All About Content

Title pretty much says it all. According to Text Link Ads you need to be upgraded to the new version of Blogger for the script to work, but that’s actually not quite true — you need to use the new version of Blogger and use one of their standard templates. If you have an older custom template that you migrated to the new (then-beta) Blogger, you don’t have the option of adding widgets. And the way the script is set up to display the text link ads, you need to add an XML feed to your template via a widget.

I’ve tried creating a separate blog, setting up the ads, and then copying the code into the template for this one; but that doesn’t work because when a widget is created it’s specific to a particular blog id… and I haven’t even been able to find out what the blog id for All About Content is (did old Blogger sites get blog ids?).

It’s probably not that hard, but as a non-programmer, non-coder I’ve hacked this about as much as I can without having to actually rebuild this blog with a new template (and I don’t want to do that!). A reply to my emailed question to the company basically says, “it doesn’t work” (or rather: we don’t support that).

Okay, so I’m done for now. Never mind that idea.

Update: Just discovered some Blogger help pages that might help me hack this thing some more. It’s probable that the old template won’t let me use the widget builder (which is a bit like a WYSIWIG) but that I could somehow write the necessary code snippet by hand. That reminds me of some other adjustments I’ve been wanting to make. Will report back later.

For advertisers, there is a significant difference between contextual ads and (non-ad-served) text link ads. Contextual ads, like the Sponsored Results you see on the side of search engine results pages are all about ROI; whereas text link ads are primarily about (c’mon now let’s be honest) buying relevant inbound links that are intended to drive up rankings.

But for publishers, one concern looms larger than all others: show me the money!

After doing some investigating into the whole industry of purchasing text links (not to be confused with paid content or paid blog postings), I’m starting to come to the conclusion that I should migrate away from Google’s AdSense system in favor of a text link broker like Text Link Ads, or the equally creatively named Text Link Brokers (both terribly generic company names that serve as ultra-relevant anchor text anytime someone links to them).

So here’s the thing, it took me a whole year to get my first Google AdSense check. I look to be on track for another year of the same. Don’t get me wrong, I have no real complaints about the program. So why am I thinking of walking away with money left on the table?

Reasons Why Text Links Are Better Than AdSense

1. Google’s minimum for actually cutting you a check is higher than most other services, but until the money is in your bank account you haven’t actually earned anything yet.
2. With contextual ads you only get paid when someone clicks, while the simple act of publishing the text links is all it takes to earn money under the other model. And depending on the default level you set for editorial oversight, text link ads can run themselves as easily as the AdSense script.
3. While one could argue that visitors to the site might actually be interested in contextual ads and that text links, by comparison, are simply link spam –i.e., that I’d be doing my readers a disservice by switching to text ads — the truth is that I don’t think any regular readers of this blog are too interested in the cheesy contextual ads that get displayed alongside my posts currently.
4. Because text link ads don’t require anyone to actually click through, there’s less pressure to pimp out a site with ads in very prominent locations. (Google advises advertisers to pay attention to eye tracking and heat map studies to make decisions on where to place ads.)

   and finally…

5. Even if I only sold 1 link a month with Text-Link-Ads.com, I’d still be earning more money than I do with AdSense currently.

Whether you think text link ads are “black hat SEO” doesn’t really matter if you’re the publisher, not the advertiser. Even if there’s a possibility that the search engines start discounting your links by virtue of being lower quality, the only reason this should matter to you as a site owner is if the ability to pass PageRank is part of your sales proposition (which means, de facto, that you were already trying to pull one over on the algorithms).

If you’re a very large site, text link ads look pretty tacky, so I certainly don’t think revenue should be the only consideration when deciding between AdSense and paid links; but on the other hand, AdSense would detract from how seriously I would take a large, would-be authoritative site as well.

If you’re interested in selling ad space on your site as well, visit Text-Link-Ads.com.

I’ve been a little behind on my industry reading, so I’m just now noticing that I got tagged last week to participate in a meme that’s making it’s way around the Web. According to one participating post, it was started by Jeff Pulver. Basically it’s a game of blog tag, where a blogger writes 5 things about herself that her audience might not know and then gets 5 other bloggers to do the same.

I’m a pretty private person, so there are plenty of things you might not know about me unless you’re a close friend. And I tend to like it that way. However, it’s fun to play along and I’m sure I can come up with 5 innocuous, non-incriminating factoids.

1. I don’t vote. Now before you get all up in my grill, I have a decent excuse: I’m not a U.S. citizen. I’m a German citizen. As a permanent resident of the U.S., however, I don’t have to worry about work visas or anything like that. The only time it’d be an issue is if I’m looking for work that requires a security clearance or anything for the government. Luckily, pretty much by definition, anything someone is going to want optimized for search isn’t going to be classified info. As for working for the government, that just isn’t appealing to me anymore. Which brings us to #2.

2. Before I came out to DC, I wanted to be a policy wonk. I spent my formative years in the San Francisco Bay Area (a.k.a. Silicon Valley) and I moved to the East Coast to get away from all the engineers. Once in DC, I promptly realized I didn’t want to do policy work and found myself an employer who appreciated that I was conversant in techno-babble (this was before the death throes of the first Internet bust).

3. I prefer WETA’s new format. I’m one of very few people who admits to being happy WETA switched to the all-news format at the expense of classical music. Trust me, this is a big deal to the public radio listeners of the DC area. But sorry guys, WAMU just wasn’t cutting it. So while everyone else laments that WETA dropped classical music, I’m personally pleased to have a radio station that I can listen to any time of day without fear of running into Stained Glass Bluegrass music hour.

4. I once met Jeff Pulver. He was hitting on a colleague of mine. The year: 1998. The event: SUPERCOMM. The dancing: spazzy. Pulver organized one of the parties, but I didn’t realize until later that he was the oddball tearing back and forth in front of the stage with some cringe-inducing euro-dance moves.

5. I hate slugs. Abhor them. Irrationally so. Give me a (reasonably sized) spider or snake and I’m a-okay. But slugs? (shiver). Okay, now I’m really stretching to fill out the list. But there you have it: 5 things about Melanie.

Much like a good ol’ fashioned chain letter, the next step is to pass this on to five more people who each do the same. As for who is next… I haven’t seen any rules about this meme, so I’m going to ahead and tag Matt Cutts and Jeremy Zawodny, neither of whom I know and neither of whom read this blog. Also on the list: Jonathan Sousa, Nick Carter, and Jaimie Sirovich.

And I’m back from PubCon. It was nice being surrounded by other people who got this SEO thing, for a week at least. As I was cleaning out my week’s worth of messages, here are 3 of the new messages that popped up in my inbox this morning … no joke:

Boss man: “It’s a one page site - it can’t be that hard to SEO it can it?” (About a completely Flash-driven application.)

Usability guy: “Just wanted to give you a heads up that I’m submitting an IT request to append unique URL strings onto every link in the new content sections. The Analytics team wanted us to use different URLs that all go to the same page so we can track which link from within the site someone used to get there.”

IT guy: “Is there a difference between a 301 redirect and a 302 redirect? Is the distinction really that important for SEO?” (After a year of getting IT project requirements from me insisting on proper redirects from hundreds of duplicate pages and then following up those requests with: and these are 301s not 302s, right? Right? Right?!)

Aughhh. Please repeat after me: content is important, duplicate content is bad. I’ve been explaining this over and over for a year and a half. Think I should try to convince the search engines to change their algorithms, rather than keep writing IT requirements documents that apparently no one is reading? Hah!

Okay, I’m done ranting now. All better.

Haven’t updated in quite a while, but worry not, I have not abandoned this blog. In fact, tomorrow is the one-year mark for this blog. I made my inaugural posting on October 17, 2005. If I dropped out of the Blogosphere before then I couldn’t be part of whatever statistic Technorati puts out next about blog abandonment. And speaking of milestones - I’m oh so, so close to qualifying for my first Google AdSense check. How I’d love to have reached that goal by my 1-year anniversary. (Only $2.01 to go… but in no way am I encouraging you to click on ads, since that is clearly against the AdSense ToS. Right?)

Anyway, besides being on vacation last week, the other reason I’ve been updating less frequently recently is that I’ve been working on a side project. Check out Melanie Phung does product/commercial photography.

I’ve got a bunch of new but as-of-yet-unfinished posts in the hopper. I’ll try to get back in the habit of posting weekly… unless of course I get a flood of paying photo gigs

More about Flickr…
Today I was doing a vanity search and found a this on the fourth page:

I had just seen the Flickr Explore page and my name certainly wasn’t on it. So why would this page come up for a query on my name? Could it be? Did one of my photos make it onto the Explore homepage without my knowing it? Did Googlebot then crawl that page during that fleeting moment before the photo dropped back into obscurity? Yep, according to Google’s cache of the page.

Check it out yo — That’s my photo!

Which also explains the high number of “favorites” the photo got soon after I posted. A ton of people saw the photo highlighted, were predisposed to mark it as a favorite, which played into a self-reinforcing cycle. After the initial high ranking, however, the photo has been dropping down the Interestingness list, where it will soon hang out in obscurity like my other photos, alas.

A fun case study in how Flickr’s Interestingness algorithm works, though. Not to mention the serendipity of Google caching the version with my photo on it, and then my finding it in the SERPs before the cache got overwritten at the next crawl.

What a wonderful thing Google cache is.

Go to Google’s cache of the Explore homepage or directly to the photo — if you have any interest whatsoever in my little self-congratulatory indulgence, that is.

Google is testing a new version of Blogger. I’m going to switch over to the new platform. If everything goes to pot and things stop working… well, that’d be why.

More later…

Added: Okay, it’s later. That duplicate posting issue wasn’t a Blogger Beta bug; that was just me being impatient and hitting “Publish” twice because Blogger was being sooooo slow. Turns out I wasn’t allowed to switch to Blogger Beta yet. Another case of Google announcing something widely but limiting who can sign up. (Speaking of which, Google Analytics is now open to anyone sans invite).

All the Web’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely Players;
They have their Egos and Alteregos,
And 76 percent of Bloggers blog about Themselves…

According to the latest study released by The Pew Internet and American Life Project, titled Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers, 37% of bloggers say they are their own favorite subject. About 76% claim their personal experiences as a reason, if not the reason to blog (although many of them do so anonymously), summarizes WebProNews’s Jason Lee Miller.

Okay, so let’s get back on topic: me and my blog.

My Blog and My Name
This month I finally accomplished one of the goals of this blog — to push that embarrassing “I am a comment spammer” page off the first results page on searches for my name. It took 9 months, a blog, a Flickr account, a couple of profile pages, and some well-placed comments on or contributions to other sites. Obviously I could have done it faster, but I wanted to see how long it would take to happen “organically.”

Monetizing My Blog
I got my very first check for money I made off my blog. It’s a commission from LinkShare.com, whose ads I had placed on my site (in the previous “design”) to give me better insight into how people interact with advertising. LinkShare is also the program my company uses for affiliates, so I wanted to sign up and understand the user experience, see how the creative was presented, and so on. Didn’t sell anything for my company… well, actually… turns out I didn’t sell anything at all. I signed up for Netflix using one of the affiliate links, and got paid a commission for that. (Is that against the TOS? I think that’s fair; that’s not like PPC click fraud since I actually purchased something, right? If anyone at LinkShare disagrees, let me know and I’ll give you the nine bucks back.)

Shameless Self-Promotion
Keep leaving comments folks, and link to my blog, why dontcha. And if you don’t have anything better to do, check out some of my photography on Flickr.

I recently asked the g00gl3r at g00gl3r.com to add me to his (or her?) blogroll. And he/she agreed in exchange for a post where I link to him/her. A blogroll link for a single post? Oh yeah, baby, the g00gl3r must have been impressed with my PR5 homepage. [ed. Apparently it didn't come across that I was trying to be a little ironic. I think Toolbar PR is silly and is actually fairly meaningless.]

Okay, done. Now let’s see if my link gets added to another SEO blogroll. Now you’re probably asking, “Is that all it takes? Isn’t that too easy? Why don’t you just do that a few dozen times with a bunch of obscure blogs and then you’ll have hundreds if not thousands of inbound links?”

And that would be a very insightful question/comment on your part. The truth is that it wouldn’t be worth the work. Back in the bad old days before Google (and cohorts) got wise to link spam farms that was one of the first and easiest SEO strategies to address, but the data show that sheer number of IBLs is not as important anymore.

Quality, Not Quantity, of Links Counts
A recent case study by Fortune Interactive shows that the quality of inbound links, not quantity, is the most important factor in SEO.

In fact, the report says, “IBL Quantity is of least relative importance among the off-page factors across the board.”

WebProNews explains:

For Google, it’s not about how many people you know or how many people seem to like you. It’s about, mostly, who points to you and says “there’s a person worth visiting.” Fortune Interactive’s reverse engineering to decode how search algorithms work suggests that one weighty somebody is worth more than a multitude of nobodies. …

Though each engine weighted IBL quality differently, Fortune Interactive determined with its proprietary SEMLogic technology that what happens off the webpage is more important that what happens on the webpage. In fact, IBL reputation was more important than even IBL relevance.

The fact that link building is important in SEO efforts is hardly breaking news, but now that reputation counts über alles, there really is very little you can do cheaply and easily to manipulate your link juice significantly. The only sure-fire strategy: Write killer content and get important people to link to you. If you write killer content consistently then you might get added to a “worthwhile” blogroll. Or, even better, get slashdotted.

Nevermind the whole business of pitching your company’s press release to a blogger and crossing your fingers for a mention and an open dialogue about your story. A new service called Pay Per Post is starting an online marketplace to connect advertisers with bloggers looking to get paid for company-sponsored blog entries.

The pitch to advertisers is this: “Create buzz, build traffic, gain link backs for search engine ranking, syndicate content and much more. You provide the topic, our network of bloggers create the stories and post them on their individual blogs.”

Bloggers on the network will be able to go through “opportunities” like they might RFPs and pick what they are willing to do on their site. As a blogger, you then “create a post on your blog, paying attention to the Opportunity requirements the advertiser has set forth. Then submit the direct link back to us. Our team will review the content and either approve or deny the post.”

After Pay Per Post ensures the requirements have been met, money is taken out of the advertiser’s escrow account to pay the shill blogger for the posting.

As you can imagine, some people are outraged, especially since there does not appear to be any requirement for disclosing that these postings are in fact advertisements. The current issue of Business Week magazine even has a story called Polluting the Blogosphere which warns of a backlash.

Ted Murphy, Pay Per Post’s founder and the company’s blogger this weekend responded proudly: “I am meeting with a few different private equity groups next week to help blow this thing out. I am wondering if all this buzz and controversy is going to be a good thing or a bad thing. I guess the important thing to them is we are making money…”

Well, at least he’s being honest - let’s see if the paid bloggers will end up following his lead.