Monetize and Analyze 

Earlier this week, I promised to offer up five useful things that I learned at the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, but I only gave you three. I’m such a tease. Really, it’s all part of my cunning plan to keep you coming back to the blog. Looks like it worked.  Anyway, here are numbers four and five of the five things.

4. There are 7 1/2 ways to monetize your blog

i. Run contextual ads—You know, like from Yahoo! Publisher Network and RightMedia’s DMX.

ii. Sell physical goods—Branded merchandise, such as T-shirts, mugs, ball-point pens and so forth. There are many vendors out there who can help you do this at a minimal cost. This is only worthwhile once you have established a broad audience.

iii. Solicit user donations—Your blog can be partly or wholly user-supported, like PBS or NPR. PayPal offers a donation button that you can install on your site in seconds. Do you blog on a political or scientific topic? There are scientific institutions and political think-tanks out there with money to burn. It won’t hurt to hit them up for a donation. What’s the worst that could happen?

iv. Join an affiliate ad network—Affiliate networks offer text and display advertising for hundreds of vendors in a wide range of categories, from automobiles to vacation rentals. Affiliate network publishers are paid a percentage of each sale. Most BlogWorld-goers that I talked to agreed that text links embedded in your content tend to work better than banners. And remember, there are many ancillary goods that can be offered. People who like high-end jewelry, for example, may also be apt to buy expensive handbags. For more affiliate tips, click here. 

v. Negotiate direct ad sales—Do you have highly targeted content that caters to a niche audience? Have you developed, or are you in the process of developing, a significant audience? Don’t be afraid to contact advertisers directly and propose a deal. The worst thing they can do is say no. You’ll find that once you have one deal going, competitors in that niche may be more likely to get onboard. Some advertisers may be happy to place a display ad on your site for branding purposes if your audience is targeted correctly. 

vi. Explore pay-per-post—You may have heard of the controversial concept of advertisers paying bloggers to blog about their products. But if done ethically and with genuine interest in the product niche, you may be able to earn extra income and help expand your reader base.

vii. Offer subscriptions—If you have high-value content to offer, users will pay you for it. Consider developing tiers of content, some free, some via paid subscription.

vii ½. Make your blog into a book—This crosses the line between selling physical goods and offering subscriber content. The fact is, people like having physical books around. Who doesn’t enjoy the smell of fresh ink? You can also offer unique content in a book and arrange your content and illustrations to be both informative and attractive. There are many on-the-fly publishers who can help turn your blog into a book.

5. Analytics are your friend
Advertisers, partners and affiliates like to know things, such as how much traffic you’re getting, how many of your users are repeats, what your “bounce rate” is, where your traffic is coming from, how long your visitors stay, and so forth. You want to know where people are clicking, which pages they’re lingering on, and which they’re staying away from, so that you can adjust your content and revenue-earning strategies accordingly. There are many analytics packages available.

I also made quite a few new friends and professional contacts at the show. In the coming weeks, you’ll see some valuable new contributions by some of the many industry experts whom I met at BlogWorld.

In the meantime, here’s a brief round-up of BlogWorld coverage:

Turns out that despite all the hoopla, not everyone in Vegas knows what a blog is, as Fox News discovered.

There’s more to corporate blogging than just begging your CEO to let you set one up.

Here’s a great list of video interviews by our friends over at Build a Better Blog.

Zac Jonhson blogs Marc Cuban’s keynote speech.

Debbie Weil listens to BlogWorld impresario, Dave Taylor, opine.

Steven Van Yoder teaches you how to get slightly famous.

For Flickr photos streams, click here and here.

—Michael Bloggeratus

Our Article on Linkbait Gets a Thumbs-Up

A regular reader and commentator on our blog, Gary R. Hess, recently gave us kudos for our January, 2007 post, “Leveraging Linkbait,” by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.

Writing in his blog, Gary called out “Leveraging Linkbait” as one of the 12 best articles on the subject of linkbaiting.

Never heard of linkbaiting? It’s cleaner that it sounds. In fact, linkbaiting can be an effective addition to your overall marketing mix, helping drive more traffic to your site. Read the original post, as well as the follow up, to find out how to make linkbait work for you.

Well done, Rand, and thanks, Gary.

—Michael Mattis, Head Linkbaitist

On Monday, October 1st, between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time, we’ll be performing a routine update to our system. Access to your Yahoo! Publisher Network account during that time may be limited. This update should not impact your account or the serving of ads on your site.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

—The Team

“Cloning” Content is a Bad Practice

Okay. So I’m not that all that keen on Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture.

But there’s one thing that Keen and I can agree on. We both hate it when we’ve discovered that publishers have obviously cut-and-pasted content from one site to another without at least citing where it came from—especially when it’s our content. 

It’s frustrating when you go searching for a piece of information and you find the same info, written in exactly the same way, on a hundred different sites. It is a bad experience that just doesn’t help.

In fact, we’re so uptight about it here at Yahoo! Publisher Network that one sure fire way to get kicked out is to “clone” someone else’s content. It’s not just cut-and-paste that gets us riled. Some folks think it’s okay to load up their sites with little games, time wasters and other digital bling that they’ve either copied illegally, or have bought from someone else. Either way, it’s just not cricket, at least not in this network.

Call it a network quality thing
Yahoo! Publisher Network is working toward being the highest quality ad network that we can be. We’ve got our standards, just like any young debutante. We want to give users a high quality experience, something more-or-less original that is both useful and entertaining.

True, some sites need more content than others—backgrounders, critical articles, product reviews, definitions, blog entries, essays, Flickr photos and so forth. But there’s a quality way to fill that need and avoid cloning. At Creative Commons you can search and find content under flexible copyright that you can use as long as you abide by the site’s terms and conditions and the author’s restrictions. 

—Michael Mattis, Clone Ranger

Putting spiders to work for you with Yahoo! Search Submit

We’ve talked about Yahoo! Search Submit in general terms before. It’s a fast and relatively cheap way to help your site get better exposure in Yahoo! “organic” search results. Today we offer a glimpse into how Search Submit works and how it can benefit certain publishers and e-commerce site owners.

Not-so-Creepy Crawlies
A Web spider is an automated script that methodically crawls the World Wide Web locating sites for display in search results. It would be virtually impossible to know what is on the Web moment-to-moment without this tool to scan for relevant sites. On the other hand, the extremely dynamic nature of the Web poses a problem for Web spiders, which slowly index the latest updates to the millions of sites on the Web.

Search Submit is for those seeking to increase their site’s chances of displaying in non-sponsored (algorithmic) search results. It also can help your most pertinent URLs get displayed in response to a search related to your site content. Search Submit comes in two flavors, Basic and Pro, with the Pro version offering the advantage of providing greater control over the way your listings are presented, helping to raise your “click appeal.”

Compare the standard Web spider search engine refresh rates of every two to six weeks with Search Submit’s search engine site updates of every 48 hours. Even if your site is updated infrequently, you may still want to think about Search Submit should any of the following apply to you:

• Your site is not optimized for Web spiders. Many Web spiders have difficulty indexing sites containing rich media or framed pages.
• Your site contains several pages detailing product or other inventory. A searcher entering keywords related to your products may not see your product pages in search results if the spider has not indexed your latest additions.
• Your site contains seasonal offers. Often these special offers need to be made available to searchers more frequently to take advantage of a particular timeframe.

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

The Big Apple’s the Place to Be

“No one should come to live in New York unless he is willing to be lucky.”—E.B. White

I’ve been captivated by E.B. White’s 1939 classic, Here is New York since reading it many years ago for a class in journalism school. It is a portrait and a paean to “Noo Yawk City” so compelling that one is obliged to follow White non-stop through his marathon-length amble around the greatest city in the world.

If you happen to be in the city that, as White put it, brings “to a single compact area the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant,” next week, you’ll surely want a little time to wander. But few ever go to New York without a purpose. If you’re reading this blog and are planning to be in New York next week, chances are you’re going for the Search Engine Strategies New York 2007 conference, to be held Tuesday, April 10 through Friday, April 13.

While you’re strolling around the exhibit hall, you’ll definitely want to saunter up to booth #2400. Yes, that’s the Yahoo! booth, where our dedicated Yahoos will be on hand to answer your questions, hand out schwag and generally make things pleasant and informative.

In addition, you’ll want to catch these Yahoo! panels, which will be informative and get you off your feet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hopefully, one day phishing will be gone; until then, beware
 

All you need to do is wire a few hundred bucks to the office of the finance minister of the tiny nation of Twitbuktu, located on the border between Bikini Atoll and Denmark, and email him your bank account number, date of birth and mother’s maiden name, and a few days later a million dollars or more will materialize into your bank account like manna from heaven. 

Right. And if pigs twirl their tails fast enough, they can fly.

By now we’re all pretty familiar with email scams, those too-good-to-be-true offers that multiply like romance-happy gerbils in your inbox. Most of them are pretty easy to spot, even to the untrained eye.

Scam I am
But what should you do if you got what looked like a legitimate email from Yahoo!—or from a business that claimed to be affiliated with us—asking for personal or account details such as a password or credit card info?

Don’t respond to it.

Neither Yahoo!, nor any business we are affiliated with, will ever send you an email or call you proactively asking you for contact, account or other financial information. If you do get such an email or call, it likely comes from a crook who is “phishing” for your information in order to bilk you of your hard-earned cash.

If you think you’ve been “phished” for info, please let us know by emailing phishing(at)cc.yahoo-inc.com, or forward the email in question to the same address.

To learn more about how you can keep from getting reeled in by “phishermen,” and how to guard against other Internet-based scams, visit these resources:

• Common Abuse Issues
• Yahoo! Security Center

—Michael Mattis

Yahoo! offers a turn of the dreidel for the Festival of Lights

As the calendar year quietly draws to its close, people naturally turn to friends and family to help them celebrate their successes of the past year and help prepare them for the challenges to come—and in the process eat, drink and laugh a lot.

Today is the first day of Chanukah. Over the next eight days, families will gather to light candles, exchange gifts, munch tasty nosh and offer blessings. All of us at Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo! Publisher Network would like to wish everyone a happy and safe Chanukah. 

—The Team

Interactive: How five lives were changed, five years after »  Full coverage »