who is just starting to monetize his blog, and wanted to know how to come up with a price for an advertising banner. I thought I’d share with you the formula I use to come up with a monthly banner ad price for clients.

First, I had my friend give me some details.

1. What niche?
Some niches are more profitable than others. For instance, a typical click via adsense () on this blog runs over a dollar. However, a typical click on my celeb blog tends to be less than a nickel. Of course, the CTR is much, much higher over there, but that’s another thing altogether.

2. What’s the estimated traffic?
Usually my friend sees 7-10k per day. Therefore, I’m using 8.5k x 30 as our typical monthly traffic (255k).

Using a traditional advertising formula, CPM (cost per thousand) x 255=monthly advertising rate.

How To Determine CPM
Continue reading “How To Price Advertising On Your Blog”

July 9, 2007

Text-Link-Ads Script

John Pozadzides is one of my favorite people because every time he sends me an email or shows me a post it’s something concrete and useful (and because he founded our MyBlogLog User Group). Over the past few days he’s sent me a few ideas for improving my site that are golden. Again this week he sent an email out to the Mybloglog list that was first rate.

I’m not sure if anyone else has ever struggled with this, but I needed to put text link ads on just the home page of my WordPress site, which of course is difficult considering that it is auto-generated.

He’s devised a way to do this (front-page only ads) and he’s kind enough to share the text link ads work-around with the rest of us. If you are one of those bloggers who are earning money with text link ads, you owe it to yourself to take a look at the code and see if it’s something you want to implement on your own site. Of course, if you aren’t a current text link ads publisher, I do hope you’ll sign up using my link. 😉

June 11, 2007June 11, 2007

Now I Know Why My Blog Was Banned From Google’s Index

Update: Brian, from the Search Quality Team, just gave me a bit more info.

You probably have a compromised .htacess file, and maybe a .php script dropped in your cgi-bin/ directory, based on cases I’ve seen in the past. I can’t be sure without access. These hacking spammers tend to change and adapt.

On our end, we see pay-per-click pages when we visit the pages from Google results. One of this spammer’s goals is to leech off your good reputation in our index to send users to pay-per-click programs, which is a clear violation of our Quality Guidelines.

Looks like when my site was hacked last year, some annoying links were added to my site without my knowledge. Take a look at what happens when you do the “site:sleepyblogger.com” search on Google:

Google Banned Sleepyblogger.com

Now I have to find out how to dig through my server and find any pages like that. That should be fun 😉 Of course, I also have to find out if they’ve done it on any other domains I hold, since I also don’t want them being banned either.

So, no conspiracy, just a clever, malicious hack that will cause me hours of work…

Brian White from Google was kind enough to send me an email giving me a heads up as to what the problem was, so, “Many Thanks!” to Brian.

My guess is that spammy pages were added by a malicious third party. You may want to contact your ISP’s tech support if this is the case.

The reality is that such pages can have a negative effect on our users, so in these cases we typically prioritize a removal from our index first. We do want your site in our index 🙂

May 2, 2007

Using MyBlogLog Will NOT Get You Banned From Adsense

I’ve been seeing these posts for a few months. I asked Google Adsense, and here’s their response:

Hi Robyn,

Thank you for your question regarding click tracking software such as
MyBlogLog. We do permit these type of programs however, we recommend that
you exercise caution when using third-party software to ensure that you do
not violate the AdSense Terms and Conditions nor inadvertently disclose
sensitive information about yourself or your site through the use of such
software.

In addition, it is solely your responsibility to verify that any tools or
software used in conjunction with AdSense do not violate the AdSense Terms
and Conditions and program policies.

For your reference, you can find tips and guidelines for keeping your
account in good standing by visiting our Help Center at
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23921.

Thanks for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Sean
The Google AdSense Team(emphasis is mine)

So there it is, straight from the horse’s mouth. Whether you use MyBlogLog or not, at least ask Google before you tell others that it’s against Google’s TOS.

March 21, 2007

What’s The Dealio On Google’s CPA?

I’ve been looking all over for more info on Google’s new CPA model and how it will affect those CPA companies today that seem to make up the bulk of affiliate actions. Some are saying they’re up the creek w/o a paddle. Take, for instance Tech Crunch’s Arrington:

Affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare are screwed.

He seems to expect the Google CPA decision will make their mark heavily, and quickly. In fact he’s saying that Google’s news, though expected via the rumors we’ve all been hearing, has already made quite a dent in ValueClick’s stock yesterday. ValueClick is the parent company of CJ, by the way. I think he’s right, as ValueClick’s stock has continued to fall today.

Of course, there’s room for all, and CJ and Linkshare have built a following of loyal users (God only knows why). However, I have a feeling that the casual affiliate bar has been lowered, and many will flock to CPA ads on Google not even knowing that they are now an affiliate. I suppose it’s good for those of us in the industry, to increase our numbers, but then again I’m not so sure. I rather like the fact that affiliates are a tight group and we’re very concerned about the industry. Will this new influx of casual (even unaware) affiliates change our numbers?

Will Yahoo soon follow suit? Lots of questions, very few answers.

**If you have great insight on this and have blogged about it, let me know and I’ll include your link on this post.

March 19, 2007March 19, 2007

My Life Is A Twitter

I’ve spent the last few months playing with Twitter, and while some of my experience has been painful (not due in any part to Twitter itself), I’ve learned quite a bit about the people I follow and the general workings of this new communication medium. (Des’ Podcast on Twitter)

For those of you who aren’t twittering yet, Twitter is much like a group instant messaging platform that allows users to stay current on each others’ status and the resulting status updates are archived by user.

There are any number of mashups using twitter (TwitterBuzz and Twitterholic), 10 that I’ve seen in the last week, and people are almost smothering this thing to death with ~~hype~~ love. I’ve also seen quite a few people who don’t like the service, but it seems to be their main complaint is that it is a waste of their time.

Love
I don’t do the level of reporting on Twitter that heavy users do, like Scoble, Hsien or Nick, but I do a fair amount of twittering daily. Lately, this and my recent travel schedule has been to the detriment of my blogging, but I’m trying to get my habit under control.

I’ve had to up my monthly text messaging to the most Verizon will allow at 5K per month, and I’m going to have to buy an extra battery for my Treo (won’t make it 24 hours anymore), but the constant news stream from colleagues and from news agencies like CNN and Techmeme, is great, and I don’t see myself falling out of love with Twitter anytime soon.

Hate
The most frequent complaint I see that I also share is the fact that Twitter is limited to 140 characters. It’s difficult to write anything of value within that limitation, so probably a third of my twitters are so long as to force me to twitter it in two messages. However, this is a small price to pay for instant information transfer.

And, while I’ve seen several dozen more complaints, mostly due to system overload and IMs not working, by and large, most users are happy with the service. Sphere, one of my favorite blog search engines (my 2005 interview with Sphere CEO Tony Conrad), reports that almost 2500 posts have been found relating to the messaging service Twitter. Likely Twitter is already on the short list of ‘to buys’ for the big three internet giants. If it is not, it should be…

Follow Robyn on Twitter

March 14, 2007

Elite Retreat Winner

Just saw that Wendy from eMoms has won the Elite Retreat contest.

Do you have any idea how cool this conference is? I have had my heart set on going ever since they announced it. There will only be 30 participants in the room. And we will be getting one on one consulting from the following amazing people:

Guy Kawasaki
Lee Dodd
Jeremy Shoemaker
Darren Rowse
Kris Jones
Neil Patel
Aaron Wall

You better take good notes because we’re all super-jealous that you get to go!

February 21, 2007

Another Blog Evangelist Hire

I’m thrilled to report that my old friend, Martin McKeay, has been hired as the Product Evangelist for StillSecure. Now, if security isn’t something that you normally follow, I’ll enlighten you to what Martin has been doing for the last few years.

He’s an accomplished blogger with an enormous reach, but more than that, his podcast, based on security of course, is overwhelmingly popular with security geeks. This podcast captures the ears of the people who make the IT decisions in companies. (read: those fellows who turn the ear of the people who buy millions of dollars of servers, rack systems, blah, blah a year)

That’s valuable, and StillSecure was super-smart to take that into account. Sure, Martin could go anywhere and be a dynamite IT Security guy, but to hire him specifically for the role of Product Evangelist is using him where he’ll be of tremendous value to a company. Very smart…

And, as Jeremiah said, at events he knows how to work a room. Congratulations StillSecure, for snatching-up a dynamo!

smiley Disclosure: And, I’m not just saying that because Martin just gave me a Nokia 770 (for free). I’d sing his praises for free any day!