• “Hallo?”
• “I’m Larry. I didn’t succeed in updating it.”

Those were the words he never wanted to hear.

• “Pardon, can you repeat please? I think I didn’t understand……”
• “You understood properly, Sergey. There’s no new post. It wasn’t updated.”
• “Are you sure about that? Did you run all controls?”
• “Otherwise I wouldn’t have called you. I know you are puzzled, but that’s the sad truth: he didn’t update the blog”

It was a long time that something so mysterious didn’t happen in Mountain View, and now it was important to take a decision at once:

• “What will we do then?”
• “You well know the procedure in these cases.”
• “Yes, but….maybe he was just too busy or he had an accident….”
• “It’s useless now to search for some excuses: the blog hasn’t been updated and we have to follow the procedure.”
• “OK Larry. Give advice to the Game Over department. Cut all pages, wipe them out from SERP. Close his AdSense account, kidnap his wife, steal his car and………..”

At this moment usually you suddenly wake up, in a cold sweat, while your mind takes its time to get in touch with the reality, and then you understand you were just dreaming, luckily….it was only a bad dream…….

Photo Credit: cybernesco

Come on, who is not victim of this fear? A fear that, with years, has taken place of the past and common nightmare of the missing high school license exam for an alarm-clock that didn’t go off. That’s a true nightmare for any blogger: what happens if I am not regular in updating my blog?

A part from any sort of blogger or information overload mania, what will really happen in case we stop up-dating our site? Which are the risks we run?

Here my personal experience when I stopped updating it for 2 months.

In the last two years, the italian version of Ikaro has been updated on average every week with 3 new articles, up to 23 June, 2007. From that day on up to 3 September 2007 I nearly abandoned it.

Let’s try now, examining all access statistics, if bloggers fears can be real or not.

2006 and 2007 access comparison

From Google Analytics I get all accesses trend referring to the period 23 June 06 – 03 September 2007: it is compared to the same period of time in 2007. We should notice that in 2006, my blog was updated quite regularly, while, in 2007 in was abandoned.

I must specify that it is much better to consider just its trend and not its absolute values, as one year of difference means more articles, more contacts, more links. In other words: more traffic. As much as about the trend, it is easy to find a sort of similarity up to the end of August, and after that period there is in 2007 a sudden and astonishing jump: that is to say after 2 months the blog was abandoned!

But this jump could be the result of off site elements, for example a sudden popularity of an article thanks to a keyword related to a subject ran on tv or on a newspaper. In other words, we still have few data to state that my site didn’t really suffer from 2 not updated months. Therefore, let’s extract the traffic and let’s do the same graphic for:

• Direct access
• Engine access

Direct access traffic comparison

Engine access traffic comparison

It seems to be quite clear that this raise was determined by traffic coming from all search engines, the one that we supposed to be the most suffering from such a long time blog inactivity.

Engine traffic analysis

Why do engines had such a raise in visits after 2 months inactivity? If we are so stubborn to refuse that updating frequently our blog is not that much important, not even a risk of being penalized from engines, we should think as well that the cause of such a raise is maybe an important keyword, which appeared in 2007, but was absent in 2006. But it isn’t so. Top keys are always the same ones, but in 2007 they were much more incisive in all serp. Here you have:

1. coolstreaming   +95%
2. voipstunt           +196%
3. pplive                   +33%
4. tv internet          +905%
5. software free    +100%

Conclusions

My conclusion is a simple one: all blogger mania of updating constantly one’s own web site with thousands of information, sometimes not interesting, is really useless. You can live your life quietly even if you don’t update your site so frequently as you think you should (a part in those cases in which such a frequency is an editorial choice, of course).

I realize that many SEO and marketers will disagree my statements but, on my turn, I disagree such a maniac and empiric way (supported by too many numbers, operations and formulas), stealing web marketing of its nature. Sometimes it is much better to stop calculating, forecasting or thinking to be some sort of scientists, in order to make a stop, relax and observe silently all situations in their developing.

If you want to begin in a simple way not necessarily creating original content, here’s how to create the basis of a successful blog.

Keep in mind that: selection and aggregation of relevant content might be valuable as the original content creation.

Image Credit: luchschen

Start a blog on WordPress

The blog’s platform is important because it allows connection automatization on blogs you link on your posts and vice-versa (trackback).

The dilemma always lies between choosing WordPress or Movable Type, but if the choice for a platform consists on generating the higher traffic in less time, so you must start a blog on WordPress for a simple reason: it’s the one more frequently used and it offers a high level of customizing due to the several plugins and templates for every demand.

Select a few but relevant sources

Almost every blogger don’t generate self content, they limit to comment / translate / reelaborate the same news coming from the same sources (a.k.a. background noise, 1% rule, etc). It’s important to get them directly from the original sources skipping intermediaries.

Here there are 5 websites that constitute a good source pack on new medias, web 2.0, etc:

• Mashable
  News and articles on web 2.0 and social media
• Lifeshacker
  Great source on useful programs and advice on PC
• ProBlogger
  Specific advice on how to improve the quality of your blog and monetize traffic
• TechCrunch
  The best site to get in touch with start-ups news and new media backstage and rumors. News frequently travel as rumors by TechCrunch much before they get to public acknowledgement…
• KillerStartups
  It’s a social media specific for web applications and start-ups. Every new web-based service come by and users love blogs that post on new services on the web

If you post on other topics, you should obviously find relevant sources of your interest.

Metabolize the process of acquiring fresh news

To check and to evaluate new posts from several sources should constitute a very simple process since it may cause a great stress due to the information overload.

It should be as simple as opening the browser. And that’s exactly what you should do:

• create a homepage on iGoogle
  If you have a Google account of any kind, you can customize your homepage adding lots of content, including the RSS feed sources previously mentioned.

• use your iGoogle page as the initial page on your browser
  Evey time you open your browser you’ll instantaneously get the most recent news from the web
  

Select and publish the most interesting posts

Choose one piece of news a day from your sources and publish it to your blog.

1. Summarize the original article translating it from English
2. Add your notes and opinions
3. Always mention and link the source without hesitation
4. Always insert a related image to it

Another good idea is to insert links to other articles to get a better idea on the topic (in your blog or to an external link). That procedure generates incoming links due to automatic trackbacks and it offers a useful service to your readers.

Share only your best posts on social media

There are lots of social media that allow content sharing and getting traffic. Don’t go over the top and use one strategy that allows better results with less effort. Use SocialPoster to spread your post across social networks and OnlyWire to share your pages into the most popular social bookmarking websites.

Hint: do not post all your content indiscriminately. Share only the most interesting posts even the ones not written by you. This little strategy will help you gain reliability and get the attention of other users.

Resist to teasing

There comes a time when someone will tease you by saying all you can do is copy and paste articles and that your blog is a clone of this or that website: don’t bother!

To filter, to select with criteria and to suggest again the news published every day has become a procedure almost as important as generating original content.

If there was no one to do so, think of the amount of original news that would get lost in a global ocean of information without reaching the ones they were written to.

Some of the most popular and followed blogs do exactly as mentioned above. No doubt they do it in a structured and organized way, but what they do essentially is to gather, to select and to indicate news.

Watch, evaluate and evolve!

You’ll gradually learn how to understand what your readers search for and get to know their inclinations in a better way.

You’ll learn how to direct your researches, to select other sources, to focus, to create original news and to generate new kinds of content (audio, video, etc.).

You’ll also feel the need for tuning the instruments and to begin using more complete and efficient RSS add-ons. You’ll find more specific social media and learn how to use the ones you already work with in a better way.

We wish you good work. And remember: the ingredients for a recipe are only a part of the dish: it’s up to the cook to turn them into something good with dedication and passion.

Searching for good templates is hard once you come across the huge amount of layouts available, therefore the choice on selecting and sharing the best websites that offer templates for all demands: professional, amateur, free and paid ones.

Freshy 2 Theme

A free but high-leveled template, developed by Julien De Luca. The Customize plugin allows a degree of customization almost limit free with the control panel. Here are its main features:

• WP 2.6 compatible (in opposition to the previous version)
• 17 languages automatically configured through the visitor’s user agent
• Lots of sub themes
• Gravatar compatible
• Fixed and fluid width
• XHTML compatible
• Open source

and much more.

Recommended due to the high level of customization which allows it to be unique when compared to other blogs that have adopted it.

DiploD

Davide Del Monte is the author behind the old layout for Geekissimo and he develops templates for WordPress and Joomla for free under Creative Commons license.

Check it out:

• Nerino 2.0
  A nice and professional template for WP. Widget ready, Adsense ready, gravatar compatible and highly customizable.

• Geekissimo
  The foundation of this old template, very popular in Italy, available for download.

• Web TV
  If you have an online TV website or a web TV, check this great ready to use template.

TemplatePanic

Layout files of all kinds. If you’re patient enough to dig through all the pages, you might find great templates, both minimalist and extravagant and joyful. iPhone Blog Theme is a recommended choice. Here are its main features:

• XHTML and CSS compatible
• Widget ready
• Automatic management of related articles

Great for blogs geek on gadgets.

Web 2.0 Themes

Six templates for WordPress, five of them free and one paid. A strict Web 2.0 style. Check the top 3:

• Magazine theme (US$100)
• Sodelicious 2 (free and great)
• Socute (free)

Check and download the others here.

Recommended for blogs Web 2.0 style.

Woo Themes

If you’re looking for a WordPress theme for a blog focused on content and articles, this is the right place.

That’s where the new Ikaro Brasil layout was chosen from. There are approximately 15 templates, all paid, the mono user license costs US$70. The quality of the templates is excellent, ideal for quality upgrade for blogs with relevant content.

Some cool stuff for templates customization:

• Banners management 125×125 integrated
• Video file and integration due to Tubepress
• Management of files in evidence
• Feedburner and feed subscription integration via automated e-mail
• Google Analytics integrated management

These are the two favorite WooThemes templates: The Gazzette Edition, Fresh News Theme.

Recommended for highlighting relevant content.

Top WP Themes

130 free templates for WordPress, among the usual ones you can find some in great
quality. Ideal for blogs with no clear graphic definition: lots of templates from the most basic minimalism to super colored 2.0 extreme.

Great navigation system: it allows template filter based on the features you want, such as number of columns, widget management, fixed or fluid width, etc… (the illustration template is Zinmag Redux).

Recommended for bloggers not defined between milimalist or psychoedelic.

Revolution WordPress Theme

Professional paid templates, ideal for magazines, online newspapers or simply good content blogs. Ten themes for 2.6 WordPress compatible. License for only one website is around US$80.

Have fun and remember: WordPress 2.6 X version may occasionate some image aligning problems in some templates developed for previous versions. Here’s how to work it out.

The Javascript code that embed the widget into your web pages is just made of fews characters, although it is not the widget itself but it just specify where and how to download it. You don’t know how much Kb the browser needs to download in order to display your last twit, or the most recent MyblogLog readers. In this way, the load time of your pages can increase without control.

Here’s a list that shows how much your web pages are charged by the most common widgets around:

1. MyBlogLog: +64 Kb
2. AdSense Ads: +22 Kb
3. Google Analytics: +22 Kb
4. Disqus: +17 Kb
5. Criteo Autoroll: +17 Kb
6. Woopra tracker : +6Kb
7. Quintura cloud generator: +380 Kb
8. Technorati Rank: +27 Kb
9. LLOOGG Tracker: +2 Kb
10. coComment: +8 Kb
11. DIGG button: +17 Kb

As noticed before, once you have installed three or four widgets into your blog platform your web pages have become more heavy without a warning, and the load time of your pages increase. Here’s the pager size of some italian blogs:

• Ikaro: 177 Kb
• Daniele Salamina : 79 Kb
• MasterNewMedia: 120 Kb
• Psiche e Soma: 52 Kb
• Sw4an: 204 Kb
• Downloadblog: 95 Kb
• Geekissimo: 136 Kb
  
• Catepol: 337 Kb

As you can see, widgets are useful but they charge the browsers with additional data  that can make the site really unaccessible for slow internet connections, and create some serious problems with search engines ranking.

The best you can do is to choose only widgets that can bring some benefit to your blog and compress your web pages by using the mod_deflate or the php. That kind of caution can reduce the size down up to 70% and increase page loading speed.

A great tool to analyze the size of each element in a page (including widgets and adds-on) is the Web Developer Tools for Firefox. Once you have visualized the webpage, open Tools>Web>Developer>Information>View document size.

[Photo Credit: SasPartout]

Permalink means permanent connection to a content. This simple concept hides one of the strength points of any blog: information longevity, that is to say the period of time a information keep on being relevant and updated.

Everlasting blogs, a longevous blog

How much time net surfers will search for informations related to the argument of your post? The answer gives you an idea of your post longevity. Bloggers are ever and ever eager to post news in preview in order to catch any possible visitor. But they will have a very limited contents longevity, as they will run researches only for a short period of time.

As much a blog information longevity level is high, so much the effort to keep its level so is low.

Examples

Let’s consider some Ikaro posts.

Here you have an example of scarce longevity posts:

• Venice, internet free TV by Skype and KaZa (italian)
• It was written when Skype creators diffused news about P2P TV. It has such a short longevity because:
  1. In the meanwhile its name changed (now it is Joost)
  2. It doesn’t give any additional information about the product (it hasn’t come out yet)

In few words, this post won’t be interesting in a short while.

Reviews about programs, products and online services are always good contacts sources as names will always be research object and other blogs references. In my opinion some really everlasting contents should be a blog base. Current and up-to-date subjects, are always object of interest and research.

So, subject widening or press agencies?

As usual, the best solution should be middle way. Think about our blog as if it was a castle, as we need a solid structure – that is to say a good quantity of everlasting information – where we can put capitals, windows, lapis lazuli. In other words whatever decoration we like, easy and simple.

Photo Credit
Time: McKenna P

What follows here are not real rules but just few simple considerations as a result of a long lasting experience and publications of several articles on the subject.

Now I want to share my knowledge with you:

1. No news is too old

The fancy we have in longing for posting original news is the main stress cause for blog abandon. In reality no article and no news is too old for any blog, as netsurfers are many, with different experiences, cultures, interests. So, those news we consider old and not interesting, could be otherwise very interesting for many readers of that blog. Imagine 10 million people that daily look for news and information. If we consider an information useless, it can be instead very interesting for at least 10% of those visitors. This means that you can have 1 million readers easily, on a “ready” subject.

Practically speaking, one of Ikaro most commonly read article is one written in August 2005: “ADSL without telephone”. For me, and particularly for wired people, we are speaking about a sort of prehistorical subject, as we are currently dealing with subjects as Wi-max, hdspa  and advanced technologies. However, I realize that the reality is a different one as many people don’t know yet of the possibility of an internet line without a fixed line. And many are those still searching for this kind of information on the net.

Then, think of the quantity of readers you can lose whenever you leave out some not-interesting or too old (in your opinion) subjects. Again, think of how many posts you could write and the number of potential visitors you could get without searching on Digg or on thousands of feeds at the same time.

2. Don’t confuse duplicate contents with similar subjects

Another problem comes from the will of speaking about software or any other particular service not already discussed in other blogs.

Writing posts about a product already met doesn’t mean creating a duplicate content. You can write about it using your own words and experience, whatever subject it is: Voip, HTML editor, a Web 2.0 service or any other.

I usually don’t look for reviews about services or products, instead I prefer to share other users’ personal experiences about those products, as they are more reliable for a real idea on quality levels. Sharing our own experiences, even if they are similar one to the other, will certainly give an added value to the subject, maybe absent in other articles.

How many software do you have on your PC? How many Social Networking portals do you use to share your information? Which programs? Here you have an idea of some subjects you can deal with for six months at least.

3. A blog must be updated once a day? False!

Of course that would be perfect. However, it will be possible only one day when we maybe could work on it full time. But writing a post daily or three times a week doesn’t make any difference for readers or search engines. Our need of letting our site appear better than others isn’t satisfied by the updating frequency but by the information quality.

The striking thing is that the boom this site had coincided to 8/10 days periods inactivity.

4. Schedule posts

I don’t know if you agree with me, but my love for writing is determinant for an article good quality. Our enthusiasm transmits energy to the post and this is felt by most of readers. So the main rule is: don’t write if you are not in the mood.

Recently I started writing two or three articles one after the other with scheduled dates so that they are published in fixed days. This allows me to write only whenever I want to and then I am trouble-free about this.

5. Don’t care about Trolls

If we compare Internet to Tolkien’s Midway Land and bloggers, hackers, sem (and more) to the different beings living on it, Trolls would be the most dull, annoying and useless beings of this fairy world.

A Troll is the one that comments, provokes and irritates other users for the idle pleasure of doing it. Recently Trolls are slightly changing their bahaviour, as they constantly have the compulsive need of clicking on “no” in any news that are posted on Social News portals.

It doesn’t exist a particular reason for this behaviour –maybe they even don’t know why – but if in the net someone provokes and offends you for your contents or comments, you should imagine him as if he was clammy, quite ugly and pimply, playing hide-and-seek behind his monitor while his mother is preparing the soup for him. And suddenly you will lose the wish to reply him. Your reactions are his food: DON’T feed him!

A Troll ignored for a long time will definitely disappear for spontaneous combustion.

[Photo Credit: Charles Thompson]

The mechanism is straightforward: blogs that accept “replies” to their post from external posts as well, provide a unique identifier to each post called trackback URL.

When a user posts in reply or with regard to news read somewhere else, he/she will do it including in the post the trackback URL of the news in question.

Therefore, interventions on two blogs will be reciprocally linked: on one of them will appear the trackback URL (something like “ I am talking about the article read here”) while on the other one the reply notice ( like “hey, someone replied from this address”) Track back procedure consists then in two steps:

1. A blog “calling” and notifying a comment. The call is a “Ping”.
2. A blog replying to the call and reporting whether the comment was noticed or not.

A large number of platforms have trackback management integrated as a default, but in the net there are many informative systems developed ad hoc (such as Ikaro.net). For those systems trackback management has to be developed manually. The features which can be implemented in a custom self publishing system are two. System can be enabled to:

• Accept replies from external blogs (receiving pings)
• Reply to external blogs (sending pings)

Trackback URL

Let‘s see for the moment to put our blog in listening, in order to detect if somewhere in the net news or articles appeared on our site are being referred to. Let’s then manage ping requests. Technically, a ping is a call to a script with a post method, through which both POST and GET variables are sent. This script will be the trackback URL. The script data flow is the following:

1. Reception of ping and data sent with POST mode.
2. Data check, if incorrect sends negative response in XML format and quits.
3. If correct, processes data. If processing does not succeed, sends negative response in XML format and quits.
4. Sends positive response in XML format.

Data specifics

Let us examine the parameters sent by the pings managed in the script:

• GET method 1.Unique post ID the caller is replying to -required
• POST method 1. url > unique URL containing reply to post – required 2. blog_name > name of external blog – optional 3. title > reply title – optional 4. excerpt > reply text – optional

Reply specifics

Responses to pings, both positive and negative, have to be sent in XML format. So the script has to send the proper header (“Content-Type: text/xml”) before any other source output. Positive response:

< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
< response>
< error>0< /error>
< /response>

Negative response

< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
< response>
< error>1< /error>
< message>Error message< /message>
< /response>

As with parameters specs, the only two required variables are the ID sent with Get method and the field URL identifying the calling post.

Model frame

Here an efficient script frame a bit extended:

1. Validity check of HTTP_GET_VARS['id'] and HTTP_POST_VARS['url'] fields.
2. If they are not valid, a negative response in XML format ( see above) is sent.
3. If they are valid, the reply stored in POST blog_name, title, excerpt variables is saved and connected to the proper post through HTTP_GET_VARS['id']
4. If the save procedure does not succeed, a negative response in XML format is sent.
5. If the save procedure succeeds, a positive response in XML format is eventually sent

Step 3 is strictly linked to the way the informative system manages data. If information is stored on a database, it will be necessary to insert data in the response table specifying as key the reference post ID sent with Get method. If instead responses are managed on XML or ASCII text files, they will have to be stored according to the specs of the system in use.

Trackback URL

Once the script has been developed and stored, this will be used to provide the trackback URL of any post of your blog. Let us suppose the script has http://your.blog.it/cgi/trackback.cgi as an URL, the URL to supply to your visitors for the article whose id is 452, would be for instance http://your.blog.it/cgi/trackback.cgi?id=452

Frame of source code to modify

Here follows the screenshot of a php source code frame you can customize according to your needs..

< ?php
function send_error($msg) {
header (“Content-type: text/xml”);
print “n”;
print “< response>< error>1< /error>< message>$msg< /message>< /response>”;
exit;
}
if (!$HTTP_GET_VARS['id']) {send_error(“TrackBack ID missing”);}

if (!$HTTP_POST_VARS['url']) {send_error(“URL missing”); }

if (!$HTTP_POST_VARS['title']) {send_error(“Title missing”);}

if (!$HTTP_POST_VARS['excerpt']) {send_error(“Body missing”);}

if (!$HTTP_POST_VARS['blog_name']) {send_error(“Blog name missing”);}

// SAVE DATA INTO YOUR COMMENT SECTION HERE

header (“Content-type: text/xml”);
print “n”;
print “< response>< error>0< /error>< /response>“;
exit; ?>

Actually I was positively impressed by the automation level Feedburner offers with regard to operations usually made by hand such as signaling updates to pinging services, tools to subscribe to feeds with different kinds of aggregators through the web site, feed circulation monitoring and much more.

The only drawback (if I may say so) is the great number of options and features which might make the tool distractive to non–experts. I will highlight the main features as clearly as possible, granted that, in order to use Feedburner, it is necessary to have one’s own contents at disposal in a RSS feed. Here follows the scheme to integrate Feedburner with your feed

1. Insert you feed in FeedBurner
2. Feedburner uses your feed as a source and generates a new one with its own address (http://www.feedburner/feed_name)
3. All the operations are executed on the generated feed, which will be the new official feed (yours stands as data source). Once it has absorbed your feed to generate its own, you can work on it with the powerful tools at disposal.

Feedburner automates following procedures:

• Subscriptions to the feed via web with various aggregators
• Content updates signaling to pinging services
• Technical compliance of feed to the greatest possible number of aggregators
• Monitoring of bot controls to the feed (engines check to verify any upgrade)

Subscription

Subscription to the service is easy and immediate. You just need to insert the first feed in addition to username, password and e-mail address in order to be operative. In the following form, you’ll find the main interface containing all the features grouped under five labels:
A. Analyze | monitoring on contents diffusion
B. Optimize | various technical settings of your feed
C. Publicize | feed diffusion automation through various tools
D. Monetize | feed integration with AdSense for Feed and Amazon
E. Troubleshootize | support Let’s examine the different tools in utilization order, namely, after inserting the feed, let us follow these steps;

Optimize

The items ‘Your feed’ and ‘XML source’ are used to personalize the source code which generates your feed’s page on Feedburner, whose URL is http://www.feedburner/. Then we find:

1. BrowserFriendly sets graphical themes of the page and custom information as title and description.
2. SmartCast automatically generates a feed podcast, compliant with iTunes
3. SmartFeed transforms your feed in a format compliant with most widespread aggregators
4. FeedFlare integrates in each post a few tools users can interact with, such as Technorati, del.icio.us and other ones.
5. Link Splicer should you have a service for social book-marking, you can insert your links in the feed
6. Photo Splicer the same for pictures
7. Geotag Your Feed input latitude and longitude and you’ll have your feed associated to a point in the globe.
8. Feed Image Burner sets an icon for feeds which is then displayed in various RSS readers.
9. Convert Format Burner here you set your feed page content-type. As default it is the same of your source feed
10. Summary Burner You can also customize your Feedburner page with links to your site

Once set the main options, we can go on to the setting of automatic feed distribution through publicize tab.

Publicize

1. BuzzBoost generates an html code showing last feed posts which can be inserted in any web page
2. Headline Animator same purpose but with a tiny animated graphical block. Headlines are displayed scrolling
3. PingShot setting of automatic notice to RSS web aggregators (technorati, myYahoo, etc) with regard to new contents on your feed
4. Email Subscriptions generates an e-mail notice system to your site users in case of new contents
5. FeedCount small graphical counter displaying your feed’s spread on the net
6. Awareness API gives access to Feedburner data for custom applications in your site
7. Chicklet Chooser generates the code necessary to let users subscribe to the feed directly on your site, and with lots of aggregators.
8. Password Protector should you need to restrict access to your feed
9. Creative Commons includes Creative Commons licenses for your feed

After setting diffusion parameters, you can include in your system affiliation programs

Monetize

Amazon or Adsense too can be included in your site. In order to include Amazon, you just need to input the affiliation code, while for Adsense a brand new system in beta test called “Adsense for Feed “is available. If the readers of your feed are more than 100, you can subscribe as beta tester. The system goes to it on its own, and it is sufficient consulting statistics from time to time to check feed diffusion and make adjustments when needed.

Analyze

1. Feed Circulation shows the number of subscribers to your feed
2. Readership monitoring on web aggregators which took from your feed, subscriptions via web, aggregator type, any subscription made through browser, what engines have checked for updates, etc.
3. Item Stats blog statistics

Feedburner address: http://www.feedburner.com

Actually, whoever invests on online advertising, especially on pay-per-click programs such as Adwords, knows pretty well that this drop might be connected to the world economical crisis and understands the reasons why the clicks have paid less and less (not considering willingly other factors as smartpricing).

Photo Credit: Domen Colja

How cost-per-click is built

Advertisers using Adwords to promote their products/services in the Adsense circuit must, first, choose relevant keywords for the kind of ad they wish to be visualized. Those keys (simple words or phrases) are used to show Google the kind of website and post the advertiser wants theirs ads to be displayed on.

The next step is to insert in each key a certain cost to be paid for each click received on the ads linking to their services. As each Adsense block receives around 5 ads, what will happen if 1000 advertisers are willing to display their ads using the key-word? It’s simple: Adsense will prefer those who pay more per click.

In fact, for each key-word there’s a real auction in which who bids the highest will have more guarantees of seeing their ads displayed on websites and on more quality pages (which guarantees a higher ROI).

For the most popular and requested key-words, Adsense imposes a real limit, that is, a minimum value to be offered for only one click it won’t guarantee the ad to be shown if this value is lower.

In the image above, I offered one cent to have an ad displayed on a relevant page linking to a specific key-word, and further to the left, Adwords tells me that there’s no negotiation for less than 4 cents.

What’s the impact of advertisers competition on pay-per-click

It’s obvious: the higher the number of advertisers wanting to have their ads linked to one specific key-word, the higher the price of the cost-per-click, just like in a real auction, and the higher the minimum cost-per-click value demanded from advertisers will be in order to get into the competition.

The value of a single click depends by  the number of advertisers that bid at specific keywords (actually, there are other factors but I don’t want to complicate the things too much)

Check how much a simple click on a loans and financing ad is worth:

As you can see, the economical crisis has caused an increase of CPC on this kind of ad. To create this kind of report, use the KeywordToolExternal.

Drop on click costs

In times of economical crisis, there’s less money around to invest, therefore, budgets destined to advertising campaigns are cut down. Check the influence on the cost obtained per each click:

1. the number of companies investing on online advertising drops and that reduces other companies’s budgets
2. the number of competitors disputing for an ad to be displayed for a certain key-word drops as well
3. less bids on key-words mean less minimum bids, and maximum as well, consequently
4. online publishers (like you) are in for a drastic reduction on the average click revenue standing before an unchanged click through rate, or even a higher one sometimes.

In other words, it is like having a short audience auction: you can buy the object in question for a much lower price than the usual, what will make the seller (you) receive a lot less.

Some advice

The best thing to do is not to worry too much. In a year’s time, a lot of factors can be chained to determine the increase or fall of online revenues.

It is advisable to strictly evaluate your costs on a yearly basis, otherwise, you’ll take the risk of making choices based on the heat of the moment which, besides not being helpful, can cause things to get worse if there are changes in the mechanisms unrelated to revenue drops.

They could, however, constitute a valuable alternative and create a second leg to stand on in order to avoid depending on one source only.

But, let’s speak clearly: banners and graphic ads can’t compete with contextual ads on blogs, unless…

… you find a system to hyperlinks relevant keywords in every post, instantaneously and on-the-fly.

Image Credit: cre8tiv88

Now things would become interesting because, with only one action, you can add a remarkable amount of links. Check out how to proceed in each one of the cases:

• On a CMS developed in PHP
• On WordPress
• On VBulletin (one of the most common forum platform)

Generating links on-the-fly with WordPress: the Cross-linker plugin

Cross Linker is a great plugin for WordPress that generates links to determined keywords when the post is visualized without changing the source code (download version 1.3.2 here). Besides specifying the keywords with relative URLs for the link, it allows you to:

• ignore keywords included in determined tags
• insert the nofollow option in the anchor text
• search for the keywords to be linked also on comments

and much more.

Geek Auto linker Lite 4.5.0 for vBullettin

It’s the analogous plugin for that popular forum platform. It’s much more simple than Cross-linker for WordPress, but is executes its job perfectly. To download it, you need to register in the forum.

Generating links dynamically in a generic CMS developed in PHP

If you don’t have WordPress or vBullettin, but you do have a CMS in PHP, there’s a source you can use as a base to be perfected and adapted to your demands:

$anchor_keys["anchor1"] = “http://www.site.com/path/to/affiliation1″;
$anchor_keys["anchor2"] = “http://www.site.com/path/to/affiliation2″;
$anchor_keys["anchor3"] = “http://www.site.com/path/to/affiliation3″;
while (list($anchor,$link) = each($anchor_keys)) {

$key_linked=”<a href=”$link” rel=”nofollow” style=” … “>”.$anchor.”</a>”;
$post = preg_replace(‘{b’.$key.’b}’, $key_linked, $post,3);
$post = preg_replace(‘{(<A[^<]*)’.$key_linked.’([^<]*>)}i’, ‘$1′.$key.’$2′, $post);
$post = preg_replace(‘{(<A[^<]*)’.$key_linked.’([^<]*</A>)}i’, ‘$1′.$key.’$2′, $post);
}

This code performs the following task:

1. Before viewing the post, search in the text the words to be used as anchor texts indicated in the array $anchor_keys
2. Once you find them, link them to the corresponing URL
3. Check if they’re not a part of a link (as an anchor text or URL), if so, it removes the link that’s just been created
4. Preview the post

Cautions

You’d better not exaggerate on this possibility and avoid forcing links not relevant that send the user to unexpected places. If, for example, you spontaneously link Skype to your posts, you could, in some cases, do it through an affiliate program that recognizes a commission. The user will get to Skype.com anyway regardless it’s a direct link or not.

Furthermore, it’s advisable to use the nofollow option for affiliate links since, even they forward the user to a relevant content, they do so through an intermediate path that is not relevant, and they could play not very pleasant games from an SEO point of view.

In relation to the most popular affiliate programs, I suggest two among all:

• Commission Junction
  I’d dare to say it’s the number one affiliate program in the world
• Tradedoubler
  It has all kinds of advertisers