Purple Squirrl

Feedburner Ad Network vs. Pheedo

Allen Stern over at Center Networks has a great video talking about issues with the Feedburner Ad Network. He explains that since Google acquired Feedburner he’s “really disappointed in the ability for them to moneitze RSS feeds”.

This comes on the heels on Google shutting down the Feedburner Ad Network by not allowing any more publishers. They want to push FeedBurner publishers into using the AdSense for Feeds solution.

The Search Engine Roundtable backs up Stern’s comments -

“Yes, Google is going to push FeedBurner publishers into using the AdSense for Feeds solution. I personally never liked AdSense for Feeds because of the low payouts. But recently, in the past six months or so, FeedBurner’s Ad Network (FAN) has been paying out about 10 - 25% of what they use to payout.

Approximately since April of this year, the payouts have honestly been a joke. Why? I suspect because the FeedBurner team is less interested in finding ad partners and more interested in pushing publishers into AdSense.”

Stern goes on to say in his video that he will be using Pheedo in the coming months in conjunction with Google AdSense for feeds to make an assessment of which produces more income. At the moment his first experiences with Pheedo are that they are better for monetizing feeds and helping bloggers make money online.

Source: FeedBurner’s New Google AdSense Feed Advertising — Disappointing [Center Networks]

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Social Media now has a landscape

It’s interesting  that when things become so big a diagram is required to make sense of it. Well, that is the case with Social Media. People are not completely clear what should be considered a social media site. I found a great post by Fred Cavazza. In that post he showcases two great pieces that will help people get an idea of what he calls the Social Media Landscape.

From the graphic the different tools and services can be grouped into categories:

• Publication tools with blogs ( Typepad, Blogger…), wikis ( Wikipedia, Wikia, Wetpaint…) and citizen journalism portals ( Digg, Newsvine…)
• Sharing tools for videos ( YouTube…), pictures ( FlickR…), links ( del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia…), music ( Last.fm, iLike…), slideshows ( Slideshare), products reviews ( Crowdstorm, Stylehive…) or products feedbacks ( Feedback 2.0, GetSatisfaction…)
• Discussions tools like forums ( PHPbb, vBulletin, Phorum…), video forums ( Seesmic), instant messaging ( Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Meebo…) and VoIP ( Skype, Google Talk…)
• Social networks ( Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut…), niche social networks ( LinkedIn, Boompa…) and tools for creating social networks ( Ning)
• Micropublication tools ( Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Plurk, Adocu…) and alike ( twitxr, tweetpeek)
• Social aggregation tools like lifestream ( FriendFeed, Socializr, Socialthing!, lifestrea.ms, Profilactic…)
• Platforms for livecast hosting ( Justin.tv, BlogTV, Yahoo! Live, UStream…) and there mobile equivalent ( Qik, Flixwagon, Kyte, LiveCastr…)
• Virtual worlds ( Second Life, Entropia Universe, There…), 3D chats ( Habbo, IMVU…) and teens dedicated virtual universes ( Stardoll, Club Penguin…)
• Social gaming platforms ( ImInLikeWithYou, Doof…), casual gaming portals ( Pogo, Cafe, Kongregate…) and social networks enabeled games ( Three Rings, SGN)
• MMO ( Neopets, Gaia Online, Kart Rider, Drift City, Maple Story) and MMORPG ( World of Warcraft, Age of Conan…)

Social Media Landscape [Fred Cavazza.net]

SEO Cannot Solve Banned Domains

It’s amazing that everybody seems to think that SEO is the answer to a website’s traffic problems. They think well if the site was optimized then traffic would go through the roof. Well, there be other problems. One of the biggest issues is the health of the domain name. If the search engines stop indexing because they view the domain as spam then all the SEO you do will not help the marketing.

Practical Ecommerce have a great article about checking the health of your domain before you purchase it. If the domain was previously owned then it’s important to research how it was used. If it was used as spam then there are good chances that the big search engines (ie. Google, Yahoo!, MSN) will have banned it. No amount of SEO will get it listed.

Here are some tips from the Practical Ecommerce article:

1. Check out the domain name’s previous incarnations (if any) at Archive.org.
2. Learn more about the kind of sneaky or malicious practices that would cause a site to become penalized by looking at Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
3. If you’re purchasing an existing domain, use any one of a number of PageRank lookup tools, like this one at Blogflux. Look at the current site’s PageRank. If it’s an old site with a zero PageRank, something must be wrong.
4. For an existing domain name, check to see who currently owns it by using the WHOIS Search at Infoservemedia.com. Then check the ownership against the Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) at Spamhaus.org. There are 115 known spam operations on the list.

What’s the value of LinkedIn Groups?

I’ve been a member on LinkedIn for a long time. I’m one of the early adopter types. When the groups feature came out in July 2005 I was pretty excited. But 3 years later I still haven’t figured out what’s going on with it. I’m a member of 24 groups. I’ve applied to a lot more than that but for some reason I’m not in them. I don’t get that. Some random guy starts the “Social Media Marketing” group and then I need to beg him for approval. Why? Who’s he? If I’m in then how is that good for me.

LinkedIn is certainly proud of their groups - but does anybody else care. They announced that they had the Web’s Largest BlackBerry Community. So what? If I’m in that group how does it benefit me?

So far i have gained nothing from being in the groups on LinkedIn. Well, there are nice logos and it does spice up my profile up a bit. But I don’t gain anything material from the group. At least in Facebook the group owner unashamedly sends me group spam that I have to ignore. But not on LinkedIn, I’m a member of a club that does nothing.

Can somebody tell me any usefullness to this groups?

Google Analytics Tutorials

I use Google Analytics for all my web analytics. They offer an amazing service. The drawback of course is that you’re giving Google more data so that they can make their ads even more profitable. So in an indirect way you’re helping them. But if you’re fine with that then use them - they are excellent.

On Veoh.com today I found some great tutorials from Conversation Marketing, there are five in total:

Tutorial 1: Setup

Tutorial 2: Essential Stats

Tutorial 3: Digging Deeper

Tutorial 4: Goals

Tutorial 5: Search Analytics

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Social Media Inspirational Poster

There’s a lot of meaning here.. read it.. digest it.. discuss it…

Attentio.com]

Pepperjam Network - Why should you care?

At the moment Pepperjam Network seem to be the darling of the affiliate world. The are a full-service internet marketing agency and affiliate network. On January 15, 2008 they launched their affiliate network and within 5 1/2 months they have done the following:

• penetrated 17.5% of the market as per MarketingSherpa
• added 177 new advertisers, including eBay, NetQuote, Auto Parts Warehouse, FRS Health Energy, HomeGain, 1&1 Internet, VistaPrint, and Angie’s List
• signed partnership deal with M3 Mobile, an internet and mobile marketing network.

MarketingSherpa published a study in which Pepperjame Network has quickly positioned itself as one of the top 5 affiliate marketing networks in the United States. It is considered the most significant affiliate network launch of the last 10 years (Electronic Retailer Magazine, June 2008).

Over the past eight years the Pepperjam Network has provided consultation to hundreds of affiliates and merchants and therefore understand the business very well. They provide advertisers and publishers with resources and education to help optimized their affiliate marketing. Having the background of consulting firstly certainly helps Pepperjam identify affiliate network’s short comings.

They have identified two main points of weakness of competitors and are using these as competitive advantage -
(1) poor, unreliable communication tools
(2) lack of affiliate transparency.

The Pepperjam Network is that advertisers will be empowered to better manage brand and minimize fraud through full and unfettered affiliate transparency, while also building stronger, more strategic affiliate marketing relationships through real-time communication tools such as Pepperjam Chat.

So this seems to make sense on both sides. They are signing up a ton of good advertisers with the promise of serving them with tools to track their spending and measuring their success. And then in turn this is appealing for publishers because they will have a good stable of advertisers.

Now the true test is to see if they’ll sign up PurpleSquirrl.com even with its little amount of traffic. If they do I’ll report back later on its success.

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