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Case study: Facebook Flyers part 2
2007-10-25 16:03:00
A couple of days ago I blogged about my experience with Facebook Flyers - the pay-per-click advertising platform for Facebook.Part 1 focused on what Facebook Flyers are, how to set them up and the details of the tests that I ran. In this post (part 2 of the series), I'm going to reveal the results of my test. Read on...The resultsFacebook provides limited reporting but it is enough to give you basic insight into how your ads are doing: impressions, clicks, CTR, average CPC and budget spent - all on a daily basis.What was interesting in my tests was the way in which the flyers were served. Although they initially got some good coverage, they quickly started to lose visibility. Several times, I upped the maximum CPC and each time they got a boost of impressions.The graph below shows the impressions each of the 3 flyer tests got.After 11th October, I left the flyers to run themselves, with no changes. And as you can see, they are hardly being served at all now, even though they are al...
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Case study: Facebook Flyers part 1
2007-10-25 14:48:00
The huge popularity of Facebook is unquestionable. It has overtaken MySpace as the largest social network in the UK - a fact that marketers are starting to wake up to. After all, where there are huge numbers of people, there are advertising opportunities and money to be made.For a while now, Facebook has offered a targeted advertising solution called Facebook Flyers .Anyone can create a flyer (ie an advertisement) and have it served to any segment of the Facebook membership based on geographical location, interests, gender, age and many other segmentation attributes, as shown in the screenshot below:With pay per click advertising getting ever more expensive on the Google AdWords network, I thought I'd give Facebook Flyers a go.The test adsFor my test, I set up 3 flyers for 3 different affiliate products, each with different targeting selections. The images below show both the flyers and the targeting: If you are familiar with Google Adwords, there are a number of thin...
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Google gets you talking
2007-10-14 08:45:00
I've been a long-term fan of Jaiku, the microblogging platform which a couple of days ago announced that it has been bought by Google - a move that will certainly un-nerve Jaiku's main rival Twitter.The terms of the deal are still under wraps, but I'm sure founders Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen will have done pretty well out the service that they founded back in February 2006.Google is still keeping quite about what it's plans for Jaiku are. Tony Hsieh, Google Product Manager, said in a recent announcement...We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products. Although we don't have definite plans to announce at this time, we're excited about helping drive the next round of developments in web and mobile technology.At the moment, new signups to Jaiku are on hold - no doubt to allow for smooth transition of the service to Googleland. Existing users are still free to use the service.Interesting that Google has added to their acquis...
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Cool, customisable busy animations
2007-10-13 10:30:00
If you're ever in need of a cool I'm busy doing stuff animation, look no further than ajaxload.info. It does exactly what you need:provides a choice of very slick loading animationsallows you to customise the colourgenerates a free-for-use animated gif for you to add to your web appSimple.Here are a few that I prepared earlier ;)
More About: Cool , Animations , Busy , Misa , Imation

Very cool new widget
2007-10-04 20:54:00
Widgets are great and are really taking off at the moment. They're everywhere.From Blogrush (hmmm...still reserving judgement on that one) to Widgetbucks which I'm running on my gift shopping website, to WidgetBox where you can pretty much widgetize (is that a word?!) anything as well as turn it into a Facebook application (pretty cool) in a couple of clicks.Well, today I came across a very cool new widget - Spotback.Essentially, it is (as you can see!) a rating widget, but there's so much more to it than that. Add a snippet of Javascript to your blog and immediately you're allowing your readers to rate each post using a very neat AJAX user interface. That's just the start. From their site...Spotback is a personalized rating system that recommends relevant content based on personal rating history using collaborative filtering and aggregated knowledge technologies. When embedding the Spotback technology onto your website you are providing your users a unique personal online expe...
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How to be a social media king
2007-10-02 07:44:00
Engaging with social media sites is a 'must do' if you're trying to build any kind of reputation and traffic to your blog. As I recently showed with my post on getting traffic from social media websites it can and does work if you follow a few simple guidelines.Life has just been made a little bit easier now though thanks to the guys on the 97th Floor. They have just released a Firefox extension that will help you gain credibility on the key social media destinations.Once installed, the extension does two things for you. Feature oneIf you run it in 'auto' mode, for any page that you visit, you'll see in the status bar the number of times that page has been submitted to digg, reddit, StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us.Why is this a good thing?Well, if a page is popular on one of the networks, chances are it'll be popular on another. And if you're the first to discover it on one of them, up goes your credibility. So by clicking any of the icons in the status bar, you can immediately s...
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Is this some kinda joke?
2007-09-26 20:40:00
I was studying my analytics today and saw a new referrer to one of my posts. Naturally I visited it to see who it was who was kind enough to send me the traffic.But then I realised that the site is some kind of (automated? must be?!) content scraping site. All the posts follow an identical format: a brief (but normally ridiculous) introduction; a scrape of someone elses content (mine in this case); and a source with a link back to the original post (no rel="nofollow", interestingly).Here's the introduction to their post that they scraped from my blog:"I’ve a passion for Telephones and keep looking for good articles. Today, I checked if I could find more info by entering ‘adsense blogging’ in Google and found this:"What? Telephones? Adsense blogging? Give me a break. What kind of garbage is this?!Of course, the site as Google Adsense all over it and is designed to pull visitors in (thanks to other hard-working bloggers' content) and earn from Adsense clicks.Surely this type ...
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Find out who makes $40k per month blogging
2007-09-23 17:57:00
So you're trying to earn a crust with your blog, right? Well...here's some inspiration for you!I just stumbled across Paula Mooney's list of blogger (and webmasters and affiliates) earnings. The figures reported for annual earnings range from the multi-millions at the top to a few tens of dollars at the bottom.Notable entries are:Kevin Ham. $300,000,000 empire with multiple sites including weddingshoes.com. Interesting this one in that it (weddingshoes.com) is a keyword-rich site around a niche with pretty much all links being AdSense links. The content draws people in...and the AdSense sends them elsewhere with Mr Ham making a few cents (or more!) in the middle. Also interesting from an SEO perspective is that the title tag of the home page is just 'Homepage'. And there are no META keywords! So he builds sites like that and still makes $300,000,000!?!?! Sheesh.Steve Pavlina who says he makes about $40k per month from his blogging activitiesThe inspirational Darren Rowse of P...
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Using social bookmarks to drive traffic
2007-09-17 21:50:00
I'm spending lots of time at the moment reading about driving traffic to your blog. You will of course heard about BlogRush - the traffic driving system that is taking the blogging world by storm (unless you've been asleep over the weekend when it was launched...in which case get on to it now!!!).One of the methods I am testing is using social bookmarking sites and I thought you might like to see the results from a recent test...I blogged recently about ShrinkMyTunes - a new software product that re-compresses mp3s allowing you to stuff more of them on your iPod. Although SarahG recently commented that you can achieve something similar with iTunes itself, it originally struck me as a piece of software that could fly. After all, how many iPods are out there? And how many people wish they could get more on them?!Anyway, I wrote the post and submitted it to reddit.com. The results were amazing...and pretty instant. Here's my statcounter graph...That recent peak is the reddit.com t...
More About: Social , Traffic , Drive , Bookmarks

New widget drives targeted traffic to your blog
2007-09-16 20:28:00
Without targeted traffic, your blog is nothing. After all, you're writing for a readership - and without the readership, why write at all?But delivering traffic to your blog can be time consuming. There are a variety of techniques that you can use (I'll cover these in a later post), but a new one that has just been released makes life easy.It's called Blog Rush and it works like this:you sign up for freeyou put a widget on your blogevery time a page on your blog is displayed, you earn a creditfor each credit you earn, your blog's content is syndicated across other blogs using BlogRushThe content delivered in the widget is targeted to your blog - so your readership benefits. And by categorising your own blog within BlogRush, your posts appear on similarly targeted blogs, thereby gaining click-thrus from readers of those blogs.And there's a bonus: for every person who you refer to BlogRush, you earn credits on their credits...and when they refer people you earn credits on those cr...
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Free keyword research guide : WordTracker
2007-09-15 07:51:00
Click to downloadWhen you create content for your website or blog it is vital to include keywords within your content that your readers will use when searching for your content. In other words, you need to optimise your content using the most popular keywords that are appropriate to your product or service.But how do you know what those magic keywords are? Which ones will make the difference between you appearing at number 1 in Google and number 10. (Research shows that the drop-off in clicks from the number 1 to results further down the page is exponential).The key to success in building the best, most optimised content is to carry out keyword research before you start writing. There are a number of tools out there that can help, but one of the best is WordTracker. They have a database of over 330 million keywords with statistics on each.Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client's busin...
More About: Free , Keyword , Guide , Keyword Research

Supersize your iPod - get 4 times the tunes on it!
2007-09-12 08:39:00
I just heard about this cool new software download called ShrinkMyTunes . It re-compresses any mp3 files so they end up even smaller, allowing you to get more of them on your iPod or other mp3 player...and in tests 88% of people couldn't tell the difference between the original and the shrunk mp3.They've got some sample mp3s on their site so you can hear the difference.Cool!
More About: Ipod , Times

Top 10 tips for SEO
2007-09-11 21:09:00
Well...11 tips actually...you get one extra for free...ok, so they're all free...anyway...I recently joined Smorty, a blog advertising brokerage, and found this easy guide to SEO on their site which has 11 great tips for search engine optimising your site.It's nicely written (especially for beginners) and has lots of links to great, practical tools to help you optimise your site such as a keyword density checker (has a nice keyword cloud view), duplicate content checker.I particularly like their keyword suggestion tool which, given a URL, identifies the theme of the page and then suggests keywords on the same theme, ordered by the volume of searches per month for that keyword. Very nice.The article is well worth a read. In fact, I wish I'd written it myself!
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Got a design...need XHTML template?
2007-09-09 21:57:00
At my day job we're always in need of someone to turn our web designs into decent, cross-browser compliant (X)HTML. So I was really interested to stumble across psd2html.com. Their claim really caught my eye:PSD2HTML delivers hand-coded markup to any specification in under 8 hoursNow that's a great promise. And with the prices they quote (around $200 per template) it's gotta be worth a try.I'll let you know how we get on with them.
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Shopping cart software
2007-09-08 10:11:00
Some time ago I was looking for a shopping cart package to use for a friend's online store I was building (Coochi - they sell baby bathing aprons). I looked at a whole load of packages but none of them really ticked the box as to what I needed, so I ended up building my own.I'm sure I included Ashop commerce at the time of my review but I recently re-visited them as once again, I was looking at alternative shopping cart software. Back then it didn't grab me, but they must have upgraded since then and I have to say that what they are offering now is impressive.As well as a shopping cart which is easy to use for the consumer, the admin system is great. It offers everything you'd expect:category managementorder processingcustomer managementgift certificatescustom templatesbut also has some great advanced features like:product feeds for submitting your product catalogue to shopping.com, Google base and othersaccounting package integration to QuickBooks and MYOBIt's also nice to see...
More About: Software , Shopping , Cart , Shopping cart software

Facebook opens up to Google search
2007-09-07 16:20:00
If you’re a Facebook user, you’ll want to be aware that soon they will be opening up your profile to Google search. The BBC reports …The function will initially allow anyone who is not registered with the site to search for a specific person. More controversially, in a month’s time, the feature will also allow people to track down Facebook members via search engines such as Google.The public search listing will show the thumbnail picture of a Facebook member from their profile page as well as links allowing people to interact with them.The default setting is that you will be made available to Google and the like, unless you opt out. Of course, this raises privacy concerns…and I’m sure will cause a number of Facebook users to question how much of their information is freely available.If you want to opt-out of being publicly searchable, you’ll find a tick-box in the Search Privacy settings of your Facebook account - as shown below.
More About: Google Search

Coffee like you've never seen it!!
2007-09-03 21:24:00
Although it's off my normal topics, I just had to share this awesome Coffee art video... Coffee Art - video powered by MetacafeAmazing...I'm going to have to practise that!
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Google "launches" (shhh) behavioral targeting...or not, as the case may be
2007-08-29 19:27:00
Not if you ask Google , that is, since it is trying to distance itself from the term behavioral targeting. But what they are doing amounts to something not a million miles from it though...stitching together different search queries to produce search results that become increasingly focussed, based on the combined terms used in the different queries.Try searching for Paris and then hotel. You'll notice that on the second search, the ads are for hotels in Paris.As Enquiro reports, the launch of this new functionality was kept low key. There were a couple of articles written about it on ClickZ and SearchEngineLand.Is this behavioral targeting? Sounds to me like it is. But as Reuters reported, Susan Wojcicki, Google vice president of product management for advertising is distancing Google from this term. Reuters quote her saying:"That is not something that we have participated in, for a variety of reasons," Wojcicki told reporters at a briefing at the company's headquarters in Mount...
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Stories behind the startups
2007-08-27 10:09:00
David Askaripour, founder of the Mind Petals Entrepreneur Network has just released his Entrepreneurship Guide which reveals the real stories behind a range of entrepreneur start-ups. From online wine store bottlenotes.com which gives you hints and tips on wine to suit your personal taste, to bejane.com which gives women home-improvement know-how in a friendly way.Have a read of the entrepreneur profiles - there's something to learn for all of us. Thanks to all of them for sharing their experiences.
More About: Stories , Startups , The Star

The biggest opportunity on the web?
2007-08-25 18:04:00
I was interested to read about uvme.com (as in 'you versus me') which, some say, is one of the biggest opportunitues on the web at the moment. uvme is a new business which pre-launched last month and has since attracted nearly half a million associates (they can't all be wrong!). Its founders, Tom Brodie and Len Fitzgerald, launched the very successful Virtual World Direct Ltd back in 2002 and are set to create an even bigger success with their latest venture, uvme.com.From their website:uVme is a fast-moving and unique business that combines three of the most exciting phenomena on the internet: ONLINE GAMES, SOCIAL NETWORKING WITH INSTANT LIVE COMMUNICATION, and Social Marketing.uvme.com is (will be when it comes out of pre-launch) a skills-based gaming portal. The skills bit is important and differentiates the business from online gambling. The online gaming industry is currently worth around $5.2 billion - and uvme is providing all the tools to enable anyone to share in part o...
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Google drops supplemental results label
2007-08-17 20:25:00
Firstly, I've not been asleep...just on vacation with no web access (a temporary escape from this online world!) and am now back.When I set up my online gift store it was partly an exercise in on-page optimsation. The site runs on Cafepress' API and therefore (since Cafepress sells millions of products) has the potential for having thousands upon thousands of pages. The site's navigation (not the primary nav!) changes with every search (since it shows latest searches) and so every page is very dynamic. It gets crawled by Google pretty frequently (I'll dig out the logs and post about it sometime).But...I think I over-did the on-page optimisation and although I got indexed pretty quickly, I ended up in the supplemental results index, which of course wasn't great since these generally show up only if there aren't many relevant results in the main index. I made some changes to the page titles, H1s etc (generally removing over-use of keywords) and watched over some time. Gradually,...
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Problogger confidential
2007-07-31 20:40:00
I just got word of the latest Problogger Confidential series - a call with blogging mastermind Yaro Starak. The call will cover how to make a solid income through part-time blogging.Register here for the call at 9pm Eastern time on Wednesday

Paid submission...a rip off?
2007-07-24 08:41:00
I receive a whole host of search engine related emails and feeds and a common recurring theme from one of them is the old 'Get listed in 48 hours, GUARANTEED'. I've never believed in paid submission to search engines - if you optimise your site properly, you don't need to.There are some tips & techniques that you can use to get your site into search engines quickly which I'll post on soon. One of them that I've used is to add your site's feed to your personal MSN or Yahoo! page. Effectively, you're telling these search engines about your site...and a short while after adding your feed, you'll start to show up in their results pages. That, coupled with adding a Google sitemap should have you well on the way to being indexed.What techniques do you use to get listed quickly? Have you ever used a paid submission service? And has it been worth the cash? Leave a comment and let me know.
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Choosing the right domain name
2007-07-14 09:54:00
Selecting the right domain name for your latest online venture is a major choice you'll need to make...and one which you should spend some time mulling over.There are a couple of schools of thought worth noting here:Keyword-rich domainsOn the one hand, your domain name could contain search keywords that you are targetting in your niche - for example, www.unique-gift-ideas-shop.com which sells...um...unique gifts. There is some debate over how much having search keywords in your domain helps. From my perspective it isn't the best choice if you're trying to build a brand. After all, flickr isn't called online-photo-sharing.com is it?!Brand / uniquenessAnother approach is to go down the brand route - build your brand around a unique name (for which, of course, the domain name is available). The down side of this is naturally that when you start out, no one will be searching for your name. But if you structure your site properly from a content hierarchy / SEO perspective and ensure ...
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Creating Killer Flagship Content
2007-07-12 21:08:00
All bloggers want to be noticed and admired by an active readership...why else spend countless hours writing (ok, well, there is the pleasure of purely recording something, but ultimately without a readership it's a bit fruitless).So it was with interest that I read Chris Garret's free e-book on Killer Flagship Content . He likens flagship content to the "go-to" stores within a shopping mall...they're the things that attract the mall's footfall...and the smaller stores benefit too with passing trade. In the same way, flagship content on your blog attracts readership, and that readership will generally stick around to see what else you're writing about. It's a nice metaphor - and like most great ideas, it's very simple.Chris' e-book goes on to suggest 10 ideas for creating flagship content - from tips, to FAQs and more. And then suggestions on how to promote your content. His writing style makes the info-packed 14 pages easy to read so you can devour it in 30 minutes. But go b...
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Twitter and Jaiku on iPhone
2007-07-12 08:25:00
Although I'm a Jaiku fan more than a Twitter fan, you might want to know that you can now Tweet on your iPhone thanks to PocketTweets. Nothing to download, just point your iPhone at www.pockettweets.com and get tweeting where ever you are.Get updates to the PocketTweets service from their own Twitter stream.Of course, Jaiku has an iPhone interface too so you can use their superior service as well (and no, I don't work for Jaiku!)
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Build links with Jaiku
2007-07-10 22:01:00
I just joined Jaiku which, I have to say, beats Twitter with its eyes closed.Apart from it having a very sweet AJAX interface, it has some nice features which help us SEO-ers. The principle one of which is the ability to add multiple feeds to your Jaiku presence.Any feeds that you add (which could be feeds from your blog, a Google blogsearch or whatever) show up as entries in your presence with links to the original page...with the title as the link text...all without 'rel=nofollow'. Thanks Jaiku guys, you rock!So you can build posts with keyword rich titles, pull them into a Jaiku feed and you've got automatic inbound links to your site. Then all you need to do is put your Jaiku presence on your site and once again you've got a nice 3-way link relationship.
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It's good to link to LZZR.com
2007-07-09 09:45:00
I've just been reading the lzzr.com seo blog with interest. His thoughts on backlinking are worth a read and turn classic site-promotion thinking on its head a bit. Rather than (hmmm...perhaps as well as it better) promoting your own site to gain search equity, promote sites that already link to you. Build their importance and thereby your own by the fact that (more important) sites are already linking to you. Give them some link love and the love will be rewarded.Of course, you can see both your own visibility in search using the site: operator (like this) and how many sites link to you using the link: operator (like this). By using the latter, you're effectively creating the perfect 3-way link structure which is known to be better than utilising link farms (which of course suck).But search engines don't generally index their own SERPs (although Netscape results do get into Google SERPs), so LZZR suggests building an intermediate feed of results pages (such as that from Google B...
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Cool wormhole camera trick
2007-07-07 01:51:00
Wormhole Camera Trick ! - For more of the funniest videos, click here
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Website grader - how 'good' is your site?
2007-07-06 21:12:00
There seem to be website 'graders' popping up all over the place at the moment. I blogged about BlogJuice the other day and have come across another tool that analyses any site you point it at and gives SEO tips about how to improve it.It's called websitegrader.com and apart from having a nice AJAX interface and a very wacky 'I'm busy doing stuff' animated icon its results are well laid out. You give it your URL, keywords and competitor sites and it'll give you a score out of 100.For this site, they gave me 49. Plus some useful pointers that I hadn't noticed already (a couple'a META keyword issues). Interestingly, they also flagged up in a big red box "Website running on blogspot.com" and pointed me to this article about why that's a Bad Thing. Some of the points they make there (like the 301 redirect thing) are valid. But the blogger platform is fine with me right now.
More About: Site , Good