Caydel’s SEO Blog

I’ve posted the ads I’ve noticed in the rotation so far - if you see some I have missed, let me know, and I will update this post with the new photos.

If I were Linux.com, I would be starting to think about removing the DoubleClick ads, and perhaps begin direct selling advertisements to companies that provide enterprise consulting and support in Linux. One of the main misconceptions about Linux is there is a lack of support available to corporate customers were they to make the switch. Providing advertisement to companies offering these services would immediately go some ways to alleviating these concerns. Additionally, Microsoft’s FUD campaign would have one less outlet.

On another note, this reminds me of the time when OpenOffice.org plastered Redmond transit routes frequented by Microsoft employees with ads promoting the OpenOffice.org software.

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Back in January, I wrote a piece on whether the newly-popular Blogkits blog ad network lived up to their claims of outearning Adsense on blogs. My feeling at the time was that they did not even come close, but I was willing to give them more time to prove themselves.

Nearly five months have passed since I wrote the original piece on Blogkits; by now, Blogkits has been on my blog for nearly six months. Before someone points this out in my comments, I must admit that I did cheat on the blogkits challenge a bit; rather than removing Adsense and completely replacing it with Blogkits, I ran both ad networks side-by-side.

So, what are the results?

Blogkits
Impressions: 50,716
Clicks: 286
Leads: 0
Payout: $0.00

Adsense
Impressions: 22,340
Earnings: $39.64

Within the six-month time period, Blogkits has not earned me a dime, despite nearly 300 clicks. This indicates horrible conversions on their part. Meanwhile Adsense was been quietly accumulating the whole time.

Of course, we should not forget that a single sale on Blogkits has the potential to generate more earnings than Adsense; it could just be a string of poor luck that I have no conversions yet. On the other hand, I think enough time has passed to show that Blogkits is not a particularily effective blog monetization solution.

One interesting point is the fact that Blogkits reports twice as many impressions as adsense for the same time period; neither ad network correlates well with the pageview statistics shown by my analytics / stat programs.

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Do you ever hear of a new marketing idea and think to yourself, ‘Man - wish I had thought of that!’?

William Cross, who many of you may know from SeoFox, sent me a press release concerning the launch of his new company, Gadget Spark. Gadget Spark is the first company out the door to market custom Gadgets for the Windows Vista Sidebar.

According to Microsoft,

Gadgets are mini applications with a variety of possible uses. They can connect to web services to deliver business data, weather information, news updates, traffic maps, Internet radio streams, and even slide shows of online photo albums. Gadgets can also integrate with other programs to provide streamlined interaction. For example, a gadget can give you an at-a-glance view of all your online instant messaging contacts, the day view from your calendar, or an easy way to control your media player. Gadgets can also have any number of dedicated purposes. They can be calculators, games, sticky notes, and more.

In the first year alone, Microsoft intends to sell 80-120 MILLION copies of Windows Vista, each with the Vista Sidebar enabled by default. With this sidebar being constantly on the desktop of every Vista user, it is quickly apparent that this will become hot property for marketers.

According to the press release, Gadget Spark envisions three main marketing utilizations of the Sidebar Gadgets (extracted directly from press release):

• Blogging and social networks - People can add gadgets to their own space on a social network such as MySpace and FaceBook. It only requires one person to add it to their space for your personal space to become virally popular.
• Branding - Companies can have their brand or logo displayed on literally millions of computer desktops over the next couple of few years. One click in their Windows Vista side bar takes them to your Websites products or services.
• Affiliate Marketers - can create a mini-application such as a specialized clock, custom calculator, search tool, or anything else that has relevance to the sponsor the marketer is promoting. Gadget Spark can make a gadget that does it and at the same time use affiliate codes to make sure the marketer gets credit for any sales made from the gadget.

Gadget Spark is launching with 15 example gadgets available to the public free of charge, and will develop custom gadgets to fit your needs or marketing purposes for $599.

Care to Give an Example?

William gave a good example of the power of Gadget. Recently he created SEM Tutor, which gives daily marketing tips and tricks. Along with this site, he created a ‘Marketing Tutor‘ gadget which grabs the RSS feed from SEM Tutor, and displays the latest item, in effect presenting a new marketing tip every day via the gadget bar.

Despite having done no promotion of the site so far, William has managed to acquire 500 RSS feed subscribers as reported by Feedburner through the release of the Marketing Tutor gadget. For marketers, this is like acquiring an instant 500 person mailing list - one doesn’t have to think far to see the value in that.

What Makes the Idea So Good?

Now that you have a good idea of Gadget Spark’s business model, and have seen an example of a successful Gadet, I want to do some number crunching for a second to put the final touches on what I think may be the Best Marketing Idea of the Year:

Despite the fact that Vista is only relativly newly launched, by visiting the Microsoft Gadgets website and Windows Live Gallery, you can see that some of the top gadgets have already recieved over a quarter million downloads.

If we look at the numbers for the Gadgets already created by Gadget Spark and posted to the Live Gallery, we can see that even though most have only been online for 4-5 days, many have been downloaded and installed 1500-2000 times.

Assuming Microsoft only sells 80 million copies of Vista in the first year, that will still be many, many times the number of copies that are currently in circulation. If Gadgets maintain the popularity that they currently appear to have, they have the potential be downloaded by hundreds of millions of people. Due to Microsoft’s slow release cycle, any gadgets you create are likely to keep working for you for many years to come.

Roll this all together, and it is quickly apparent what a hot property Gadgets are. By being the first to offer development services in this niche, Gadget Spark should more or less be able to grab the lion’s share of the market. That’s why I think this is will be a strong contender for the Best Marketing Idea of the Year!

P.S. You can to read about the conception of Gadget Spark in William’s own words at SeoFox’s SEM News blog!

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A friend of mine recently let me into an early beta of MFABlocker, a new service he is developing.

The Problem of Low Paying Clicks

Any webmaster or publisher who employs Adsense or any other form of PPC advertisements in order to monetize his sites has no doubt been frustrated from time to time with the miniscule revenues some clicks often generate.

The problem lies in the fact that much of the inventory advertising in Adsense is composed of MFA (Made For Ads) pages, which are often nothing more than pages full of ads. The people who run these sites will often bid very low on a large number of keywords in the hopes that people who click to their pages will click on higher paying ads. This is the concept of ad arbitrage.

While many consider this a legitimate form of business, there is no doubt that the practice warrants lower advertising revenues for the average webmaster.

MFABlocker - the Solution

Enter MFABlocker - a great tool to fight low paying clicks!

MFABlocker takes a list of your sites along with an Adsense publisher ID in order to determine which advertisers are showing ads on your sites. They then follow these ads, and analyze the resulting pages in order to determine whether they share any of the characteristics of MFA pages. If they do, they are added to a blacklist which you can then add into the Adsense competitive ad filter.

The Results?

So how well does it work? In the past week that I have been using this tool, I have seen my Adsense revenues jump by 25-30%. This is a welcome jump, although I admit that it may just be regular flux considering I have only been using it for a week. But there’s something, at any rate.

The Future

MFABlocker is still in early beta, but it is already showing some promise. The interface is quite rudimentary, and there is no help section yet. However, the service is developing rapidly. In the two weeks or so that I have been in the beta, I have been seeing major feature updates daily.

Keep an eye on this - it will be a great service!

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I just came across this over at Jason Bartholme’s blog - he built his own clickbot out of a Lego Mindstorms kit.

It gave me a good laugh, anyways…

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Perhaps you’ve already seen it, but Michael Gray (Graywolf) about ‘MFA’-style pages he found while clicking around in his GMail.

I checked in my own account, found the pages in question, and found that there was more to this than Graywolf mentioned. At the top of the page, they have a 4X3 or 3X4 ‘Sponsored Links’ section containing Adsense ads, fairly well targetted to the subject you clicked on.

Below the Adsense-type ads, they have a list of 4-7 ‘Related Pages’ which point to news articles relating to the topic you clicked on. The ad copy is the headline of a news story, with the text containing the first sentence or so of the story itself.

Of course, these ‘Related Pages’ are also ads. For instance:

Layton hopes to mobilize Cdns against ATM fees; says banks don’t …
Canada.com - 8 hours ago
TORONTO (CP) - New Democrat leader Jack Layton is launching a ..

has a URL pointing to: (broken into 3 lines to solve formatting issues)

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/pageclick?client=ca-gmail&type=1&
redir_url=http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html
%3Fid%3Dd7e600a2-5817-48cf-a902-015cb247c737%26k%3D49477

What program do these news companies use to get these ads? Is this a custom offering by Google where news sources can automatically attach keywords to their stories to trigger links in the ‘Related Pages Section’? How are these paid? Or has this been in existence for a long time already, and I just don’t know about it?

I wouldn’t mind learning more about this. For regularily updated news-type sites, this could be a great way to get relevant, interested readers, better than even ‘normal’ Adwords advertising. Please, comment if you have seen these before!

Kevin from Adbrite just let me into Adbrite’s new video ad program. The ads are currently running on a CPC basis. This will be a very nice feature. Users who view the video will be able to embed it in their own site, or send to friends, and you collect the revenue for all embedded copies as well.

If a video were to go viral and make it’s way around the internet, you could potentially be collecting revenue on thousands or even millions of views.

Above *should* be my first attempt at using the system. This is a video of Jesse Cook playing ‘Rattle and Burn’ in Montral at Jazzfest 2006 from his latest DVD. He is one of my favourite artists - I had the pleasure to see him play in Dec. 2004 and he was simple amazing!

Note: To get this code working, I had to modify the Adbrite code a bit - remove the noscript tags and anclose it in a div. But - it’s working now!

Update: It appears that clicking on an ad in the video causes a popup. This popup is blocked by default for Firefox, so I doubt we see the revenue for it…. Hope they find a way around this.

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