ProBlogger - Latest Posts

Social Media Love-In: Phase 2 Coming Soon

Posted: 21 Jul 2008 11:14 PM CDT

Social-Media-Love-In Wow - when I posted an invitation this morning for ProBlogger readers to promote their social media profiles on this post I didn’t know what would happen - but I suspected it would be fun.

It’s been almost 9 hours since the post went live and over 280 readers have participated and I’m getting emails and tweets from people saying that they have had more people follow/befriend them today than they’ve ever had before (update: Lara just told me that she started getting friend requests minutes after adding hers).

The Next Phase of the ProBlogger Social Media Love-In

In another 15 hours from now (24 hours after the post went live) I’m going to close the comments section on the previous post. It’s not that I don’t want this to continue - but it’s going to enable me (or rather my good friend Lara from Anubis Marketing) to make this ‘Love-In’ even more useful.

You see Lara is going to spend tomorrow compiling everyone’s submissions into lists of the different social media sites so that instead of everyone having to trawl through every comment looking for the social media services that they use you’ll be able to quickly add everyone from your services quickly from the one list.

We’ll start with Twitter (it seems to be the most popular) and make a page with just all your Twitter profiles and go from there through the other services.

This means that we’ll end up with a directory of social media accounts from ProBlogger readers.

Why the Love-In?

As I said in the launch post for this Social Media Love-In - my hope is that this will help the ProBlogger community to grow and make it’s network stronger and more useful. While you’re all blogging on a lot of different topics - you’re all bloggers and the potential for you to help one another grow your blogs is quite massive.

You won’t find everyone that you add from these lists helpful - but hopefully they’ll give you a head start in finding other bloggers like you who are interested in putting themselves out there to connect.

What comes from it is really up to you and how you choose to use the compilations of profiles that we collate over the coming days.

So Add Your Profiles

As I write this you have less than 15 hours to add your profiles to the launch post (not this post). The comments on that post will be closed at 5am tomorrow (Melbourne time) to enable Lara to get the lists together. Depending upon how this goes we may have a 2nd round of submissions - but there’s no guarantees so add your profiles to make sure you’re included.

Just make sure you use the words ’social media’ in your comment or we can’t guarantee it won’t get sucked into our spam filters.

Thanks to everyone for participating - it’s been a lot of fun already and I’m looking forward to seeing where this takes us.

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AdSense Announce Changes to Ad Ecosystem.

Posted: 21 Jul 2008 08:05 PM CDT

Today AdSense publishers (or at least some of them) received the following email outlining some recent ‘changes and improvements’ to the Google ad system.

These changes largely revolve around new features that they’ve added to AdWords to let advertisers target websites differently (more control).

One of the big changes is the introduction of ‘Ad Planner’ (currently in an invite only beta test) which allows advertisers to search for sites with certain demographics and interests. Advertisers can now also target sites with a combination of both contextual targeting (having their ads appear on pages with certain keywords) as well as placement targeting (targeting specific sites and ad positions on them).

Really there are no changes in terms of features for us as publishers - but it will be interesting to see how these changes impact the bottom line. It should advantage bloggers targeting specific niches and lucrative demographics (what those demographics are we’re yet to see). It’s also incentive to develop blog posts that target popular keywords to advertisers. It could hurt sites with more mixed topics and demographics.

Here’s the email from AdSense.

As one of our AdSense partners, we’d like to keep you updated on changes and improvements to the Google ads ecosystem. We’re writing to let you know about some recent developments in how advertisers can find and target your sites, which are intended to bring more advertisers to the AdSense content network. We hope that this will result in increased revenue for publishers like you while also benefiting your users with even more relevant ads.

We’ve recently launched Google Ad Planner, a media planning tool which will help give your sites more visibility and exposure. Using Ad Planner, media buyers can search for sites by demographics and interest. This will be useful especially for sites with niche audiences, since it’ll now be easier for advertisers to find sites that attract the types of visitors they’d like to target. As a publisher, you can also use the tool to gain insight into your audience and their preferences. We’re still beta-testing Ad Planner, but you can sign up for an invitation at http://www.google.com/adplanner/.

Also, we’ve recently made a change within AdWords to allow advertisers to target their ads through a combination of contextual targeting and placement targeting. Advertisers can continue to create campaigns targeted to your sites or ad placements, but can now also add keywords to those campaigns so that their ads appear only in the most contextually relevant placements. In addition, advertisers can now adjust bids by individual site in order to spend more of their budgets on specific sites which give them the most high-quality, converting leads. These changes may help improve the relevance of the ads on your sites, and advertisers who become more confident that their ads are reaching the right audience may increase their ad spend on the content network and on your sites.

With these improvements, we’re looking forward to expanding the number of advertisers who use the AdSense content network, helping them find your sites, and increasing the relevance of their ads on your sites. You can find more information about Ad Planner at http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/06/introducing-google-ad-planner.html and the AdWords changes mentioned above at http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/07/use-keywords-and-placements-together-on.html . If you have additional concerns, please contact your account manager. We’re working towards strengthening the relationship between our AdWords and AdSense partners, and we’ll be sure to keep you posted on these types of developments in the future.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

The ‘Rules’:

You must include the word - ’social media’ in your comment. This is simply so that we can find any of your comments that get caught in our spam filter. If you don’t include it your comment may not appear.
You can use html in the comment to make your links live (this will make people finding your profile pages easier)
So that we keep some order to this - please limit your links to 10

My Links:

I’ll kick us off with some of my own.

Some are more active than others.

Now it’s over to you. I hope this works!

Update: WOW - this IS getting crazy. Please be patient with me as I work through all the comments in the spam filter. We’re getting there! Do remember to add others that you find and also include the words ’social media’ in your comment so we can make sure everyone is added.

Update 2: Due to the popularity of this I’m going to close it after 24 hours and then compile all the information into some pages that will make befriending people easier. Read more about that here.

The Problem of Dates on Posts

The problem is that when you have a post that is ‘timeless’ (ie it doesn’t really date because the tips you give or the principles that you talk about will always apply) a date can act as a distraction to your reader. They arrive at the post and see that it was written in 2006 and a little warning bell goes off in their mind that what they are reading is not ‘current’.

As I mentioned in last week’s post - I’ve had comments numerous time on ‘old’ posts saying things like “this is old” or “this is out of date” even when the post was anything but out of date.

When a reader has this reaction no matter what your post contains - it’ll seem ‘old’ to them and you lose reader engagement. This might only happen to a small percentage of your readers but over time this adds up.

On the flip side - when a reader arrives on a post that IS recent and sees the date showing this you can actually get a good reaction because they get a sense that what they are reading is the latest thinking that you’ve had.

So dates can be good and bad. They can make a post seem dated or cutting edge.

So What’s a Blogger to Do? Should You Have Dates on Posts?

The key question to ask when it comes to whether or not to include the date of authorship on a post is - ‘is it relevant to the post?’

The answer to this question has led me to take two different courses of action on my two blogs.

Here at ProBlogger I include a time stamp on each post.

Timestamped

I time stamp (date) posts here at ProBlogger for two reasons:

The industry is moving fast - when I started ProBlogger 3 years back blogging was very different to how it is today. The tools have changed, SEO principles have shifted, social media has become more important and bloggers are developing blogs in new ways. As a result some of the articles in my archives here at ProBlogger are less relevant and need to be put into the context of the time that they were written. While some principles have not changed more often than not I feel that dating posts can actually help readers determine what’s relevant for now.
I’m on a steep learning curve - when I started this blog I had been blogging full time for only a few months. While I’d accumulated some knowledge on the topic I look back and see that I was somewhat naive and very inexperienced. While I’m far from knowing everything on the topic I feel that I’ve come a long way and I hope that dates on posts help readers to make a call on where I was at when I wrote older posts.

At the Digital Photography School Blog I don’t time stamp posts (and never have)

No-Date

My reason for removing time stamp dates from DPS posts is simple - in the vast majority of posts on the blog they have no relevance to the post itself.

DPS is not a news related blog and aims to provide camera owners tips on how to get out of Auto Mode. While cameras are changing the basic principles of photography are not (or are changing a lot more slowly). In short - the posts have more of a timeless and evergreen quality and dates would only serve to distract readers from the content itself.

If I write a post that needs to be anchored to a point of time I will usually add it to the title of the post.