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ConversionRater A discussion of online advertising, web entrepreneurship, and personal ramblings from Pat McCarthy.

Monthly Archives: April 2006

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Ad Tech Thoughts

April 29, 2006 10:14 pm / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

I just got back on Friday from Ad Tech, and I thought I’d pass on a few observations.

Highlights: 

  • The conference was bigger than last year by quite a bit.  It’s good to have a growing industry.
  • Meeting some good people with interesting ideas like Greg Narain with SocialRoots.
  • Getting to meet with so many Right Media clients.  It’s nice to see them happy but also nice to get feedback from them on what our media exchange can do better to help their businesses.

Lowlights:

  • The show was bigger than last year.  Yes, I know this was a highlight, but it also made things feel like a bubble when I see some companies without a clue spending so much money on booths and advertising.
  • It seemed like every company was either an ad network or a CPA/lead generation network.  Which I guess is good because these companies can all take part in Right Media’s media exchange, but I’d like to see more innovation in the space as well.
  • The internet not working in my hotel room.  That was a drag.
Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Conferences, Random

LinkedIn Can Be Better

April 25, 2006 1:23 pm / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

Umair is right. I’ve been using LinkedIn since it’s inception but I’ve always felt it’s so limiting I can’t find many useful purposes for it. The only things I’ve ever heard are that people have found past co-workers they knew, or the occasional hire is found through it. That’s okay I guess, but is it good enough?

I’m a strong believer in simplicity, so I’m glad they don’t cram it with useless features, but at the same time there needs to be more freedom and useful features. Umair makes the comparison to Friendster and how it has struggled by being too limiting. On the flip side many think Myspace has done well because it allows much more control and interaction. Obviously LinkedIn’s audience is different and can’t spend their whole hour of lunch time during school customizing their profile, but I think Umair’s right in that there needs to be more interaction to truly make it useful to more people.
LinkedIn is positioned well for it since they have the userbase already, so will they execute or will a startup beat them to the punch?

Posted in: Random, Social Networks, Startups, Web 2.0

Attending Ad Tech This Week

April 24, 2006 10:54 am / 2 Comments / Pat McCarthy

If you’re going to Ad Tech in San Francisco this week, I’d love to meet up with anyone who may be reading this blog.  It’s always great to put faces with IP addresses.

Posted in: Conferences, Random

How to Get a Spike For Your Blog Analytics

April 24, 2006 12:30 am / 8 Comments / Pat McCarthy

Traffic SpikeOnce you start tracking your blog statistics with a web analytics package you may start to get a little bored seeing similar results all the time.

How do you break out of this slump? You break out by creating a spike in your blog analytics. It’s not only good for your site overall, it’s fun to watch it happen and see the results.

The question is how to go about creating a traffic spike? I know some of you are probably saying to yourselves “easier said than done.” That’s only partially true, it’s really not that hard if you commit a little effort and time, and it can help your blog get to the next level. The general solution is to create a blog post that generates this spike, now let’s get to talking about how it’s done.

1. Choosing Your Statistic

The first thing we need to do is choose which statistic we’re trying to improve to create a spike. With a blog we have a few solid choices like:

  • Visits
  • Page Views
  • Comments
  • Links

What I’ve generally found though, is that when you create a spike for one of those, you usually see a spike for all of them. But depending on which one you pick, you can alter your strategy. For example, if you want to spike your visits, you’ll need to create a post that brings traffic to your blog from many sources such as links, your RSS subscribers, word of mouth, and search engines.

If we were trying to get a comment spike, you’d want to create a post that will drive people to comment. This could be a controversial topic, or a topic that asks for opinions or help from your readers. For the sake of this article, we’ll focus on a visits spike.

2. Choosing Your Post

To create a visits spike, you need to create a post that will draw attention and lead traffic to your site. The types of posts that generally draw the most attention are:

  • Breaking news – Get a scoop on an unreported story and you’re bound to get attention. This is hard to do unless you’re well-connected in your industry.
  • Hot topic – What are other bloggers or sites talking about? Post a fresh opinion on the subject.
  • Controversy – Is there anything controversial you can say? Don’t take this one too far, but a controversial opinion or subject can generate interest.
  • Instructional Post – Are you an expert in your topic? Posting a great instructional article is well appreciated and usually earns traffic.
  • Review – Do a detailed review on a product or service in your area of interest. If it’s good and helpful it can drive traffic your way.
  • Predictions – Posts that make predictions are often an interesting subject for people.
  • “Top Ten” List – Lists for some reason tend to do really well in getting link love and attention.

The key with all these types of posts though is that it must be good, timely, and original. If you do that correctly, then all you have to worry about is letting people know about it.

3. Where To Get Traffic
Once you’ve got a great post that you think deserves traffic, it’s time to let people know about it. You can get traffic to your post from the following sources:

  • Links from other blogs and websites – Let bloggers and webmasters who would be interested in your post know about it. A kind email asking them to check out your post is all that’s required. Don’t ask for a link or any favors, just let them know you have a post they might be interested in checking out because you know they follow that subject. If your post is good, you’ll get links out of it.
  • Social news sites or memetracker sites – These are sites like Digg, del.icio.us, or Memeorandum. These sites tend to lean towards technology posts, but there are sites like these out there for various topics. If you make a great post, don’t feel shy about submitting it to these sites to see if catches on. Getting on the front page of Digg, on the del.icio.us popular list, or a lead story on Memeorandum means lots of traffic and a sure spike.
  • Your RSS subscribers – If you’ve developed a solid set of RSS subscribers, then they’ll see your post when it comes along in their feedreader. If your post is good, they’ll probably come visit your site or start the next process, which is word of mouth.
  • Word of mouth – A great blog post means people will email it to friends and coworkers or tell them about it directly.
  • Search engines – It may take a little longer to get the spike, but when creating your post keep some keywords in mind that you hope to get good search rankings for. Placing the keywords in the title of the post as well as the body can really help you achieve some good rankings, especially when other sites link to your post with your post title. If you can get a high ranking for a good term, you’ll see a spike when that occurs as well as consistent higher traffic as long as you keep that ranking.

What’s great about each one of those methods is that they often can snowball. If you can get links from a couple of top blogs, it can start the traffic flowing which can lead to making the front page of a social news site, which helps word of mouth and it all just keeps building. If your post is great, you’ll probably see each method above happening.

4. Taking Advantage of the Spike

When you get your spike, you want to make sure it helps you out in the long term. Here are some tips to take advantage

  • Thank any bloggers who linked to you – Send each blogger an email, and maybe even link back to them in some way. It will allow you to network and build relationships that can pay off in many ways over time. They may link to you again, they may provide you with a breaking story, or perhaps you’ll be doing business at some point.
  • Build your RSS subscriber list – Make sure your RSS subscription options are prominent so you build your subscriber list. Each time I get a spike I see a noticeable jump in my number of subscribers. Make sure you follow up your spike post with some similar topics in the next few days to keep those subscribers around.
  • Respond to comments – If visitors leave comments, reply and engage in the discussion. It will make your visitors come back and feel more interested in your blog.
  • Monetize it – Depending on what your blog is like, there may be an opportunity to make money off your post directly either through ads, affiliate links, or selling an item directly. Keep this in mind, it’s something you might want to think about before your spike occurs as well. But if it’s too obvious, it might be less likely that a spike ever happens.

Have fun with it, and let us know here if this advice helps you get a traffic spike.

Posted in: Blogging, Random, Web Analytics

Marketing to Myspace Users: A Real Example

April 20, 2006 4:30 pm / 8 Comments / Pat McCarthy

As Myspace has grown to be a 800 pound internet gorilla the web business world has been trying to figure out why it’s successful and perhaps more importantly how to take advantage of it and market to it’s user gigantic user base. I’ve seen many people talk about using Myspace to market their business, but I’ve seen very few examples of it being done successfully besides the music industry.

I was made aware of RollerWarehouse and the success they’ve had by creating a news ticker of their rollerskating-focused blog posts for people to put on their Myspace profile pages. Here’s an example profile with it going, and here’s the ticker in action:



Roller Warehouse: Aggressive Rollerblade Skates

The kicker is that by running this on your Myspace page (or any other web page for that matter), you can get 5% off any order you place with RollerWarehouse. So, if you’re into rollerskating, you can put news on your Myspace page to make it cooler, and you can get 5% off your orders. Not bad.

So how has this worked out for RollerWarehouse?

In it’s first two weeks of action RollerWarehouse.com went from a Google Pagerank of 0 to a 6, sales for March were up about 10% over 2005’s sales which was their first increase in 4 years. The program has a viral effect as other Myspacers see it on pages and add it to their’s, so the link benefit is just growing, as well as the number of customers taking advantage of the 5% off. They currently estimate that 50-75 new news tickers are being placed today for a total somewhere between 750-1000 total tickers running on people’s pages.
Why is that Google Pagerank important? Well, now everytime they highlight a product on their blog, they get great natural search results in Google for that search term. For example, they went from nowhere to being ranked #1 in Google results for “aggressive skates”, and are currently sitting at #2. That is one of the top search terms for their industry.

How much work was this for RollerWarehouse? Not much, simply creating the news ticker and getting it adopted by the first few users.

What a simple and great way to market their ecommerce business and blog.

Posted in: Ecommerce, Random, Social Networks

More On An Open Ad Marketplace

April 14, 2006 6:37 pm / 1 Comment / Pat McCarthy

Chas Edwards of FM Publishing comments on his blog about the Open Ad Marketplace Jeff Jarvis proposes in a recent article.  I wanted to comment on some of Chas’ comments.

The folks who put their hearts and souls into a magazine or TV network or web site want to make the case to advertisers that the editorial product they produce, and the conversation it engenders, are unique. That uniqueness, they argue, deserves a premium. While an advertiser can find those same people — say the few million people who watch The West Wing — watching other shows or reading certain websites, there’s extra value to reaching them when they’re watching The West Wing. And making that case, god forbid, usually requires a bit of high-friction human contact.

I think Chas is evaluating the open ad marketplace concept based on how it would work for what FM represents, which is high-quality unique content publishers who can get targeted advertising from advertisers who want conversations, and can charge a premium for that.  Just because an open ad marketplace is “frictionless”, doesn’t mean these same advertisers couldn’t find these same high quality publishers and advertise on their inventory.  The value of an auction is that it bids the value of inventory up.  If Fred Wilson’s blog advertising was available in an open marketplace, he could still get a premium for his inventory, and only accept advertisers he wanted to work with.  I’m not saying FM doesn’t add value as a network, they definitely do, but there’s no reason to believe that high quality publisher inventory is suddenly devalued just because it’s not being tightly represented.

My worry is this: Create a frictionless, rational, performance-oriented marketplace for ads, and content quality and editorial innovation go down the drain.

Why?  Fred Wilson was writing his blog before FM came along to represent him right?  Was the content of less quality then?  Quality publishing on the web is often created out of love, passion, or knowledge.  Sure, there are lots of publications out there that need good ad revenue to pay writers and stay afloat, but nobody said that an open ad marketplace has to be so performance-driven that publishers lose money.  Isn’t this about publishers making more money and advertisers getting more value?  That’s the whole point of an open ad marketplace.  Publishers making more money shouldn’t equate to editorial content going down the drain….it should help.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Random

Jeff Jarvis’ Open Ad Marketplace

April 14, 2006 12:46 pm / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

Two thoughts on Jeff Jarvis’ recent Guardian article about an “open ad marketplace”.
1. It’s genius, I love that people are thinking this way.
2. We’re on our way to building it at Right Media.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Random, Right Media

Can You Trade a Red Paper Clip For a House?

April 13, 2006 11:59 am / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

This is a fascinating story of using the power of the web to do amazing things, and of course to create instant celebrity.

Posted in: Random

Google Calendar is Off and Running

April 13, 2006 12:17 am / 4 Comments / Pat McCarthy

Google Calendar has gone live, CNET has the story, and TechCrunch has a quick review. I’ve been playing around with it some tonight and I’m impressed so far. Importing from Outlook is handy for me compared to 30Boxes, but I’d like an export to Outlook as well.

They’ve done some nice stuff with sharing, creating multiple calendars, and allowing for RSS subscriptions and for others to view your calendar as a web page. It’s good to see Google be very open with this product. The integration with Gmail could be the highlight for heavy Gmail users.

In true Google style you can also search all public calendars which an interesting kind of sharing and voyeurism, but it’d also be handy to search your friend’s calendars for a specific event.

Unfortunately for 30Boxes, which I’ve enjoyed thus far, Google Calendar is probably far enough ahead that I switch over to using it. At least giving it a serious shot….

Posted in: Google, Web 2.0

Video Increasing Conversion Rates

April 12, 2006 2:46 pm / 5 Comments / Pat McCarthy

Can video increase your conversion rate?  Andrew Johnson’s Web Publishing Blog has an interview with Brendon Sinclair about a website he made that is just a video case study that promotes Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.  What’s interesting is that Brendon also has a normal site promoting the book, but the video site gets four times the conversion rate.

It’s a pretty interesting idea to build a site like Brendon built to review the book in an affiliate format.  It’s pretty compelling because the video gives a sense of trust in seeing a real talking person, and he does a good job showing a real example of why the SEO Book worked for him.  It’s getting easier and easier to create video like this, although Brendon still points out it took him four days of work to create this, but depending on how much revenue it generates four days isn’t that bad.

I wouldn’t yet say it’s a hard and fast rule that video will convert better. It has to be done well, a poorly done video could kill conversion rates as fast as a well done video could help them.

The bottom line is think about testing video for whatever you’re promoting.  Whether you’re running a topical blog or an ecommerce empire, it could help your results.

Posted in: Conversion Rate, Ecommerce, Random, Web Analytics

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