Caydel’s SEO Blog

LinkedIn has been generating a signifigant amount of buzz in the last few weeks. First, a lot of noise was made over the launch of the new LinkedIn Answers section, then Guy Kawasaki’s great ‘10 Ways to Use LinkedIn‘ post.

Where is the value of LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a network of over nine million professionals, with full profiles on them including their education, their industry, and their work histories. In short, LinkedIn has control over a staggering amount of data. This information is a goldmine for data mining purposes, market research, or any one of a thousand different uses.

But that is only the smallest part of the value of LinkedIn. The real value becomes apparent when you go to Account Settings > Advertising in your profile and read the following text:

LinkedIn is developing or has developed a method to serve ads based upon the content in your LinkedIn profile. Any time you are logged into LinkedIn, the ad code they are developing will likely read a cookie in your browser to gain the stored profile ID, then delve into your profile to pull out the information to serve ads.

Think of the value in this - they know your industry and your work experience. They could tune advertisements exactly to what you as a professional want and need to see. This technology could be worth potentially millions to the Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing programs. For all we know, LinkedIn is already licensing out this data to other companies for marketing purposes.

Before too long, we will likely see LinkedIn purchased by either Google or Yahoo! in order to get control of this data. It could potentially form a large part of the algorithm of either company when determining which ad to display on a site to a given end user.

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Roughly one month ago, on December 11, I signed up for Jim Kukral’s BlogKits service. Blogkits was designed and is marketed as a way to monetize blogs, aiming at taking over the advertising positions on blogs most often filled with Google Adsense or a similar PPC service.

The truth is that the vast majority of blogs don’t make more than pennies per day using Google Adsense. And here’s a little secret that even the “big” bloggers (the ones with tons of traffic) don’t want to tell you… Even they only use Google Adsense to supplement their blogs. They make a lot more money selling other ads because they have traffic.

It’s true, if you don’t have a ton of traffic like the vast majority of blogs, running Google Adsense is a waste of time. Take our challenge. Sign up and run BlogKits partner ads on your blog for 30-days in place of your Adsense ads. Then compare the earnings, and you decide which one is more worthwhile.

I was definately interested in giving it a shot, so I signed up and placed a BlogKits block on my blog, which is visible to the right, above my existing Adsense ads, as well as in a text link following the title of each post. Now, nearly a month has passed, and I have made my decision.

Before I comment on my earnings, I should mention that I cheated on the BlogKits challenge a bit - I did not remove my existing Adsense ads. I figured that the influence each ad service had on the other would be minimal; if people are interested in an ad, they will click it, regardless of what else is on the page.

For the time period from 11/12/2006 to 08/01/2007, BlogKits has taken 61 clicks, with a 0% conversion rate, and $0.00 earnings. For the same time period, Adsense has had 22 clicks, with $8.33 in revenue.

Now, I realize that the click volume to each is somewhat small; it may take more clicks before I see any conversions with BlogKits, and even a single conversion has the possibility to pass my Adsense revenue. Nevertheless, after just under 30 days, BlogKits has not performed for me!

I will leave BlogKits up for another month or two to collect more data, but so far I am not holding my breath! How has your experience with BlogKits been - has it worked well for you?

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Ever since my early days in the webmaster sphere, Shoemoney’s adsense check has been a motivation and an inspiration to me. Well, now I’ve had mine and become a successful webmaster myself, so I would like to provide a new image so that the next generation of marketers will have something to work towards:

Adbrite is perhaps not proving themselves to be the most efficient company by sending checks for that amount, but I can never say they didn’t pay me in a reasonable time. I only ran Adbrite for the last day of that pay period… Hopefully the next check is somewhat more impressive

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About a week and a half ago, I wrote a post ‘Adsense Should Allow Contextual Ad Filtering by Keyword‘. In it, I made the suggestion based upon an article posted by EGOL at SEOmoz that in order to prevent certain types of ads from showing, Google should allow us to set negative keywords for the Adsense ads on a site.

In the comments, Joost de Valk informed us that Google is indeed beta-testing such a program, and that he is actually part of the limited beta-test.

I know for a fact that Google is testing with negative keywords like that, since I have been testing it myself

I can’t tell to much, except that i was given the possibility to give a series of terms for which they broad matched and didn’t show ads. And no, no release date…

That is extremely encouraging - I can’t wait for this feature to be released to the general public. There are some categories of ads that I would *really* like to see banished from my site (such as the $0.07 CPM ads Google is running advertising Adwords and Adsense). I think that this toold could really help Google - I think the publishers know what is on their site better than Google does. It seems every day I see ads which are close to a good match, yet still manage to miss the point of the page entirely, and thus result in unsatisfactory, off-topic ads which probably don’t get the CTR they should.

Plus, this would be great for people who have definitions of ‘family friendly’ that are perhaps more stringent than those of Google. I don’t really want to see seduction tips and other crocks advertised on my site, regardless of what one or two keywords I may have that might trigger those ads.

What do you think?

EGOL recently made a post on the SEOmoz blog about one of the major shortcomings of Adsense: the lack of a feature to set negative keywords for the contextual ad matching. In short, EGOL is having a problem where many of the contextual ads showing on a few of his sites are not family friendly, leaving him with a poor image when people associate him with these ads.

EGOL’s issue is that while his sites are family friendly, some of his ads are not. Since most visitors do not understand the nature of contextual ads, they would have no choice but to consider him personally responsible for the smut ads Google is giving him. I also see a use for functionality such as this; most SEO types who would be visiting this blog probably aren’t to motivated to purchase ‘Get Rich Quick With Adsense’ ebooks and MFA templates. Knowing this, I could probably largely increase my Click Through Rate by eliminating these ads altogether.

Domain filtering can only go so far; I am sure that I could spend all day placing domains in the contextual ad filter, and I would never be able to remove all the Adwords and Adsense oriented ads showing up in the units to the right of this page. Yet it would be helpful if I could just set those as negative keywords in the Adsense control panel, and not have to worry about them.

What do you think? Would this be a useful feature? I am curious to hear from more people on this. Perhaps if enough people ask for it, we may see the Adsense team implement this type of functionality.

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It appears that Commission Junction has shut down my account do to a lack of activity in the last couple of months. Searching around, it seems that the only solution is to sign up again with a new email account, since they don’t seem to re-activate people’s accounts.

I am giving Shoemoney’s Ebay Ads script another shot on a few of my sites. I’ve used it in the past, but not with any really spectacular results. I guess it all depends on the niche, and your visitor demographics. Yesterday, I thought of a new site idea which could capitalize big on these ads. Unfortunately, to use it I need my Ebay publisher’s ID which I can only get through my Commission Junction account….

If you are curious what this script looks like, take a look at the sidebar on the right. Currently, it *should* be showing a Google T-Shirt up for auction, although occasionally, in a show of defiance for all logic, a 3 Stooges DVD collection seems to come up for my ‘google shirt’ query. In a day or two, I may change the query to try to find some ask.com swag, or something else cool.

I have a real great idea for a new site where the Ebay ads will do great - it is a niche of collectibles in which people will purchase dozens of this item used over eBay. And the niche is small enough that a single new site in it will immediately be noticed by the community.

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Here’s a tip for all the bloggers out there trying to monetize their blogs with Adsense:

When you are writing a blog post, write yourself a first draft. Work on it until you are happy with what it says, but don’t publish it yet. When you are done your first draft, open the . Copy the text of your drafted post into the keyword box, ensure that the ‘Use Synonyms’ box is checked, and hit ‘Get More Keywords’. Set the ‘Choose Data To Display:’ drop-down box to show ‘Cost and position estimates’, select USD from the currency box, and set a max CPC of $10.

Now click the column header which says ‘Estimated Avg. CPC’. This will sort all the CPC values for the keywords into descending order. What you will now have is a list of high-paying synonyms to a variety of the phrases within your article. Substitute the phrases you would like to use from the Adwords tool into your draft post as necessary.

You will find that a lot of the phrases that you used had higher paying variations compared to your original draft version, while still conveying the same information. If you do this consistently as part of your blogging habits, you will see your blog’s CPC and Adsense revenues as much as doubling.

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