Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

• WordPress readying PPC advertising feature

  Monday, December 5th, 2011

  

  Having become a popular platform for publishing SEO copy, WordPress has revealed that it will be launching a PPC ads feature for its sites, according to an article published by The Drum.

  WordPress has partnered with Federated Media to create the feature, which will be accessible to users of WordPress that meet a number of preset requirements.

  It has also been revealed that the service will be accessible through a specifically designed application for the blogging platform.

  Ads lead for WordPress, Jon Burke, writing in a post published on his blog, spoke about the upcoming introduction of PPC ads to WordPress.

  He wrote: “Over the years one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads.

  “We’ve resisted advertising so far because most it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into you blog and you deserve better than AdSense.”

  Burke concluded by stating: “If you’re going to have advertising on your site, it darn well better be good and beginning with our partnership with Federated Media we’re ready to start rolling out WordAds here on WordPress.com.”

  News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.

  Tags: Google AdSense, PPC, WordPress
  Posted in Pay Per Click Marketing

• Competition for AdSense from WordPress

  Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

  With over 24million WP blogs already in existence, and over 50,000 new blogs being added daily, it was only a matter of time before WordPress helped its users monetise on those and helped itself to a share of the lucrative ad market. The launch of WordAds this week sees WordPress taking on Google AdSense with a partnership with Federated Media after announcing late last month that this was on the cards.

  The observation on the WordPress blog that many of the AdSense ads aren’t always “terribly tasteful” is of course, sadly true, in that this is one of the areas where the algorithm has not always been very accurate, and has meant occasions where inappropriate ads are shown. Which when this is next to your content can reflect more on you than on a faulty algo. Visitors are more likely to remember, and link to, your site where the bad taste ad appeared than to blame the algorithm, which may not be a good thing for PR.

  WordPress have not yet announced the revenue split with bloggers, and there are certain provisos when applying to be part of the program such as a custom domain, level of traffic and engagement, content and language, but for anyone with a WordPress.com blog, it would seem to be worthwhile to apply and see if your blog is accepted.

  Are we likely to see more competition to AdSense and other Google services? Yes. It is unlikely that the Google bubble is bursting, but there is definitely an appetite for alternatives; although WordPress was always the most likely competitor, there are opportunities for Tumblr, Posterous etc to help bloggers raise money through displaying adverts.

  There are other monetisation options for bloggers such as Flattr.com who ran Pay a Blogger day this week. Whilst Flattr is still a small network, it highlights an opportunity available for businesses – advertising with blogs.

  Whilst using Google’s display network is one option, the targetting can never be as accurate as looking out niche blogs whose readers fit with your target audience for your products and services. Many bloggers are keen to take an ad or two, or will write reviews on your products, offer giveaways and so on, so it is worth discovering which blogs your customers and potential audience look to for information and getting in touch.

  Finding this info will lead you to interesting content, engagement with your audience and possibly exciting new joint ventures. So, take 2 minutes today to craft a tweet or status update for your social network and ask for recommendations of blogs that your followers and friends enjoy.

  Tags: adsense, Blog, bloggers, federated media, monetise, wordads, WordPress
  Posted in Blog, Google, Small Business Resources

• Optimising a WordPress site

  Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

  

  Many small businesses have taken to using WordPress for their company sites.

  Easy to use and maintain, you can also implement your SEO strategy into your WordPress site.

  Writing for Search Engine Watch, Kevin Gibbons has created a short list of tips, which display the ways in which you can optimise your WordPress site.

  Here are just a few of the best in summarised form:

  - SEO Plugins - Plugins are extremely useful and can make the overall management of your site a whole lot easier. Gibbons recommends a number of useful plugins, including All in One SEO; SEO Smart Links and Urban Giraffe Redirection.

  - Create content with good SEO values – The main body of text on a page should contain your best keywords and phrases, as this will help your pages to rank much higher. However this shouldn’t have a detrimental effect on the quality of your content – remember Google’s Panda algorithm can be extremely harsh, so ensure that the quality is there.

  - Keep your site up-to-date – Gibbons states that hacking on WordPress is commonplace, therefore he suggests that site owners keep regular tabs on the malware reports in Google Webmaster Tools – in order to ensure all is safe.

  News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.

  Tags: Kevin Gibbons, SEO, WordPress
  Posted in Search Engine Optimisation

• Give away for free or penalise theft?

  Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

  The latest furore in the UK about “three strikes and you’re off the Net forever” should give many marketers cause to ponder new business models.

  The music industry, as with other sectors such as telecoms, are operating with old business models, creating and then charging for false scarcity. However, many with online businesses that work, have seen the error of this model and are working on new ways to generate revenue that involve giving away a huge proportion of their ‘product’ for FREE.

  Assuming, or accusing everyone of being a thief is not the way forward, nor is penalising folk who may have been ignorant they were doing anything wrong. Or worse, who may not even have done anything wrong but who are penalised anyway.

  What ought to be happening is that businesses work to attract potential customers by giving them a taster of what is available on becoming a customer, and playing to human nature. Everyone loves a freebie. Look at all the free tools on the Net that are becoming embedded in online culture, and who can then look to paid models for the avid.

  Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and Google docs, Google itself, Zemanta, WordPress – in fact, most businesses who started online have had to adapt to the thinking that “Everything is free on the Net”. Open Source software is another prime example.

  Take a look at your business. It may be that you are Rolex, and therefore do not need to give anything away for free because the quality of your brand is historic, known and appreciated, and freebies would actually undervalue the product. You won’t find a Rolex in a cereal packet, ever!

  However, most businesses are not in that privileged position and need to look to what can be offered as the magnet to attract punters to you, to your website etc. White papers, free software with full or almost full functionality, seminars and webinars, online tutorials, how to manuals, guides, tools, video, podcasts…the list is endless.

  If your product is so exclusive and every aspect of it is copyright, you are denying your largest unpaid workforce of evangelists and sales people the chance to add value to it, promote it, or engage with it.

  

  Tags: facebook, free content, Google, marketing, Open source, Rolex, WordPress, Zemanta
  Posted in Content, Stats & Trends

• Wordtwit vs Twitterfeed

  Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

  As some may have noticed, we have been experimenting with some of the Twitter tools available for clients and SEO agencies alikes.

  For those with a blog, there are multiple options for ensuring that the information posted to your blog is automatically added to your twitter account, thereby saving a job. However, some tools only work with specific blogging software eg WordPress, whilst others offer a variety of useful functionality across multiple platforms.

  This post is to check out what happens with Wordtwit (a WP add on) as against Twitterfeed, which works somewhat like Feedburner (now in the Google stable) and potentially is of more use to a wider audience.

  Let’s hit send….!

  Just before we do though, a salutory lesson to others. If you try to post in different places, eg blog, facebook, Twitter etc, and automate distribution of the content between those places, be very careful not to create an infinite loop!

  For instance, if you set up Twitter to feed into your corporate Facebook page, and for your FB page to feed new content into Twitter each time a member of staff posts there, you will end up with a constant re-posting of the same content between the two places. Test and think out such processes before applying them live….

  Update: you can use the Feedburner Awareness API to see your stats from Twitterfeed to Twitter and compare stats for clickthroughs between your traditional RSS feed distribution and your social media distribution.

  

  Tags: Blog, FeedBurner, plugins, rss feed, Search engine optimization, social marketing, twitter, Weblogs, WordPress
  Posted in Blog, Link Marketing, SEO, Small Business Resources, Social Media