NYT Free RSS?
May 31, 2005
Some publishers want to use “free” to draw traffic. Free linking over the web remains a big item in content circles as more major media companies come to value unpaid traffic. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) named a “free content” editor to extend efforts to feed free news links to bloggers, and the new paid archive-and-more plan from the New York Times (NYT), called TimesSelect, may include an affiliate revenue plan to induce bloggers to keep driving traffic to NYT op-ed columnists. Meanwhile, the New York Post continues to suffer fallout from their botched registration implementation and they weren’t even trying to get people to pay; the Drudge Report has dropped standing links to a few Post columnist.
NYT Digital head Martin Niesenholtz recently revealed how important RSS has become to the company’s online efforts. He expects RSS feeds to drive ever-more traffic to nytimes.com. “Links from My Yahoo! feeds have grown from half a million to seven million pageviews. It’s the fastest-growing distribution channel that we have,” he said.
We babble on about RSS regularly with little movement from publishers, but when it’s free, easy, and the NYT says it’s their fastest-growing distribution channel, isn’t it time to give it some more thought?
Weblogs Inc. Hits $2,000 Per Day in AdSense
May 27, 2005
Weblogs Inc. has broken the $2,000 per day barrier in AdSense revenue, reports Jason Calacanis.
These guys definitely deserve a hat tip.
It was just April 7th when they broke the $1,000 per day barrier. Now, just a few short months later, they’ve doubled that.
Calacanis reports:
It took us just over seven months (from September 2004 to April 2005) to go from $0 to $1,000, and about six weeks to go from $1,000 to $2,000. The increase was based on traffic gains and adding Google Adsense for RSS. We’re also involved in one other unannounced Google Adsense program that makes our sites a little more targeted (I can’t go into details on it, but it’s not having a huge impact).
I had no idea Weblogs Inc. was so big. Apparently they have a 10 person full-time staff, and over 75+ bloggers, who post regularly (many times a day) to the Weblogs Inc. network.
Darren Rowse of problogger.net fame chimes in on the comments:
Can I suggest that if you put them in content that you’ll probably increase your earnings by significantly more than $200- $300 per day if you’re earning $2000 currently.
I still remember the night I did it and saw my earnings double.
Of course you might not see a doubling as you’ve already done other things I hadn’t done back in those days - but I’d hazard a guess that it’ll be more than a 10-15% increase.
As for things here at Niner Niner, well, let’s just say we haven’t broken the $1000 per day barrier. Heck, $1000 per month would be nice!
Chris Pirillo Goes Full-Text
May 27, 2005
I’ve been reading Chris Pirillo’s blog for a while now.
More recently, I finally grokked RSS and have been using Bloglines in a major way.
FeedDemon is great, but I browse the web on at least three computers. (Home Desktop, Laptop, & My Work PC)
Bloglines makes it easy to read your feeds from anywhere with ‘Net access. The only thing I dislike, though, is that it seems to have trouble remembering which items I’ve viewed on other machines. I’m not sure if this is by design. It doesn’t make sense to me… If I’ve already viewed entries on one PC, why show them as unread on another PC?
Now, where were we…
Scoble and a few others have been bitching lately about how Chris Pirillo’s RSS feeds weren’t full-text. His site is ad supported … so his RSS feeds were just brief summaries that linked to the full posts w/ embedded AdSense ads, etc.
Well, full-text RSS feeds are back over on Chris’ blog.
I think this is a smart move on his part… Sure, you want to monetize your site. But you also want to provide a great service to your users. When full-text becomes the norm, and you’re still doing summaries, it really makes them think, “is this really worth it, that I have to click-thru and all?”
There will be a day (it may not be that far off, either), when AdSense for RSS or some other means will provide a way to monetize full-text RSS feeds.
Until then, I think it’s just one of those things that you’ll have to do (provide full-text RSS, that is), just to keep up with the proverbial Joneses. That … and to keep guys like Scoble from bitching about your summary feeds.
The most popular things to buy online…
May 17, 2005
Affiliating with various on-line merchants is a good idea. Linking to specific, pre-chosen products is an even better idea. (e.g., If your blog is about dogs, and you’re an Amazon affiliate, link to a dog-grooming book now and then.) And maybe even better than chosing a product yourself is finding out what people most like to buy online and using that to guide your selection…
Computer related products (40%)
Books (20%)
Travel (16%)
Clothing (10%)
Recorded Music and Subscriptions (6%)
Gifts (4%)
Investment (4%)
I’ve seen this list all over the web, so I won’t credit a particular site, though everyone says it’s based on an Ernst and Young study. I also have no idea how old it is, so it could be outdated. But, to be honest, it looks about right to me, so I’ll trust it.
So back to dog grooming. Maybe instead of a dog-grooming book, link to a dog-related gadget (i.e., ever seen those devices that promise to “translate” barking into English?). Or maybe link to a nifty digital camera that can take great pooch pics. (Yeah, it’s a stretch to connect cameras to canines–but hey, people love their gadgets, so just give ‘em a reason…)
How to Make Your AdSense Ads More Relevant
May 7, 2005
I recently picked up a tip from genius blogger and Google employee Biz Stone’s recent book Who Let the Blogs Out? : A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs
Here’s the secret insider tip for putting AdSense Ads on your blog: don’t put them on your blog — put them on your post pages. See, the ads are content sensitive; that means they are relevant to the text of the page they cohabitate…if you set the ads up to display on your blog’s post pages — the individual archive page of each post — then they will learn the content on that page and serve up highly relevant advertising.
Such a simple bit of advice, but one that I’d overlooked. The whole point to AdSense is relevancy; you want those ads to grab your reader’s attention (along with the superb content you’re providing for your visitors, of course). So if you use a Blogger or WordPress-type of service to manage your weblog, be sure to dig around its support forums or FAQ list to find out how to keep those AdSense ads on your post pages.
