Jay Meydad's Life Mashup

In the last year I have seen several house ads running on the AdSense network, promoting different Google services such as Chrome, Picasa and Google Analytics. But today while reading TechCrunch, I saw for the first time an ad targeted to acquire new advertisers.

I wonder if that is a response to the fact Microsoft AdCenter came out of beta recently or to the Bing launch, a search engine that I highly recommend using.

BTW, does anyone know if (and how much) Google pays publishers when visitors clicks on these house ads and take action (download picasa or chrome, sign up for analytics or as advertisers)?

google-house-ad-adwords

My blog gets a fairly small number of visitors and page views every month. But just like TechCrunch, Fred Wilson and Sean Percival, I decided to take a look at my Google Analytics account and see how much link love social media services like Twitter, Facebook and others send here.

Below is February 09 referring sites data and a couple of observations:

• February was not a usual month for this blog in term of traffic. At the begining of the month, my Tropicana’s poor re-branding post was picked by FastCompany and the blog recieved (and still continues to) large number of readers.
• As pointed out by the bloggers I mentioed above, social media services are becoming major traffic drivers in the overall mix of referring sites. Specifically in my blog’s case, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Ginx (a Twitter interface), Facebook and Outbrain appear high on the list. In addition, their positions improved compared to previous months.
• Users referred by social media services seems to be of “better quality” than users referred by Google. These users tend to spend more time and often read more than the specific page they land on. In addition, a smaller percentage of them, compared to users referred by search engines, hit the browser’s Back button immediately after seeing the landing page (bounce rate %).

I will keep following whether this trend continues to grow over time and post about it.

Yesterday this blog & I reached some pretty encouraging milestones:

Milestone 1- My previous post, about Outbrain’s round B, was my 200th post since I began blogging almost 2 years ago. Who would imagine that would happen so fast?

Milestone 2 - The same 200th blog post made it to Techmeme and that was the first time my blog was featured on the popular tech news aggregation service.

Milestone 3 – My 198th post about Tropicana’s terrible re-branding was mentioned in this FastCompany article about Pepsi’s logo redesign. That article has been sending tons of new traffic to my blog. It was the first time a post I wrote received over 1000 unique page views in one day (to be precise, 1127 UPV on 2/11/2009).

I wonder what would be the next one?

One of my new year resolutions was to refresh the design of this blog with a new theme. I am happy that it took me less than a month to complete it and get it off my task list.

I am now using the stylish iNove theme, created by mg12. I like its simplicity, cleanses and how it brings the content to the front. I also find the RSS button implementation very cool (hover over the button to see it). Hopefully it will get more people to subscribe to this blog and consume my thoughts regularly via RSS readers or email.

I kept only the essential widgets on the site in order to shorten page load time:

• Twitter badge shows the number of followers I have on twitter (if you are not one of them, now it is a good time to do it) and the latest twits.
• MyBlogLog gives me information about the community who reads this blog
• Disqus powers the comments and integrates very well with this theme and Wordpress
• Outbrain lets you rate my posts and provide feedback that helps me improve my writing over time
• And of course, all external hyperlinks are enhanced using the product we have created at Snap – SnapShots
• For analytics I use both SiteMeter and Google Analytics.

The last credit goes to Alex Sirota, founder of FoxyTunes, who took my portrait picture that is displayed at the top right corner.

I hope you will like like the new design as much as I do.

Several readers and friends have asked me for tips and suggestions on how they can improve their blog or how to start  a blog. I thought it would make sense to list what powers this blog.

• Hosting service – I host this domain on BlueHost.com were I get much more that what I used to get from my previous crappy provider. I get more space (disk space, # of domains, email accounts etc), better tools, good CS support and a good price.

• Blogging platform - I use Wordpress.org (self hosted). In my opinion this open source blogging platform is the best. It keeps evolving, improving and it provides a large variety of themes and plug-ins which extends ever further the platform’s capabilities. I have tried using other platforms such as Typepad, Vox, Blogger and the hosted Wordpress.com and none come close to the capabilities of a self hosted Wordpress.org blog.

• Wordpress Plug-ins - One of the great things about Wordpress is the variety of themes and plug-ins. The control panel inside Wordpress makes it very easy to activate/deactivate plug-ins or switch themes. Here are the ones that are currently installed:
  • SnapShots – The product I am very proud to be one of its creators, provides a better user experience and an entirely new source of ad inventory for every web site owners.
  • Akisment – eliminate blog comments spam
  • Wordpress Blog stats
  • All In One SEO pack
  • iWPhone – A plug-in that automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone.
  • AddThis – social bookmarking & sharing made easy
  • Wordpress Database backup
  • Current theme installed is ISM – this might change in the future

• Other Sidebar widgets
  • Lijit – Search tools for a blog
  • MyBlogLog
  • Feedburner for content syndication (don’t forget to offer a “Subscribe By Email” option)
  • Site Analytics done by Google Analytics, SiteMeter with help from Lijit and MyBlogLog (all services show different stats for some reason…)

• Desktop blogging application – Windows Live Writer makes blogging very easy. I wrote in the past a detailed post, followed by another one, about it.

I hope it helps those who are currently blogging or about to start blogging.