Are you tweeting more these days? Seems somebody is. Last month, Twitter users hit a new milestone. They sent nearly 2 billion tweets in the month of May, according to Pingdom, a website monitoring service.
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photo from The Small Object
I have been talking with a lot of bloggers lately that are interested in working with brands but aren’t so sure about how to go about it. Since I come from the other side and help brands find partners online (bloggers, communities, events, etc) I have some good tips for you when you are ready to actually ask a someone to work with you. Here they come:
1) Make a list of people you’d want to work with. This can and should be your dream list. Even people who you don’t think will give you the time of day. It’s just an email and no one is going to say “you’ll never believe what this blogger did….. she e-mailed me!”
2) Make sure and include “what’s in it for the brand”. There is always someone at the marketing meeting for these brands who’s going to want to know how many followers you have, how many times you post a week, how long you’ve been at it, where it’s been reposted, etc. You can head this off (and look really good) if you just include a page of stats. Even if they are low, just send them. It’s also not just about traffic – but you’ll have to sell it a little bit. For example, if you write for a very specific audience or if you have some unique portion of your blog you have something to offer that others may not. Make sure and include these things in the email.
3) Explain exactly what you want but give options. Some brands haven’t ever done anything but place ads so they aren’t going to come up with anything outside the box. If you want them to buy you a camera so you can do a photo series sponsored by them you need to outline it in detail. Also, you could give a range of options from sponsoring a post (little money) to sponsoring a giveaway (product) to helping you create a video (content).
4) Make sure you ask the right person. If there’s a contact on the site don’t pitch your whole idea to that person. They may be an intern or someone else who couldn’t possibly decide for a brand if it’s ok to work with you. Find out on the first contact who is in charge of partnerships and talk with them. (bonus – do NOT pitch a sales rep. They make commission and won’t likely want to talk to you further once they realize you want to trade).
5) Don’t ask 1 brand at a time. Don’t email the world either but sometimes brands take a really, really long time to make decisions and you don’t want to wait 4 months and hear that they just don’t want to work with your community or blog right now and then have to start all over. Ask 4 or 5 at a time.
Good luck!
There are a lot of settings to choose from in your Google AdWords account, but how do you know which ones are best? Depending on your objectives, goals and approach you might find one combination works better than another but the key is to test, test, test. What works for one account or campaign, may not work well for another. If you haven’t spent time exploring the settings options, you are likely using the defaults and a few quick changes could bring in additional clicks or conversions. Below is a brief description of many of the settings as well as some recommendations.
Locations & Languages
If you haven’t taken a look at the geo-targeting options, it is worth becoming familiar with the many choices. I once had a client where we targeted the states in the Midwest. We noticed in analytics that a lot of clicks were coming from one metro area, but those visitors rarely converted. In order to help manage spend, we kept the states we were targeting but excluded traffic from a 15 mile radius around the metro area. This way we were no longer getting irrelevant clicks and had more money to spend on those who were more likely to convert. The location options allow you to narrow down your focus by country, state, city, metro area or even zip code. Want to reach everyone in who lives in Houston but not those that live downtown? You can choose to target the city of Houston but then exclude the zip codes in the downtown region.
Another option if you are trying to target a region but don’t want to list out every city in the area, is to use settings on the ”Custom” tab. You have the option to target a specified radius around a city or zip code or you can also create a “custom shape”. For custom shape, you can decide if it is a triangle, square or rectangle and include (or exclude) exactly what you want.
Networks and Devices
Under this section you can choose if you want to run on Google Search, Search Partners and/or Google Content Network. I won’t go into these differences today but you may want to brush up on the Content Network best practices before you make your selection.
If you haven’t taken a look at the Device options, you might want to. Is your landing page smart phone friendly? How about your conversion form – is it really long with a lot of items to fill in? You may be getting clicks from smart phones and your landing page is less than optimal for these devices. If that is the case, change your settings so you don’t spend money on clicks that won’t convert. Google gives you the options to target all devices, desktop and laptop computers only, or just iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers. If you do have a landing page that is mobile friendly, click on “Advanced devices and carrier options” to choose which mobile devices to target (Android, iPhone, Palm and iPad) as well as the mobile carrier. Running ads for a Custom iPhone app? Since the apps won’t work on Android phones, target only iPhone users to help rule out irrelevant clicks and spend.
Bidding and Budget
Google provides two options for managing your bids – either use Manual Bidding or Automatic. I prefer to manage bids myself and use manual bidding in order to maintain control of budgets and spend but some only use automatic bidding and it works well. Try both and see which one gets you the results you need. Another option in this section is to use Conversion Optimizer. This option is only available for campaigns that have at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days. If you qualify, you are given the option to set your conversion goal and then Google will manage your campaign to help generate additional conversions. For better results, make sure your account has quite a bit of history before activating. Also, keep conversion optimizer on for several weeks before you determine if it does or does not work for you. Often the cost per conversion goes up at first and then brings itself back down to an acceptable average over the course of several weeks or months depending on your traffic.
Position Preference, Delivery Method
Position preference can be enabled if you want Google to control bids and show your ads in a preferred position or range. For instance, if you get the most qualified clicks in positions 3-4, you can set it to optimize to these positions. Google can’t guarantee you will show in your preferred position all the time, but they will try to automatically adjust your bid to place. You can choose to show:
One important note before selecting this – you may loose impressions and clicks by setting position preference. If you are not able to show up in position 3-4 as specified, Google won’t show your ad at all. Make sure you weigh the options before deciding.
In Delivery Method, you have two choices – Standard or Accelerated. In Standard method your ad will show evenly throughout the day. The benefit is that Google helps balance your clicks to your budget so you are less likely to run out of budget by mid morning. Make sure your budgets are set high enough, if your budgets are too low, you will eventually run out of money not matter what. The Accelerated setting doesn’t take into account your budget and the amount of time left in the day. It shows your ads as frequently as possible, which means if budgets are low, you may run out by lunch.
Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling
In this section you have the option to set a start and end date for your campaign. Running a campaign for the 4th of July? Make sure it starts and stops on time by setting a start and end date so you don’t loose track and time and forget to pause the campaign after the holiday. Ad scheduling or day parting allows you to run your ads only during certain time periods in the day. There are many options with this and we have put together a separate post with tips on how to get the most out of ad scheduling.
Ad Delivery: Ad rotation, Frequency Capping
Ad rotation allows you to choose how your ads are served. Do you want Google to determine the best performing one? If so, choose Optimize. If you are testing not only ads but also landing pages or simply want more control, select Rotate which shows your ads more evenly. A general best practice is to use Rotate, especially if you have a campaign focused on conversions. With Optimize, Google will run the ad that has the highest click through rate but it may actually have a lower conversion rate – since you want conversions, Google isn’t optimizing to your advantage.
While several of these categories can be explored much further, this gives you the general summary of the Google AdWords settings tab. Make sure you try different settings to see what produces the best result and anytime you add a new campaign don’t forget to go in and update your settings!
Bonus shortcut tip – an easy way to change the settings on multiple campaigns quickly. Click on the Settings tab (without clicking on a campaign first). Once all campaigns are listed, click the check box on the left for all the ones you want to edit. Once all are highlighted in yellow, select “Edit Settings” and you will be allowed to change settings right there rather than going into each campaign separately. Want to change Ad Rotation and it isn’t showing up? First click “Column” at the top and use the check boxes to select other categories. Make sure you hit “Save” at the bottom to save your changes.
BP spending $10k/day on Google ads to drive traffic to its web pages on spill http://bit.ly/dqDvPJ cleanup efforts could sure use that $
[Direct Link]I am in love with the Ford Sync system that the company uses in its 2010 and 2011 vehicles. Ford keeps adding new features to the system free of charge for users that are already using the Traffic, Directions, and Information (TDI) software. The latest ...
Yesterday we reported that developers should anticipate Facebook adding new sources of traffic to restore organic growth for applications and it appears as though the first source is already being tested. As Eric Eldon reported yesterday, Facebook is now testing in-application promotions of applications. Essentially it shows how many credits a user has and enables users to navigate to their bookmarked applications.
The feature, which was first pointed out by Eric von Coellen, appears to be more of a promotion of Facebook Credits, however it should benefit developers as well. While a small adjustment, it’s something that could significantly increase the number of Credits sold and the number of applications users interact with each day. As I mentioned yesterday, many of the new channels will most likely be focused on Facebook users that already interact with applications.
While we don’t know whether or not new communication channels are in the product roadmap, the company wants to make as many changes as possible that will help boost traffic to applications and stop the DAU downfall that we’ve seen happen over the past few months, and more importantly, the past few weeks. Facebook has said that the new feature is a test but has confirmed that the company is actively testing new ways to encourage users to return to applications.
Ultimately having a healthy Platform is in Facebook’s best interest as a healthy Platform directly correlates to Facebook’s growth in Credits revenue. You should be able to view the test (as pictured below) from within any of your favorite Facebook applications.
Twitter chief operating officer Dick Costolo revealed that the company is seeing 190 million unique visitors a month and 65 million tweets a day in New York today.
The choice of metrics is interesting, in part, because Twitter is using one of the highest possible numbers afforded to it. That’s visitors, not 30-day actives, or even registered users. By the same metrics, Facebook could claim to have 1.2 billion unique visitors a month. (Facebook publicly says it has more than 400 million active users, but that figure may be closer to 500 million now, since it’s four months old.)
Of course, from another perspective, Twitter’s figures could also underestimate usage somewhat. There are plenty of users that access Twitter completely independently of the website. The microblogging network said 75 percent of its traffic came via its application programming interfaces during its April developer conference in San Francisco. At the same event, the company said it had 105 million registered users. It added that it was seeing 300,000 new users a day. If its growth stayed consistent, and neither accelerated nor decelerated, then the service would have about 122 million registered users by now.
Companies: Twitter
People: Dick Costolo
I have mentioned many times how SEJ Tools help you with keyword research and competitive research through multiple built-in third-party tools. This week I am sharing how all those keyword research tools and data can be aggregated through SEJ Tools Research Assistant feature.
The Research Assistant feature is divided into three sections:
The Domain Research query returns details about a website, including:
The Keyword Research tool finds related keywords and URLs that rank for those keywords. Clicking on a keyword will take you to a new related keywords view. Each view includes:
The Page Analyzer utilizes semantic and keyword analysis to determine the key themes and relevance for the content of a Web page. From there, you can conduct further research, like finding keywords or websites related to the analysis results.
Right from the Research Assistant dashboard you can also:
From there you can also download and view the PDF report of any search you have previously run and saved.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Get Help with Competitor and Keyword Research with SEJ Tools Research Assistant
Facebook welcomed more than 130.3 million unique U.S. visitors in May, up 8.6 million from April, according to a report from market research firm comScore.
The rise came despite growing criticism of the social network's handling of users' privacy.
Last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his company needed to do a better job of handling privacy. Shortly after, it launched revamped privacy settings.
The average user didn't seem to care that much. Facebook is now home to more than 400 million active users worldwide. Its privacy and security levels appear to mean little to those who want to connect with friends, view pictures of long-lost buddies and play some FarmVille.
In fact, Quit Facebook Day came and went last Monday, and just 30,000 users committed to leave the network as part of that effort.
-- Don ReisingerGraph: Facebook's growing number of unique U.S. visitors. Credit: ComScore
Beware of selecting the smallest car for efficient transportation in congested and busy future roads since there is a possibility of owning a tiny, boring car that has been designed to be a smart traffic cutter only. Victor Uribe has envisioned the Audi as a futuristic concept car that not only is perfectly sized, also features the aesthetics and functionality that can give the riders a feel of racing cars. Even in low speeds, Audi concept car, being propelled by hydrogen, can provide a lot of fun between the curves. The conventional sliding doors have been replaced with sliding roof to make entry for the passengers which is another unique feature of the car.
Designer : Victor Uribe
Oh, a car story written by Nicholas. This is sure to be riddled with errors! (Kidding&mdas;or am I?) Ford Sync, which Matt has talked about for some time, now works with Google Maps. That is, from Google Maps on your computer or mobile or whatever, you select a destination then send it straight to your car. That way, when you hop in the saddle—cars have saddles, right?—your destination is all marked out for you. Pretty neat.
Ford makes it seem pretty easy to handle. On Google Maps, again, either on your computer or mobile device or however you want to access Google Maps, you select a destination. Let’s say you want to drive from New York City to Six Flags Great Adventure. You search for “great adventure” on Google Maps, then pull down the Send menu. Then off you go.
You will need Ford’s traffic, directions, and information dealie for everything to work.
I think that’s it.
I have mentioned on several occasions that I have a serious infatuation with Ford’s Microsoft Sync technology. Every time I look around Ford is adding cool new features to Sync and giving them to customers at no charge. Ford has announced that it has added a new function for Google Maps called Send to Sync.
The Send to Sync feature allows the driver to find destinations using Google Maps and then send those destinations directly to their Sync equipped vehicle through the cloud-based Sync Traffic, Directions, and Information (TDI) app. The directions are downloaded on their Bluetooth equipped phone and then processed as turn by turn driving directions while driving.
Using this feature you won’t need to print out directions again and bring them in the car, which is very slick. Ford will launch Send to Sync later this month and it will work on all 2010 and 2011 Sync equipped vehicles with TDI with no updates or extra software needed.
Relevant Entries on SlashGear
Filed under: Forecasts, Good news
Monday’s economic good news data point came from the airline industry: The International Air Transport Association (IATA) now expects the industry to post a $2.5 billion profit in 2010.
In March, the IATA had forecast that the industry would lose $2.8 billion in 2010.
“The global economy is recovering from the depths of the financial crisis much more quickly than could have been anticipated,” Giovanni Bisignani, IATA’s Director General and CEO said Monday, in a statement. “Airlines are benefiting from a strong traffic rebound that is pushing the industry into the black. We thought that it would take at least three years to recover the $81 billion 14.3% drop in revenues in 2009. But the $62 billion top line improvement this year puts us about 75% on the way to pre-crisis levels.”
Continue reading Airlines Now Seen Earning $2.5 Billion Globally in 2010, IATA Says
Airlines Now Seen Earning $2.5 Billion Globally in 2010, IATA Says originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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International Air Transport Association - Airline - Giovanni Bisignani - BloggingStocks - Business
This year's E3 Expo is expected to attract around 45,000 visitors, up by 5000 over last year's resurgent event.
That's according to Rich Taylor, the ESA's VP for Communications and Industry Affairs, who told GamesIndustry.biz that international support from the retail and media sectors was also up over 2009.
"For this year, if anything there will be a modest, slight increase in attendee numbers, probably in the region of 45,000 compared to 40,000 last year," he revealed. "We're not tearing the doors off of the Convention Center and waving traffic through the door.
We’ve warned, exposed, and ranted about myPadMedia, but they just won’t stay down! The latest from them shows they’re just getting more brazen as this saga continues.
First, I received this email from manybooks.net over the weekend:
Hi Carly,
I’ve just read your article exposing myPadMedia’s mis-use of Feedbooks.com, and I think they’re doing the same thing to manybooks.net
If you still have an account with myPadMedia would you mind logging in to see if that is the case? I had a few emails from folks yesterday asking for refunds, and if I’ve guessed correctly then I may have blocked them from framing manybooks.net, but I can’t tell without logging in– and I’m loathe to buy an account just to check.
In any case, thanks for writing the exposé!
regards,
-Matt
I checked, and they had already begun relinking to Feedbooks, who were able to block them yet again.
Then I received an email from Matt at epubbooks.com:
Hi Carly,
Earlier today I was contacted by one of the Feedbooks.com guys that myPadMedia are now linking to my site; epubBooks.com.
I also received an email from Jonathan Crawford stating that they have provided “…a link to ePubBooks and…may see some extra traffic from our site because of our recommendation. We hope this is okay.” It seems they are now doing the rounds with different eBook sites.
I’ve only just got home, but I’ll be putting up a redirect as soon as I can.
Best Regards,
Mike CookepubBooks
If you were a member of myPadMedia, you would see this message if you log in:
What amazes me is that myPadMedia just does not give up. They are just hopping from site to site, looking for holes to tap into ebook databases. What’s worst of all is that the longer this goes on, the more people are going to fall for their trickery.
And it looks like myPadMedia has either a twin site, or there’s another ebook scam out there…we were alerted today via a reader about PADbro.com, which bears a striking resemblance to myPadMedia, down to the lack of information about their catalog or what your $47 will buy you.
Worst of all, there’s been no change to the main page of myPadMedia. They still have testimonials up claiming you can read the full “Twilight” saga, for example. I think filling the Grand Canyon with sand using a teaspoon would yield faster results!
But, as always, buyer beware, and if you see something that sounds too good to be true it probably is!
As a consequence of having a really stellar launch, the HTC EVO 4G cause a little havoc for video chat service Qik. The fine folks at Qik are partnering with Sprint to offer video calling on the EVO. Little did they know EVO users would bombard their servers with roughly 20 times the usual traffic. As you can imagine, the servers went down in a big way.
The situation got so bad that the app had to be pulled from the Android Market. Qik promised the app would be back up soon. However, users that managed to get the app before it was removed are still being met with connection failures and overall poor quality of service. Luckily, the EVO is able to use other apps for video including Fring for Android.
We hope they've got a rainy day fund to buy more servers. EVOs aren't likely to stop selling any time soon. Are there any EVO users out there that have had trouble finding or using Qik?
Facebook, in the eyes of some developers, has pruned its platform too hard. Traffic has been falling for many companies, large and small, following the removal of third-party notifications in March and a range of smaller recent changes.
But a feature showed up this weekend, as spotted by Eric von Coelln, that gives developers a new application access point. It is showing bookmarks for games and apps on the far upper right side of application canvas pages, meaning any time a user is on an app, they’ll have the option to easily navigate to other apps they already use.
Specifically, the new bookmark feature shows users their current number of Credits, an option to “Get [Buy] More,” a list of a few apps they use, and a button that says “More.” If they click on the “More” button, the feature will drop down, covering the ads and displaying their full list of bookmarks. Clicking on the links here will take the user to the Games or Apps Dashboards.
Bookmarks have been a key way for apps and users to find each other. Facebook had made them available via a pop-up in a bottom toolbar, until a redesign in February. Then it got rid of that feature, and moved app bookmarks to the left-hand navigation column on the home page. It added the Dashboards to compensate, displaying them pre-filtered views of games and other apps, respectively, but developers have generally reported limited results. The left-hand navigation column, meanwhile, has limited space and highlights web sites and Facebook own apps. Serious social gamers and other app users just don’t have enough space.
We asked Facebook for comment, and it tells us that this new bookmarks feature is part of a larger effort. “We’re working on a series of tests and updates to better position app developers for long-term growth and provide great ways for users to find and return to their favorite apps on Facebook.”
Facebook added some more details on the bookmarks change:
We recently began rolling out additional real estate for app bookmarks above the ad unit on the right side of all apps. This is still in testing but we plan on making it available for all users to make it easier for people to jump from app to app. In early tests, developers saw a noticeable increase in Page views from the more prominent bookmarks.
The feature shows a person’s Credits balance and bookmarked apps in plain view when that person is already interacting with an app or game. A link to the Games Dashboard appears for those in a game, while a link to the Applications Dashboard appears for those in all other applications. If a person does not have enough bookmarks set up, his or her recently used applications will be shown. Bookmarks will also continue to exist on the home page for quick engagement.
One final note. Facebook’s new use of bookmarks here is also not surprising. Unlike deprecated features such as notifications and unprompted wall postings, it requires that users care enough about apps to opt-in to using them. The change doesn’t just help app usage, it does not enable spam.
Remember the story on Read Write Web that was called “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login”? It causes some controversy back then because it made the popular web blog rank in front of Facebook in Google Search for the term Facebook Login. Many Facebook users left comments and messages on the Read Write Web website that were complaining about the design changes of Facebook, others wondered how they could access Facebook from that page.
Read Write Web had to add a bold paragraph to the article that explained to Facebook users that the site was not Facebook.
The recent ranking algorithm changes by Google, dubbed MayDay by webmasters throughout the world, has apparently repeated the ranking problems. The site in position one in the Google Search engine for Facebook Login is a very basic website with the domain name sahabatsejati.com that is currently displaying a 404 error message, most likely caused by the increase in traffic that this highly competitive search term is sending to the site that made it to the top of the Google search engine.
facebook login
The Google cache is still showing the website which does not even contain a link to Facebook.
facebook login not working
The Facebook website is listed in second position right after the dead website. This is a very prominent example of the ranking problems of Google Search. Maybe it is time to switch to another search engine, read Useful Tips To Get The Most Out Of Bing Search for a start.
MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY, Google we have a problem.
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Post tags: facebook, facebook login, Google, google search, mayday, search engine
