FreshYields - Ecommerce and Internet Marketing Solutions

I’ve been stumbling upon many blogs lately that are participating in sponsored review programs, like PayPerPost and ReviewMe. I don’t know about you, but the reviews are starting to annoy me. I used to be able to just skip by them when they were posted once in a blue moon. But now I am running across blogs that will have 4 review posts, followed by one “original” post, then 4 more reviews. What’s the difference between a site like this and a splog?

I understand how this can be useful for an advertiser with a very targeted campaign, but what is stopping said company from going directly to the influential blogger and negotiating directly? Oh, that’s right, this is really all about SEO. After all, the review costs are determined by Google Pagerank and Alexa Rankings. It’s probably cheaper and more efficient to buy a couple PR4 reviews than hire an SEO expert for a couple of hours for some link building. And forget about trying to convince a single A-list bloggers to review your product on their blog when you can buy your way onto a myriad of blogs lesser in statue for a similar cost.

And what about sales? Does CTR matter? Is the review the same as a giant CPM banner that gets buried into a blogger’s archive in a week?

The great thing about the internet is that trends run in cycles. Will the sponsored review phenomenon last? Not in it’s current form. Here’s where I see it heading, which I think would be a good thing. Why not have the advertiser pay the upfront fee like they do now, but offer an affiliate tracking link and commissions for sales conversions? Both sides would win. The advertiser gets the SEO link that they are currently paying for, and potential a new sales channel. The blogger gets paid for the placing the “review” on their site, and can earn commissions by referring their readers to the advertiser’s site and completing a sale. Bloggers have been slapping affiliate links on their sites like it’s going out of style, but I’m willing to venture that a majority of them aren’t rolling in the commission dough. By giving them a little cash up front, they may be encouraged to write a better, more focused review. The cookie could be tracked through the permalink for the article, which may be necessary if(when) google continues to devalues affiliate-type links in it’s algorithm.

What are your thoughts? Are you making good money through blog reviews? Better yet, for the advertisers, are your sales increasing directly from the reviews, or more from the link-building SEO benefits?

Shai Coggins has been writing about blog communities lately, and has tasked others to write posts on their own blogs about it. In my opinion, it’s a pretty tough subject to write clearly on. I’m going to try to bring in my perspective as one who not only blogs, but is in the midst of a community building project right now. This is part one, and I hope to follow up with more soon.

I used to believe that to become a community member, you have to participate and enter the discussion. I used to compare lurkers to people who window shop, checking out all the displays, but never making a purchase. This may have been true in Web 1.0 (ugh, did I just say that?). But with the social nature of the web, all of that is changing.

In the first month that Babblz has been live, we have had around 100 user signups, with about 20 users being the most active. But it’s community is much larger than that. For instance, we had one of our users submit a post to the site about Sanjaya Malakar titled “Sanjaya, Sanjaya, gone set this place on fiiiiah!.” It got some traffic early on from the search engines, but things really picked up as he became closer and closer to getting kicked off of American Idol. Chances are if they searched for “Sanjaya Gone”, they were being directed initially to Babblz, and then to the submitter’s site. While the traffic may not have directly led to Babblz signups, it did send traffic to our user’s blog, and maybe created a few new followers of her site. This is why social bookmarking sites are so popular. When you submit to these services, you are not just submitting a site. You are submitting a community.

To help spread the word for my wife’s new venture, I am replicating her contest on my site.

Piggybacking a little off my last post about entrepreneurship, the Big Guy and I have started a new website called Babblz.com.

What is Babblz? I would be lying if we didn’t say we are taking inspiration from Digg, Reddit and the like. I have been using Digg for my articles over at DiabetesNotes.com with some success. But when I went to submit something that I wrote for this site, I had now idea where to catorgorize it!

So we decided to start a similar site for mommy and daddy bloggers. A place where stories from across the web can be collected and shared. We decided to try a contest to get the word out and to get some feedback for the new site. So here are the details:

1. You must sign up for a new account at Babblz.com, and submit at least one story. Submitting more than one would be awesome, but will have no effect on your chance of winning.
2. You must put a link on your site to Babblz.com. It would be great if the link text said Babblz - Tell Us How You Really Feel. It be even greater if you wrote a small review about our site, or gave us feedback.
3. A prize will be awarded every 75 signups. At that time, a winner will be randomly selected. After 75 more users sign up, a new prize will be awarded to one of the 150 users, minus the previous winner. We hope to continue this until we get to 300 users.
4. If at least 75 users do not sign up, the contest will be null and void

That’s it! If you have any questions, please leave a comment here on my blog. Oh yeah, almost forgot. the prize is…

A Bath & Body Works Signature Collection™ gift basket. If you win, you will have your choice Passion Fruit, Cherry Blossom, or Japanese Cherry Blossom scents. You can see more about the prize here.

So sign up, spread the word, and start sharing you crazy stories!

Back in the old days, marketing was simple. Outside of a nasty story in an editorial section of the newspaper (and you had to be real bad), the reputation of a company was developed by it’s marketing department through press releases and advertising campaigns.

Nowadays you have to deal with bloggers, social media, reviews on ecommerce sites, message boards, and more. Your company’s name might be as good as mud, and you have no idea. Let’s give an example scenario:

You work in the ecommerce marketing department for Home Depot. Things are going great. You have no idea that right now on Digg you are being called out for having bogus reviews on your site. There have been 563 diggs coming from a post on this blog. Add to that 62 comments on Digg.com, 7 users blogging about it after digging it, and 57 comments on the originating website. All of this in a week or so. What if the accusations are not true? Wouldn’t you want to defend your company from a potential loss in business?

Now the Home Depot may not be the best example, as I’m sure they could handle a situation like this rather easily. But what about your business? Are you prepared to suffer a huge online reputation hit without ever knowing? Are you prepared to see a slowdown in sales or leads without a clear explanation?

There is now a site available that can help the discovery process. ACS has release Serph.com out of beta. From their website, here is how Serph works:

When you type a query into Serph, it goes out and searches online social media to find the latest buzz. After it gathers the results, they are sorted and organized so the most recent buzz appears first. Serph gathers these results from blog search engines, social media websites, social news websites and social bookmarking websites. This allows Serph to show you exactly what people are saying on the web right now.

Entering “Home Depot” in the search box yields 8 pages of results for the previous day. In this case, the digg.com story is not included since serph was still in beta. But with the number of diggs, blog posts, and comments that are attached to this one story, I guarantee you that your online reputation is taking a hit.

Now how are you going to attack this? If it’s true, then you have to remedy the problem. Take down the fake reviews. If it causes damage, maybe issue a press release clarifying the issue. Hell, blame it on a renegade employee trying to be too ambitious. But if it’s not true, you need go on the offensive, clearly explaining the situation wherever your can. You never know, you may win over some of the diggers of the original story.

Home Depot is big enough that they probably have staff already available that can deal with issues like these. But is your business ready?

Let me preface this post by stating that the affiliate programs I am talking about deal with physical goods, like those you would buy from Amazon. This post does not reference downloadable content or survey/subscription models. It also does not refer to product review blogs.

So you’ve decided to monetize your blog, and are searching for the best way to do so. There are tons of programs out there, like PPC programs, sponsored reviews, and the topic of this post, affiliate links. PPC programs can be confusing to some new bloggers, and may take some time to master. The results are easy to track, and percentages say that if you get enough traffic, you will make at least some money. Sponsored reviews usually have qualifications based on PageRank and Alexa ranking, which may not be available until your blog matures. But they are perfect for low-inspiration days. So that leaves us with Affliliate Marketing.

What could be easier than applying for some affiliate programs and slapping some links and banners on your site? The are many programs that automatically approve you once you’ve been accepted into LinkShare, CJ, Shareasale, or one of the other affiliate networks.

I just can’t see affiliate banners being a good idea for a blog. Typically, banner ads use a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model. This is great for branding and reputation. Affiliate banners are CPA (cost per action). That better be on convincing banner ad to result in a sale. Affiliate Links are a better idea, especially when the product you are pushing fits in the context of what you are blogging about. But how many people typically click on your links? This should be the first indicator of whether or not an affiliate link is going to be successful. Of those that click on the link, how many are going to actually result in a sale?

One blog I helped set up had been running affiliate banners for about 2 months, but recently canned them altogether. The blog generated decent traffic for a new blog, but only resulted in one sale, netting the owner $4.00. She found the banner to be obtrusive and distracting to her readers, so we took them off.

I am running one affiliate banner here right now, for TextLinkAds. If you are a blogger, I believe that a program like this might be best, as it targets other bloggers, who probably make up a large percentage of your readership. I am also offering to throw in a free review as an incentive, making it a little different than typical affiliate links.

So what do you guys think? Am I was off base here? I knot that there are many blogs out there making good money off affiliate programs. But what percentage? .1%? If Technorati is correct in saying there are 55 million blogs, then that means 55,000 blogs are making good money off affiliate programs. We can probably be safe in saying the .001% is closer to the right percentage. Are your online marketing skills in the top 99.999%?

The other day I wrote about implementing Text Link Ads here at Fresh Yields. Well, that went over so well (I still have no sponsors), I decided to try out another advertising solution in Kontera. After adding the provided code to your site, Kontera scans your site for keywords and places PPC ads within your content. When users scroll over the Kontera links, a small window pops up with the ad inside. Amazon has started a similar program, which my wife trying out over at her site.

Here is my problem. I usually don’t imbed too many links in my blog posts, but now with Kontera, there are links everywhere. Just take a look at my last post. I’m keeping the double-underline and non-bold font for the Kontera ads so they will be a little less spammish, but did change the link color to match my normal links. You can certainly make your normal links and Kontera links look identical. It’s up to you to decide if that would piss off your readers or not.

How do you feel about in-text advertising programs like this? Are they too spammy, or can they be a good source of revenue for your blog?

btw, I have no idea how I got accepted. The qualifications include “Generate more than 500,000 page impressions per month“. Once they find out, they will probably pull the ads

You see it all the time in the sports world. The latest example is Scottie Pippen, the former basketball great who played most of his career with the Chicago Bulls. It happens often in boxing. Buster Douglas attempted to come back, but was unsuccessful. Probably the most famous example was the great George Foreman. We all know how well that turned out, both in the ring and the business world. Sometimes athletes come back because they miss the competition and excitement. Other times, it’s all about the money. In most cases, it’s probably both.

I have been ‘retired’ from true enterprise-level web application and database development for about 6 years. I have held different project management and consulting roles since then. Don’t get me wrong, I can still code html, php, and css just fine. But thinking on a broad scale and being able to whip out database structures on the fly seems to have disappeared. And honestly I don’t know if I can get that back at this point. I have been using nothing but pre-built solutions like Wordpress, Textpattern, and other CMS tools.

Now I sit here at my desk with five or six web business concepts that, at first glance, look like they should be relatively simple to execute and produce revenue. But as I dive deeper into thought, that spark that would start a fire and allow me to kick out 40 tables in a custom CMS just isn’t there. I have to write everything down first, do a little research, and edit my notes and thoughts as I go. Jesus, I’m only 31! It kind of reminds me of that scene in Vegas Vacation were Clark Griswold is sitting in front of the TV, obsessively watching the baccarat infomercial. I repeat over and over out loud, “Bet on Ruby. Bet on AJAX. Search is a natural.”

But I know I’m not the developer I once was. Technology changes so fast, that if you fall behind, especially as far as I have, it’s extremely difficult to catch up.

Do I still have any value? I’d like to think so! I have experienced so much over my early career that would provide a great resource to any business. I may not be the hot shot programmer that works best in isolation and pumps out solutions in minutes. But now I’m a team player, and more important, a team leader. I have developed greatly in other areas of IT and business management thanks to training and experience.

So which one will I be, Buster Douglas or George Foreman? During Foreman’s comeback, he used not only his natural talent in the ring, but also the talent he acquired through his many business dealings. He had grown professionally, and I hope I have done the same.

I’ve decided to slowly work ads into this blog, partly to make some money (at least enough for hosting), but mostly to experiment with some of the newer non-AdSense advertising programs. First up is Text Link Ads*. Right now, I have none :). They would be located in my sidebar menu, under the label that says “Sponsors”.

Applying to Text Link Ads is easy enough, but it seems that things go much smoother if you have a PageRank of 4 or greater. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for advertisers to buy links on your site. We’ll see how it goes, and I will be happy to report on any progress. Of course, you will be able to see progress as my Sponsors area (hopefully) fills up.

Here is where you would go to buy a link on my site: Sponsor Fresh Yields. Because my Alexa ranking is so low, it only costs you $15 a month to get your link on a PR4 blog. If you buy a link, I will also dedicate at least one blog post reviewing your site, using keywords where appropriate.

First, let me start by saying that I think that everybody who owns a legit blog should try and monetize it. If your writing style and the topics you choose are good enough to draw traffic and a following, you should be rewarded.

I have set my wife’s blog, Gaga For Lulu, up with a few zones that she has been running AdSense on. She has made $11.00 so far this month. Hey, she’s not ShoeMoney yet, but it’ll pay for the hosting. She’s experimented a little with AdBrite and some other smaller providers, but has decided to stick with Google.

Here is the frustrating part. The ads Google has been serving lately make no sense (or mabye no AdSense?) at all. I went to her site early this morning, and her top 468×60 banner was for a company that sells Vampire Fangs. Honey, is there something I need to know?

I had to re-read some of her posts to be sure she isn’t dabbing in the occult, although some would say she already is with all this mommy-blogging. My latest visit has found that the only ads showing on her blog’s home page is the top banner with the Hurrican Katrina ad, which is run as an alternative when Google can’t find anything better for your site. One question though, was the Vampire Fangs ad more relevant?

I’m writing this while debating whether to place ads here on my site. I may do it to test out some techniques for some other blogs that I either own or manage. But if I do, I may avoid AdSense.

Chad Randall recently wrote a guest post on Darren’s ProBlogger blog about why you should not use AdSense, and after the natives got a little restless, followed it up with more at his own blog. I think he is right on the money. Check it out!

I love good web design, especially blog design. I guess it’s because there are so many blogs out there using the same templates. Not that there is anything wrong with that. There are tons of very talented blog template designers out there helping people add some flare to their sites.

The first thing I notice when going to someone’s blog is the look and feel, even before I start reading. This is not to say that a blog with a poor layout is unreadable, but to be honest, I may not stick around too long or come back. Well, thanks to Hsien, I came across Alister Cameron’s Blogologist site, which has been recently redesigned. It is one of the best designs I have seen in a while. The image density is perfect, all the sections are easy to find, and the font sizes are well-proportioned and easily read.

Check it out and let me know what you think…

*disclosure: Alister is now part of b5 media, whom my wife also writes for. This did not sway my feelings on his new design