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When your blog or website becomes successful and starts to get traffic, if you don’t make direct sales yourself or commissions via affiliate traffic, you almost always look for other revenue streams. The most common revenue stream is CPM based advertising or something like adsense. However, once many publishers start down that path, they almost always end up chasing off topic traffic. Let’s look at two of the flagship websites of the technology space, Techcrunch and Mashable.

This week, Techcrunch posted a story about how so many valley entrepenuers in the Valley are now having babies. I’ll take a quote from the article which shows exactly how silly this type of posting is:

To anywhere else in the US, this may sound “So what? People have babies all the time.” But in the Valley, this is a staggering injection of work-life balance into the 24/7 Web space.

This is not tech news. In fact it barely qualifies as a “slice of life” piece about life in the Valley. ZOMG I mean you people in the valley finally realize that 99% of the rest of the population in the US struggles with work-life balance issues… I mean–WOW. Congratulations on peeping your head out of your narcissistic incestuous self centered bubble for nine months and, you know, actually getting  a life. This piece was written to be nothing more than a polarizing, emotionally-charged bit of linkbait designed to drive up page views.

Don’t worry, Mashable. You’re just as guilty as Techcrunch of chasing off topic subjects. Just look at how many Tiger Woods posts you have. And after victims of the recent earthquake tragedy in Chili posted pictures to twitpic, how long did it take your writers to create their articles?  Just because an issue arises doesn’t mean you should start writing about off topic subjects.

Let’s be honest here. You aren’t being responsible journalists. You’re becoming ambulance chasers, hoping to make some page views and few dollars off of a time sensitive spike in search terms. Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with being a traffic whore. But you can’t act like a traffic whore then turn around and claim you’re a journalist. It just doesn’t work that way.

As a publisher, how do you decide what to cover and what not to cover? Ask yourself this question and answer honestly. Am I writing about this subject because it’s part of my industry or because it’s kinda connected and there is a lot of traffic? Every so often there comes a story that is too good to pass up. But remember that, every time you bite into that juicy little bit, you sell out just a little.

Nobody ever sells out all once. They do it slowly over time until, eventually, there’s nothing left…

Decide which side of the fence you want to be on. Every time you cross from one side to the other, you lose the respect of your peers and your readers.

Advertisement: Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts. #4

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Are You Chasing Off Topic Traffic

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Are You Chasing Off Topic Traffic

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Patrick Bennett, Co-Founder, BLVD Status
Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc.
Ralf Schwoebel, CEO, Tradebit, Inc.
Brian Ussery, Director of SEO Technology, Search Discovery Inc.

Maile’s first. Here’s her agenda:

• Need for speed
• Faster on the frontend: for little or no money down
• Available tools
• Performance and ranking
• 3 steps to success
• Looking ahead: performance and SEO

Need for Speed: Increased Conversions

Side-by side testing of an optimized site vs. the original version. They found a faster site resulted in higher conversions and higher volume for average conversion. Delays under half a second reduces a visitor’s average searches/day even after the delay is removed.

Good News: Faster on a Budget

The Performance Golden Rule: 80-90 percent of the end-user response time is spent on the front end. Start there.

Tools: Site Performance

It’s a lab tool. It will tell you how long it took on average for a page to load. It tells you how slow it is in comparison to other sites. It will tell you average load times for specific pages, as well as specific clues to make it faster.

Available Google Tools: Page Speed

It’s a Firebug plugin to use on any URL. It prioritizes ways to speed up your site.

Established truths about ranking:

• We aim to give users the best search experience possible
• Ranking is a nuanced process, over 200 signals
• Google is always innovating and conducting experiments

As of today, performance is not a factor in organic ranking. If performance becomes a signal, we expect to notify webmasters. But, hint: Google is pushing the importance of speed.

3 Steps to a Faster Site

1. Check out site performance in Webmaster Tools
2. Install Page Speed
3. Explore! Check out tools like YSlow, WebPagetest.org, hang out in the “make the Web Faster” forum

A faster site is proven to increase conversions, pages views and time on site while lowering bounce rate and operating costs. That’s measurable SEO value. Check out more at google.com/speed. She closes saying, “So you understand that speed is a priority. Good luck making the Web faster!”

Next Patrick takes the podium. Is site monitoring part of your SEO budget? Search for “website uptime monitor” and the tools can help you identify speed problems on your site.

What are some hints in analytics? Certain KPIs can shed light on bottlenecks:

• Visits
• Page views
• Bounce rate
• Time on site

Create a custom report to watch performance KPIs. They’re good indicators of whether or not the site is functioning properly.

What’s the ROI?

• Lower bounce rates
• Higher number page views
• Higher time on site
• More user interaction = more conversions
• More spider interaction = higher indexability

YSlow

This tool gives a performance grade to a site and lists important components that are in play.

Okay, my site is slow. Where should I start? It’s important to have a good host.

• Create a benchmark
• New server?
• Server-side caching
• Fewer HTTP requests
• Gzip compression
• JavaScript and CSS as external files
• Image compression

CSS Sprites: Create one image that holds all of your CSS background images, buttons, etc. This means a lot fewer HTTP requests.

When should I stop?

• Continually make this a priority.
• User the tools weekly to find bottlenecks.
• Never stop optimizing.
• Can we make this standard?

Ralf steps up next. He’s coming from an e-commerce background.

Focus on speed when SEO is done. Speed influences ranking.

Using Open Source Tools

• Search: Sphinx (or Lecene)
• Cache: Memcache and Squid
• Code: XCache for PHP

Embrace the Squid

• www.squid-cache.org: free proxy for Lin/Win
• Easy to setup, powerful, stable, scalable, fast

Divide and conquer: put the statistics into cache, lower server load.

Go Global

• Local delivery from the closest hub
• Load balancing included, also fail-over

Conclusion

• A fistful of dollars gives you
• A global content distribution network
• Increased speed = higher conversions
• A security layer between your site and hackers
• A fail-over solution to sleep better
• Less load on your main servers

Brian is next. Consumers expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less. Speed is not in analytics, so what do you do? Use the Webmaster Tools Maile talked about. The more data points there are, the more accurate it is.

Speed 2010

• Split the initial payload into 2 parts: 1) necessary to render the page and 2) not necessary to render page
• Prevent scripts from blocking other downloads
• Order resources for load efficiency
• Avoid placing inline scripts between CSS and other resources
• Use a cookie free domain for serving static content.
• Compact CSS, place it in
• With images, use the appropriate optimized format. Specify dimensions, don’t scale images in (X)HTML
• Use a Favicon with expiration to avoid 404s
• Use Google Page Speed to optimize images
• Strip whitespace
• Minimize redirects and remove dead links to avoid wasteful requests

The Need For Speed: Google Says It Matters was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

Go here to read the rest:
The Need For Speed: Google Says It Matters

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Brian Boland, Manager, Direct Response Solutions, Facebook
Addie Conner, Director of Search Marketing, Course Advisor Inc.
Michael Kahn, SVP, Marketing, Performics
Will Scott, President, Search Influence

Facebook’s Brian is starting the session. He’s going to give an overview of how Facebook ads work. About half the audience is using Facebook ads now.

Mission: Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

Product vision: identity, connections and sharing

Facebook scale: Rapid growth, the top daily reach of any site, including Google and Yahoo, they’re number one in the time spent on a site.

Direct response: Standard ads

1. Standard ad
2. Standard with social
3. Event
4. Fan

Facebook Ads and Search

1. Users are at a different point in the sales funnel. Comparing a Facebook ad to a search ad and you see they’re very different. Facebook has a broader swath of users. Facebook ads will have an impact at the highest level of the funnel, demand generation, as well as the end with demand fulfillment.

2. Targeting is based on user interests, not keywords: take advantage of interests and connections. You can specify targeting for age/gender/location, authentic interests (not “keywords”, they’re changing that next week).

3. The ad environment and ad units themselves are very different.

Optimizing Facebook ads is between an art and a science. There are demographics reports that provide information about users viewing and clicking on ads. There are responder profile reports which tell you common characteristics of the users clicking on your ads.

Try it out. For new accounts or accounts created in the last 90 days, $50 coupon to test and learn with Facebook Ads. Limit 150 uses. Code: SMX50

Next Michael will talk about performance based advertising on Facebook and some applications that are being used to optimize Facebook advertising.

Performance Based Advertising

Facebook social ads are text and image based ads that appear in the right-hand rail of Facebook user’s profile pages

Bought on a CPC or CPM basis

Trigger by demographic

Benefits:

Increase brand exposure

Drive acquisitions/sales

Generate fans

Capabilities:

CPC auction-based media to target audiences on social networking sites and manage campaigns to optimal CPA, click or impression goals

They learned that Facebook is a fertile and welcoming promotional environment, with the right offers.

Case Study: Threadless

Facebook Application Development

Moxie Interactive developed an app for driving movie sales. It fetches movies or gifts your friends may like based on their profile interests. Select your Facebook friend in the “fetch” box. Users could add it to their profile. Users could share their fetch result with their network.

Benefits of a Facebook connection with your consumer:

Post ad for product 27%

Link to ad for product 37%

Purchase product 44%

Talk about product & recommend product, combined 46%

Will is next. He works with local businesses, almost all small businesses with small budgets. He’s going to compare search and Facebook ads with small budgets. He’s generally finding the same level of success on Facebook at a third of the price of the major search engines.

Display ads are earlier in the cycle. You can talk to them before users know they have a need.

Facebook Demographics

Facebook is like the third-largest country, or it rivals it in size. It’s also the third of the population with money to spend (they have computers, after all).

They’ve seen a huge savings on a cost per lead basis with Facebook. The advantages of Facebook are a lower CPC that traditional PPC, there’s great demographic targeting, and you get magazine-like editorial ads. Keyword filters allow tremendous targeting opportunities.

You can target fans of affinity groups. For instance, show ads of high-vanity product to fans of Victoria’s Secret. You can also show ads to fans of your competitor.

Facebook Advertising Benefits Summary:

• Lower cost per click
• Lower cost per conversion
• Less saturated ad inventory
• Demographic filtering
• Competitive targeting
• Customer is earlier in buying cycle

Addie takes the podium next. She loves Facebook ads:

• In January her ads were served to 57 million unique users an average of 56 times for total impressions of 3.2 billion.

• User data is accurate for the most part
• Targeting is awesome
• It’s not Google, Yahoo! or MSN and she likes competitiveness in the marketplace

Who’s Advertising on Facebook now?

• Data collectors
• Aspirational products
• Local advertisers
• At night, it’s a dating site
• Brand advertisers
• Everyday needs
• Facebook game apps

Finding Your Audience

It’s not search — it’s demand creation:

• Know your demo – gender, age
• Understand their interests – interest, education, occupation, keywords
• If they are dating and who they like to date – relationship status and interested in
• Know where they live – geo and language
• Get to know their friends – app, fan page

Testing is awesome:

• Image tests
• Headline tests
• Body text tests
• Three-factor ANOVA
• User experience testing
• Geo testing
• The list goes on!

They did a test of 6 ads for the same thing, same text, different images.

From here you can do a headline test. They saw up to 120 percent difference in unique CTR, 101 percent difference in conversion rate.

Challenges: Constantly evolving marketplace

• Changing ad policies
• New entrants
• Ad fatigue
• Audience saturation
• User behavior

How to Win:

• Get to know who you want to target
• Continually test and get better
• Get granular
• Use all the reporting Facebook gives you
• Be creative
• Stay fresh, try new things

Fears: Her mom is on Facebook. Facebook might not be that cool anymore. But she hopes it lasts because it’s a great platform and it’s getting better every day.

Facebook Ad Tactics For Search Marketers was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

Continued here:
Facebook Ad Tactics For Search Marketers

This is a quick reminder that the Scribe introductory offer, where you get our most advanced plan for the Starter price, ends tomorrow, Friday, February 26, 2010, at 6:00 pm Central.

But I also wanted to share a video with you. It was created for current Scribe customers to let them know what’s coming next month, but I’m going to hook you up too.

It’s a preview of the Scribe web-based application. So while you can use Scribe right in your WordPress interface, you will also be able to use this web-based version to analyze any content before posting it online on any platform. Or analyze and optimize older content for any platform. Total freedom.

This is especially useful for professional web writers who create content for clients. The Scribe web version even generates an SEO analysis report that you can deliver to your clients along with the content.

This video preview was made by Sean Jackson (one of the technology ninjas behind Scribe) for our current customers. So trust me, it’s not a sales pitch. But it’s very useful for getting an idea how the Scribe web-based application works.

And if you decide to hop on board tomorrow with our great introductory offer, you’ll get Scribe Web during your very first month as a customer at no extra charge. You’ll also get every other version of Scribe we develop, all inclusive.

Check out the video preview of the Scribe web-based version here.

• Take the Scribe for WordPress tour
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Take Scribe WP on a Free Test Drive

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and wants you to know that Thesis + Scribe = SEO Made Simple. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

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Check out this preview of the Scribe SEO web-based application

Backup Technology has created a new plugin for WordPress that allows you to securely backup your WordPress database online. While there are quite a few plugins that can backup your WordPress data, none of them offer an online solution, until now.

For many of you, blogging is a money making business and that means you must protect it in case something bad happens (this is true even if your blog doesn’t make money). This means having a backup solution in place. The Online Backup for WordPress plugin can not only backup your WordPress and email you a copy, it can also back up the data onto Backup Technology’s secured servers.

Backup Technology offers 50MB of free secured server space with the plugin. In this day and age of TB size drives, 50MB may not seem like a lot but it’s more than enough for most blogs. My blog, which has over 3,000 posts and 160,000 comments, consumed only 23MB of space. I still have a long ways to go before I reach the 50MB limit.

Five Steps to Total Protection

1. Download the plugin here.
2. Upload the plugin to your blog using the Plugins > Add New > Upload feature in your WordPress Dashboard.
3. Register for your 50 MB of free space on Backup Technology’s backup portal.
4. Configure your plugin to enable encryption and provide the login details of your online account by clicking Change Settings on the Tools > Online Backup page.
5. Schedule your backup by clicking Change Schedule on the same page

Online Backup for WordPress allows you to schedule your backups every hour, twice a day or once a day. Backups can be emailed to you, sent to the backup portal or both. As I’ve stated, Backup Technology provides 50MB of free storage space. When it is reached the oldest backups will be removed to make space for the newest, so you will always have the latest backups available. Each time a backup is added, Backup Technology sends you a notification email.

At the moment, Online Backup for WordPress backups your database. Future versions will add backup for plugins and themes. This is the best backup solution I’ve found for WordPress so far. Having a copy of my database on my computer as well as on a secured server in the clouds just adds to that extra piece of mind. And best of all, it’s free!

Download Online Backup for WordPress Plugin

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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How To Do Online Backup for WordPress

I decided to turn on Google Buzz today to see what all the buzz was about. So far, it’s been quite a pleasant experience. I can see real potential in the product. There are some bugs in it but I’m sure Google will iron them out in the coming days and weeks.

I like Google Buzz enough to set up my Buzz page. I didn’t like the URL Google gave me so I created my own using the Ninja Affiliate WordPress plugin. If you’re on Google Buzz then please follow me.

So far, I’ve set up my Buzz to stream my blog, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter feeds. However, the Flickr and Twitter streams don’t seem to be working at this time. I’m sure they’ll be fixed soon. Have you tried Google Buzz yet? What’s your impression so far?

What Is Google Buzz?

Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most.

Google focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.

Google Buzz will be rolling out to all Gmail users in the next couple of days. To find out if you have it, just log out of your Gmail account and log back in. You should see a Buzz invite. If not, try again later. Every Gmail user will eventually get it.

Follow Me On Google Buzz

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Follow Me On Google Buzz

We got tired of eating Pho every week so this week, we decided to head to Nando’s Chicken in Kerrisdale for some flame grilled Portuguese chicken. Nando’s is one of my favorite places for chicken. The franchise has hundreds of locations around the world and Vancouver has been a very good market for them. Nando’s is also the first restaurant that allowed me to try out my new chip enable Visa card.

We had a nice turn out of ten people coming out for Nando’s famous Peri Peri chicken. The location is idea for a Dot Com meet up. It’s relatively quiet with a seating layout that promotes networking. This is the second Dot Com Pho we held at Nando’s and I can see us going there for more meet ups in the future.

For the Learning To Read Edition of Dot Com Pho, we have Stephen’s chicken lunch, Tris Hussey’s new blogging book, eBook reader smack down between the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPhone, iPadInCanada.ca, the iPhone app of the week and other stuff. Anyone is welcome to join us for Dot Com Pho. Follow me on Twitter to find the time and location of the next one.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

Originally posted here: 
Dot Com Pho – Learning To Read Edition

Yesterday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed the world the iPad. During the presentation, I had a good time making fun of the new device with the interesting name. I tweeted that in Q4, Apple will introduced a big screen version call the MaxiPad plus a small screen version call the iPad with Wings. The jabs at the iPad were so hot that iTampon became the number two trending topic on Twitter.

There were a bunch of features missing from the iPad that many people were hoping for, like a camera, SD card reader, USB, etc. Judging by the Twitter streams and many blog posts I’ve read, most are calling the new device a failure. However, I believe the iPad rocks and is going to be a massive win for Apple.

It’s Not Meant To Replace An iPhone Or A Macbook

The iPad is not an iPhone or a Macbook. Stop thinking of it as such. It’s a brand new category. Had Apple put features like card readers, USB, cameras, etc., the only thing they’ll be doing is cannibalizing their laptop sales. That’s what netbooks did to laptops and it’s the reason why 90% of laptops sold for $1,000 or more are Apple Macbooks. No, Steve Jobs is not dumb enough to make the same mistake PCs did with the Netbook.

Amazon Should Be Worried

With a starting price of $499, the iPad is only $10 more than a Kindle DX. Anyone in the market for an eBook reader is going to think seriously about the iPad. For $10 more, you can get a device that can do so much more than read books. Who wouldn’t go for that?

While E-ink is a great way to display written pages it has limitations. The contrast is still too low and it’s only black and white. While the iPad’s LED screen may cause eye strain sooner it has the ability display materials that e-ink doesn’t perform well at, like comic books, children books and text books.

The Kindle is designed for linear reading. It doesn’t work well for non linear materials like text books or the bible, where you’re scanning through chapters or verses. I have the NIV Bible on both my Kindle and my iPhone and the iPhone verison works way better. The Kindle navigation is extremely cumbersome. I can navigate to a verse in less than five seconds on my iPhone compare to 30 seconds for the Kindle.

The main advantage the Kindle has right now is the size of Amazon’s library. However, giving the marketing power of Apple, I suspect the iBookstore is going to get huge really quick. Don’t be surprised if you see Amazon announce a price reduction on the Kindle in 60 days.

At $499, It’s An Impulse Purchase

Had the iPad been priced at $999 as some speculated, the iPad would have been a massive failure. However, at $499 this thing is a game changer. People would buy it just for the novelty factor alone (I know Ed Lau would). At this price, Apple is going to sell millions of these things and it’s going to create a whole new revenue channel for them not just in iPad sales, but book sales as well. The iPad could do for books what the iPod did for music.

I can’t wait to get my hands on one.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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My Take On The iPad – It Rocks!

For the past year, John Chow dot Com has used Vimeo as its default for embedded video. The main reason for doing this is Vimeo allows HD embedding while the other video services does not. I’m starting to see comments that say the Vimeo service runs very slow for some readers and they’ve asked me to switch to YouTube. I should note that all my videos are available on YouTube, I just choose to embed Vimeo on the blog because it’s in HD 720p by default. However, YouTube recently allowed viewers the ability to choose their resolution on videos embedded on a web page. The default is 320p but you can easily change it to 480p or 720p if the video was filmed in those resolutions.

From a marketing standpoint, it would be better to use YouTube as the default player. The video views racked up by Vimeo would go to YouTube and that will give the clip a much higher chance of being a YouTube featured video. The other advantage of switching to YouTube is it’s free. Vimeo cost $59.95 a year and they don’t allow commercial content.

What do you guys think? Should I switch to YouTube as the blog’s default video player or should I remain at Vimeo. Please vote and leave your comment. I’ve included a sample video from YouTube and Vimeo so you can see the difference in video quality.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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Should I Switch To YouTube As My Default Video Player?