Using Social Media Marketing to Get More Visitors to Your Site

Editors Note: As a publisher, you know that getting more users to your site is vital if you’re going to earn revenue from contextual advertising. Last time, Louise Rijk introduced the basics of social media marketing (SMM.) Today, she digs more deeply and shows you how to go about developing an effective SMM campaign to help get those users.

SMM Redux
As we discussed briefly last week, “SMM” is marketing that you initiate by uploading or bookmarking and tagging content on social media and networking sites such as Digg, MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr, del.cio.us and Reddit. 

(The photo at right is a great example of how social media, and the network effect, can work. The photo is called “Whisper” and it was snapped my Brian Scott, who uploaded it to his Flickr account, where we found it. Because we posted it on our blog, under Creative Commons license, and linked to it, thousands more people are likely to see Brian’s photos than would have if he had kept them in a closed photo album or on his computer—M2.)

Depending on the type of site, this content can be text, video, audio or even widgets that users put on their own sites that distribute your content, such as the MyBlogLog badge. (More on these options below.)

SMM Benefits
The benefits of a social media marketing campaign include:

• More Links—SMM campaigns can generate incoming links and result in higher rankings in organic search results.
• More Traffic—SMM campaigns can generate more traffic from profile pages, from links embedded in messages that travel virally throughout the social web, and from pages that rank high in search.
• More Brand Awareness—An SMM campaign can build more brand-awareness through visibility, online reputation and authority in the social media.
• Better “Legs”— If your message gets enough attention in the social media sphere, there’s a chance it will be picked up by other, more traditional media, such as mainstream news sites, newspapers, magazines and television. Think Perez Hilton or lonelygirl15. (Remember JenniCam?)

SMM Strategies
Most marketing strategies involve reaching the potential visitor at a distance, through advertising, email and other messaging. In SMM, you engage directly with your potential audience through existing social media, encouraging them to generate discussion about your content, your products or your services. SMM techniques include:

• Submitting a how-to article or tip sheet to a “voting” site like Digg and Reddit
• Bookmarking an article on sites like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia
• Uploading and tagging images up on Flickr, Photobucket, etc.
• Uploading videos to Yahoo! Video, iFilm, YouTube, etc.
• Establishing a business profile at a social media web site like MySpace or Facebook
• Developing your own widget that lets users spread your content on their own sites

The Social Medium is Not the Message
Way back in 1964, the pop philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.” What he meant that the form of the media carrying the message is more important than the content that the message conveys.

Well, it probably sounded good at the time. The fact remains, however, that content is king. You can have the best gee-whiz media technology at your fingertips—which we pretty much do these days—but if your content is crap, people will use those fingertips to click away.

Read the rest of this entry »

An intro to marketing through social media

Editor’s Note: Last time Louise Rijk penned a piece for the blog, she wrote on word-of-mouth marketing, or WOMM. Today she goes into social media marketing, or SMM, and explains how you can help drive readership, links and clicks using social media.

Social media marketing (SMM), social media optimization (SMO) and word of mouth marketing (WOMM) are new forms of online marketing that are increasingly taking control of brands, the marketing message and advertising away from the business owner and online marketer and putting it into the hands of the user and the consumer. They’ve created a “new world order” in marketing and advertising. In this new world the goal is to partner with consumers and customers so that they interact with, and call attention to, your products and services.

Online marketers, publishers and business owners need to adapt and find creative and subtle ways to promote their content, products and services. But before we can start doing social media marketing we need to know more about social media and understand the differences between social media marketing, social media optimization and word of mouth marketing.

Social Media Tools
Social media are “Web 2.0” tools and services such as blogs, wikis, online forums, online user review sites, podcasts, RSS feeds and social networking web sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, MyBlogLog, de.licio.us, Digg and even the virtual world of Second Life, that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives with each other. Increasingly, social media tools are used by marketers to place and spread their marketing messages, and to generate beaucoup traffic. The better you understand the inner workings of these services and communities, the better you can take advantage of them.

Word-of-Mouth Marketing
We’ve talked about word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) before. To reiterate, WOMM is based on intense user engagement and relies on finding and empowering “influencers” and “evangelists” to spread the word about a product or service. (Read more about WOMM here .)

Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing (SMM) is primarily initiated on social media and social networking web sites, such as Digg, MySpace, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Groups, Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, Reddit, topic-specific message boards and so forth. These services can be used to spread a message or content (via text, video, audio, widgets, etc.). The objective can be to increase page views and inbound links, help improve your ranking in organic search, improve your brand awareness, or all of the above. 

Your social media marketing campaign is most effective when you have a prominent profile in the social media community. To help establish a prominent profile, begin by carefully targeting your community, engage with it and generate compelling content that speaks to the other users’ needs and desires.

For example, let’s say you’re a scooter enthusiast and have a site that offers articles and advice on scootering, sells scooter accessories through an online store or affiliate program, and serves up contextual ads for scooters and scooter parts. You’ll want to target the groups within the scooter community most likely to be interested in your content, merchandise and advertisements. You can build trust in that community through offering authoritative content—factual data, advice, opinions, photos, video and so forth. Once you’ve gained their respect, your community is most likely listen to you, buy from you and click on your ads.

Social media marketing campaigns can vary from creating compelling text-based content that gets bookmarked at del.icio.us or Furl or makes the home page at Digg to the creation of a video that spreads virally by placing it on video sharing sites. (Go to Flickr or Yahoo! Video and type “scooter” or “Vespa” into the search box and you’ll get an idea of what I mean by a “social media community.”)

Social Media Optimization
Social media optimization refers to making a web site or blog more adaptable to social media. It involves adding compelling, dynamic and fresh content on a regular basis—stuff like tip sheets, how-to’s, white papers, podcasts or videos can be especially sticky, can get more links to and help drive better ranking among search engines and specialty sites such as Technorati or Blogpulse. Other examples of SMO include the implementation of links to social media web sites to make tagging, sharing book marks (del.icio.us, Add to MyYahoo!), and voting for content (Digg, Reddit, Netscape) by visitors easier.

In the next installments in this series, we’ll cover these techniques in more detail. 

—Louise Rijk, co-founder and vice-president of marketing and sales at Advanced Media Productions

Reducing design clutter can make your blog or website more attractive and more engaging
 

Editor’s Note: Design matters, even for blogs. It’s an important part of optimizing your home page. Clean, crisp design appeals to your visitors’ aesthetic sensibilities, helping ensure that they come back. In this, the 4th installment in our ongoing series on good design, Yahoo! user experience design manager Eric Thomason tells you how to tidy things up.  

You notice it, even if you never really think about why you do: Some blogs are easy to scan and read. Some have an almost calming effect and seem to encourage you to spend time on them…and some just don’t.

Your content is what keeps readers coming back, for sure, but the extra polish that some blogs and websites have gives them an air of respectability, maybe even credibility. Here are a few simple guidelines that can help your own blog shine.

1. Color and Contrast
The best advice for the novice designer is to keep it simple. Contrast and legibility is arguably more important than the flare and flavor that color provides, so it is a good idea for the background that your copy sits on has a light color. The copy itself should be a well contrasting black, dark gray or other dark color.

It is also possible to go the other way and use a dark background with light copy, but it isn’t as easy to read, plus it may be a little over-used. One thing to try to avoid is a middle value (not light enough nor dark enough). This will probably not provide enough contrast for your copy, and may make your site appear muddy and difficult to read.

Color is subjective and can be a very complicated aspect of design. A failsafe method is to choose only one color and use it with grays and white and maybe a little bit of black. If you use this approach, your colors will never clash.

A slightly more advanced method is to choose one main color with one or two accent colors for your design. Most blog templates take this approach. When in doubt, remember that simple is generally better.

2. Type
As with color, the best practice when choosing type styles is to use the fewest number of variations possible. It is also a good idea to create rules for when you will use them. By type style, I mean the font face (Helvetica, Times, etc.), weight (bold, normal), treatment (italic, underline etc.) and size (12pt or “medium” etc.)

Generally you will need at least two styles and maybe as many as five (excluding link styles), but you will seldom need more than that. For example, the two styles you will almost always need are Headline and Body copy.

Here is an example of rules for usage of five type styles:

Headline: Always use as the title of an article or post.
Subhead: Use for sub-headers and for section titles within an article or post.
Body copy: Use for all main articles.
Small Head: Use for side rail titles and comment titles.
Small Body: Use for side rail content, time and date stamps.

3. Alignment
When placing new content on your page, whether it is a headline, photo or body copy, try to imagine an invisible line running up and down the length of the page. Line up as much as possible to that line. If you want to place something off of the imaginary line, make sure that it is far enough off the first line to make the placement appear intentional. Going forward, you should try to line up everything to one of the two lines.

Designers call these imaginary lines grid lines. You should try to maintain the fewest grid lines necessary on your page. One thing that will make this easier is to avoid centered or right-aligned text when possible. Centered and right-aligned text, when not implemented by a skilled designer, usually leads to a cluttered page.

By keeping your site’s colors, fonts and alignments as simple as possible, your site will appear crisp and “clean,” which will always reflect better on your content.

View the other articles in this series:

The Web 2.0 Style

Publishing with the User in Mind

Chips off the ‘Ol Block

—Eric Thomason, Manager, User Experience Design

Keeping it real… simple

Editor’s Note: In the previous edition of our series on improving relevancy, Cody Simms and Amit Paunikar offered up tips on writing good content that’s friendly to both bots and users. In the fourth and final installment (for now), our intrepid Yahoo! Publisher Network product managers offer handy tips on what not to do, both content- and code-wise.

Content Don’ts
The things below can result in us displaying all sorts of wacky and random stuff on your page. You don’t want that, we don’t want that, and your users don’t want that.

1) Don’t use unnecessary code. If you right-click and “view source” on your webpages and don’t like or understand what you see, it’s time to get to work.

• Use structured, consistent code. This saves time in the long run
• Reference a separately hosted CSS file rather than hard-coding style information into the HTML page at hand
• Remove unnecessary scripts from your page. Host them in a separate document if you can

2) Don’t use unnecessary language.Remember high school debate class? You were told to find an argument and stick to it. No wishy-washy-ness. Well the same thing goes for pages that do well with contextual advertising. When a page contains unnecessary words or too many topics, we get lost somewhere around your third rebuttal.

• Don’t have too many topics on a page; stick with one or two good ones. Otherwise, it is difficult for us to know which topic the user finds most interesting…and thus, it is difficult for us to know which type of ads to put on your page. We usually figure it out over time by testing multiple options, but the clearer your page is, the more quickly we’ll get our ad engine tuned up properly for you.
• Reduce unnecessary marketing copy (e.g., “best in class”, “top-reviewed service”).
• Remove jargon (e.g., “iChump user reviews” or “iChump product reviews” vs. “iChump reviews”).  Only use words that actually mean something to users and to advertisers.

3) Don’t try to take shortcuts around lack of content or traffic. You don’t want to take actions that bring low-quality traffic to your site (such as people who were duped into coming to your site in the first place), and you should avoid using content that appears elsewhere. Be an original! If you have to stop and wonder if a given practice is bad or not, it probably isn’t something that you should be doing.
 

• No keyword stuffing. This refers to the dirty practice of filling a page with very targeted keywords, but not offering any true compelling content. Again, your page content should exist for the delight of your readers, not for the padding of your wallet.
• No link farms. Let sites link to you naturally. Remember, you can’t buy love. Buying or forcing links will be equally fruitless for you in the end, too
• No small, illegible text
• No duplicate content. Thou shall not steal or violate other people’s copyrights. It’s not only a bad contextual practice; it’s illegal!

4) Whatever network you use, don’t violate “Terms of Service” or “Terms and Conditions.” These terms are in place in order to protect advertisers. Remember, without advertisers, there is no network. And all of the advice we’ve given you up to this point would be for naught.

• Keep ads off of pages with non-compliant content
• Do not directly alter the ad unit code
• Do not encourage your users to click on your ads (and don’t click your own ads!)

Useful links and best practices:
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
Traffic Driving tools
Site Enhancement tools

Read the rest of this series:
Optimizing for Relevancy, Part I: Semantics and Bots
Optimizing for Relevancy, Part II: Anatomy of a Web Page
Optimizing for Relevancy, Part III: Content Do’s

—Cody Simms, Senior Product Manager and Amit Paunikar, Senior Product Manager

Motivating, Empowering and Retaining Your “Influencers”

Editor’s Note: Last time, Louise Rijk, Co-founder and Vice President of Marketing and Sales, Advanced Media Productions, introduced the concept of word of mouth marketing, or “WOMM” and showed how to find the right “influencers” to help promote your brand. This time, in the fifth installment in our series on driving traffic, Louise schools how to motivate, empower and retain those influencers so that they stay excited about your offerings and loyal toy our brand.

Motivating Influencers
Motivation can be challenging. Once you have identified the influencers, you need to look into what will help them help you.

Influencers enjoy being the first to know. They like to be “in the know” about new products, so that they can share the information with their friends. So give them exclusive access and special privileges, such as special access phone line, enrollment in any beta test programs, advanced information or demos of new products.

Learn what makes your influencers tick. It is usually not enough to rely on a positive experience of a great product to court the pure influencers. Identify upfront what social currency is required to motivate them to spread the word about your product or service. Influencers often demand real value for their participation in a “word of mouth” (WOMM) program, so some free stuff, a coupon and a short spot in the limelight usually does not work.

Finally, invite them in. Make it special and official. Invite your influencers officially into your WOMM program.

Empowering Your Influencers
WOMM is most effective when a product or service is new, unique, high-performing and fun—and therefore worth talking about.

1. Place the products or services in the hands of “influencers.” Give them a good product or service, and excellent customer service, so that they have something exciting to talk about.
2. Provide them with success stories about your products and services that they can talk and write about.
3. Provide product samples or literature that they can give out when they talk about your product or service.

Keeping Influencers Engaged
Once the WOMM campaign is underway, influencers need to remain engaged. This can be done in various ways:

• Keep the program visible and accessible for employees and influencers so that they can talk to each other.
• Respond quickly to opinions, questions, comments and feedback. Influencers expect that companies listen to them. There is nothing more discouraging for a loyal customer than to be ignored. Often their comments provide an early indicator of what others are thinking.
• Monitor the buzz online and look for ways to engage. Find out which blogs your influencers are reading and posting on, the forums they participate in, and the web sites they are visiting, because that may be where the next concentration of influencers is located.
• It is relatively easy to monitor influencers online. However, remember about 80 percent of WOM takes place offline. That’s why it is important to have your influencers report back on a regular basis or to meet with them in focus groups. What kind of conversations are they having with people? What are they saying?
• Influencers need recognition and rewards, or they will become inactive. The more personal recognition you can give them, the better. There is nothing more rewarding for an influencer than a “Thank you for your support” post from a company to a positive blog or forum comment regarding their product or service.
• Some of the most valuable feedback on your campaign may be negative. Don’t shut out the “haters.” Listen to them and engage with them if their comments are constructive.

There are many aspects to a successful WOMM campaign: the message, the product or service, listening to conversations, company commitment and many more. But most importantly, WOM is about people, and WOMM cannot succeed without loyal influencers who are spreading the message.

—Louise Rijk, Co-founder and Vice President of Marketing and Sales, Advanced Media Productions

View the other parts in this series:

Word of Mouth Marketing, I
25 Things to Think About Widgets
Leveraging Linkbait
Signal to Noise

What you told us about your plans for the year, Part I

Editor’s Note: Since September of last year, we’ve posted a series of polls within our secure publisher interface asking a variety of questions on themes such as traffic, optimization and relevancy. Today’s post is part of a continuing series by Senior Insight Manager Todd Lombardo in which he shares your opinions and provide some pointers from Yahoo! team members, with the aim of helping you become a better publisher.

We’ve previously shared with you what you told us about optimization and how you display ads on your site. For 2007, we wanted to know what you’re planning to do as publishers. And in January, we asked you about your top priorities as publishers. You are obviously passionate about this topic, as the quantity of responses made this our most popular poll to-date. 
Here’s what you told us:

For your published site(s), what is your top priority for 2007?

Almost 60 percent of you told us that you were focused on driving traffic.  But you also had other ideas that you told us about including:

“Increase revenue from advertising.”
“Diversify.”
“Re-design.”
“Create more relative content with better targeted advertising and increase site traffic.”

Largely, most of you want to expand your operations, some through increased visitor traffic, others through expanded content or new sites.  Both methods could provide additional opportunities to display contextual advertising. 

Recognizing your focus on driving traffic, Margaret Holland, a Senior Account Manager here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, notes there are many ways to help drive traffic that won’t necessarily require additional expense.  For example, suggest your sites to search engines, or consider an RSS feed to distribute your content.  Or, as some of you plan on doing, expand your content.

Forrester Research agrees with Margaret.  According to Forrester, the top five ways users find websites suggest that publishers don’t necessarily need to spend extra dough:

“How have you typically found Web sites that you have visited in the past month?”

Respondents were able to check more than one answer. Source: Forrester Research, “How Consumers Find Websites in 2006,” 10/06

For publishers who are interested in paid advertising, advertising in search engine results pages, like Yahoo’s,  may be a good place to start; sponsored search targets by keyword, and search engine results pages are often considered some of the “lowest-hanging fruit” for driving traffic.

Since we saw such a large percentage of you are intent on increasing site traffic, our next question was specifically about how you’re planning on doing that.  We will cover this in next installment.

—Todd Lombardo, Senior Insight Manager

Editor’s Note: In the first part in our series on Optimizing for Relevancy, we discussed optimization, contextual advertising, and semantic analysis; in the second, we explained how bots work, optimal web page anatomy and site structure. In this, the third installment, Cody and Amit school us on writing content that works for both bots and bipeds.

How to write good content
Barbie says, “Math is hard.” We say, “Writing good content is tough.” While we are not about to give you tips on how to improve you literary skills, we have some do’s and don’ts that will allow you to make the most of what you have.

Content Do’s

• Write for users. Users come to your page to read your content, not to click on ads. The clicks just happen.
• Maintain your editorial integrity. Write unique articles that drive traffic to your site.
• Take time to optimize your web pages. Use distinct titles, headers and section headlines for each article.
• Limit the number of low-content pages on your site. If you have a page with lot of images, make sure you use alternate text.
• Maintain a high “signal-to-noise” ratio (more on this below).

Remember that high-paying ads on your site do not necessarily mean high revenue. It is important that users click on those ads for you to gain any financial benefit. Relevancy drives click-through-rate. Aim to make the content relevant to your users’ interests, which will help make the ads more appealing to your users. The more clicks you get, the more revenue you earn, and the more we learn about your page.

Tag: You’re it!
That sounds so meta, doesn’t it? But seriously, meta tags play an important factor in helping us determine what a page is about. If you take some time to work on your meta tags, it will result in better targeted ads for you and an easier time for search engines.

Here are some helpful tips for meta tags:

1. Place tags as high as possible in a page’s code; they should be the first thing that we see when analyzing your site.

2. Create compelling meta titles and descriptions with clear calls to action.

3. Include the most desired keywords, but keep repetition of individual words to a minimum. Place the most desired keywords at the front of the tag string. And don’t put any words in your tags that aren’t on your actual page. You don’t want to get spam email; and we don’t want to analyze spammy tags. We’ll just delete them, just like you did with that email with some strange pharmaceutical name in the subject line.

4. Exact per-tag character limits vary by the service that is analyzing your page, but in general try to keep your maximum per-tag character limits—including spaces and punctuation—to the following:

Meta Title Tag — 70 characters
Meta Description Tag — 250 characters
Meta Keyword Tags — comma delimited; 250 characters

Signal-to-noise ratio
Try to keep the content of each page focused on one or two topics at most. For example, let’s say you have a site about knitting. You might want to have a page dedicated entirely to yarn and yarn types. In that case, you’d want to repeat the word “yarn” multiple times on the page. But the page shouldn’t be “keyword-stuffed”—that is, the content should still be very useful and user-focused.

Most of this requires some initial effort to get started, but it is easy to fall into these good habits once you get going. Make these your rules to blog and publish by—they will be good for your users, good for our semantic analyzers, and good for your wallet. You can even turn it into a bit of a game: Make small changes here and there, and analyze the results in terms of the two key drivers, revenue and traffic. 

Implement, measure, optimize, repeat.

Next time: Content Don’ts

—Cody Simms, Senior Product Manager and Amit Paunikar, Senior Product Manager 

Introducing “WOMM,” and Finding the Right Influencers to Enhance Your Brand

Editor’s Note: When I heard Louise Rijk speak at last fall’s Webmaster World, Vegas conference on a panel with Lawrence Coburn, Rand Fishkin and Lee Odden I was immediately struck by the depth of her knowledge in guerrilla marketing and asked her to pen a piece on the subject of her talk, “Word-of-Mouth Marketing,” or WOMM. In the fourth chapter in our ongoing series on driving traffic, Louise introduces you to the concept of WOMM and shows you how to find the right “influencers” who can make a difference to your brand.

What Is Word of Mouth Marketing?
“Word of mouth” (WOM) is the oldest form of marketing. WOM is the act of people providing information and making honest recommendations to other people about a brand, product or service. Today this is often performed by what we call “influencers,” those who are already successfully using products and services and are naturally inspired to talk positively about it.

Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) happens when marketers launch campaigns to influence and accelerate “organic” WOM. Unlike traditional offline and online marketing, WOMM is not about how many people you reach directly, but more about how many people pass your message on to other people. WOMM is, therefore, based on intense user engagement and primarily relies on finding and empowering “influencers,” opinion leaders who have extensive knowledge in a specific area, to spread the word about a product or service. WOMM requires an excellent product or service that influencers can use, be excited about, and talk about.

Although most WOMM still happens offline, online WOMM is growing fast. It includes online consumer activities using Internet technologies such as blogs, online forums, videos and podcasts to create consumer-generated media (CGM). Unlike offline conversation, online WOMM conversations don’t dissipate after the conversion ends. They exist as long as the site or vehicle stays live, are archived and indexed in search engines, and continue to be accessible to consumers.

Whether online or offline, a successful WOMM campaign involves true and passionate influencers who are willing spread the message. Here is a guided tour to finding your offering’s true influencers.

Who are the influencers?
In general, influencers are typically the 10 percent of individuals who are influencing the choices of the remaining 90 percent of the population. They are sitting at the top of the WOMM pyramid and possess usually three main characteristics: larger social networks than the average person, persuasive power and the drive to disseminate product or service information within their expertise.

Influencers are different from the general population in several ways:

• They are four times more likely to be associated with five or more organizations.
• They are four times more likely to be considered “experts” by others on a variety of general topics or issues.
• They are well connected, and have about three times more knowledge than the average person.
• They are twice as likely to recommend a product or service they like; and when they do, they are four times more likely to tell nine or more people about it.
• They are typically well traveled and are activist-oriented.
• They are willing to inform with feedback, ideas and competitive information on a consistent and regular basis.
• They do their research and uncover unethical programs and communications. For example, 72 percent double-checked the information they received with an offline source, and 69 percent with an online source (E-fluencials Study, 2001, Burson-Marsteller).

How to find and target influencers
An important step in finding the right influencers for a WOMM campaign is identifying those individuals who feel strongly about your brand, and giving them the means to participate. The most passionate influencers are often part of the current customer base, and can be located and engaged with the help of your marketing, sales and customer support departments.

Start with “listening.” Go online to find out who is talking about your products and services. This can be done by monitoring blogs (Blog Pulse, Technorati), news search alerts, online discussion forums, del.icio.us tag analysis, RSS feed monitoring (PubSub, Technorati) and other methods. Another, more automated way is to use professional online “listening services” from the various CGM analytics vendors, such as Cymfony, Nielson Buzz Metrics, Umbria, BuzzLogic and Intelliseek.

Interview and qualify potential influencers. Finding the right influencers for your WOMM campaign requires insight into their backgrounds, passions, motivations and aspirations.

Choose the right influencer partnerships. The ideal relationship is mutually beneficial—collaboration always beats paid partners.

In Part II of Word of Mouth Marketing, I’ll talk about how you can motivate, empower and retain your influencers.

—Louise Rijk, Co-founder and Vice President of Marketing and Sales, Advanced Media Productions

Creating cool little web apps draws users—maybe

Editor’s Note: Lawrence Coburn is the founder of RateItAll.com and author of Sexy Widget, a blog devoted to the emerging widgetsphere. When I heard Lawrence—call him “Lawrence of Widgetabia”—speak at WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon Vegas 2006 last November, I asked him to pen a piece on using widgets to  help  draw traffic for the third part of our ongoing series. (See the first two installments here and here.)

When Michael asked me to write a guest piece on how to help drive traffic with widgets, I got a little nervous. I can talk all day about the causes behind the rise of widgets, about best practices in developing widgets, and about the benefits of having a comprehensive widget strategy.

But I can’t talk about how to drive traffic to your site with widgets. Why? Because as a publisher, it’s out of my control if my widget is going to drive traffic to my site.

So what’s a widget?
When I talk about widgets, I’m talking about chunks of code that can be grabbed on one site, and embedded on another. Depending on who you’re talking to, widgets can also be referred to as modules, blog bling, gadgets or MySpace Codes. Here are some of my favorites:

iLike Music Widget—the iLike widget aggregates your iTunes listening history and allows you to display your recently played songs via the widget. The widget is also a music player that allows readers to play samples of the songs.

Bunchball Widget—Bunchball allows you to embed classic video games like Asteroids or Space Invaders on your blog or personal profile page.

Bitty Browser—Bitty Browser allows you to embed a fully functional, mini-browser into your blog or personal profile page.

MyBlogLog—MyBlogLog is a distributed social networking service that allows blog owners to embed a visual display of thumbnail photos of their blog’s readers. Blog readers can message each other and post public notes for each other via their MyBlogLog profiles
 

Widgets represent the next stage of the Web 2.0 phenomenon of ceding control to your site’s users. If Web 2.0 is about giving the keys to your site to your users, widgets are about providing your site’s content and functionality in a “to go” bag for your users (and your users’ readers) to consume wherever and whenever they want it. (But Larry, dude, widgets can also totally be linkbait—Rand.)

So while there are things you can do to minimize the obstacles in the adoption of your widget and maximize user experience, there are no guarantees that your widget will be published and/or clicked on. That’s up to the distributors (your users), and their readers.

Read the rest of this entry »

What you told us about how you display ads on your sites

Editor’s Note: Since September of last year, we’ve posted a series of polls within our secure publisher interface asking a variety of questions on themes such as traffic, optimization and relevancy. Today’s post is the second in a series by Senior Insight Manager Todd Lombardo in which he will share your opinions and provide some pointers from Yahoo! team members, with the aim of helping you become a better publisher.

Following up on our previous post about optimization, below are the results from the questions we asked our readers. Our goal is to help you understand what your fellow publishers are doing, and get you thinking about how you can improve your own publishing experience.

Q: Where do you see the most successful ad placement?

Ads embedded in content is the clear leader, with almost half of you indicating that this is where you see the most successful ad placement, followed by leaderboard placement for about a quarter of responses.

These results were not surprising to the team here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, though we have found through our own data that the right rail also performs well. Check out this post from last May, where we discussed ad placement performance and eye-tracking studies. It does make sense that more visible ads—such as those at the top of a page or embedded within content—will perform better, though optimal ad placement will vary depending on individual sites and their user bases.

Here’s another question we asked you, this one about ad design:

Q: Do you find it more successful to select ad colors that blend in with your site or contrast?

It’s overwhelmingly clear that you design ads to blend into your site, rather than to contrast. We expected that the response would be more evenly split between “Contrast” and “Blend in,” due to the fact that contrasting ads may work better to gain attention. 

Blend in or stand out?
To gain further insight, we again tapped into our experts here at Yahoo! Publisher Network to provide some helpful guidance.

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