The Blog Beat

Google Adsense’s newest product is something they call Video Units (To see what one looks like, check out the link). To sum up what this unit does, you embed the code on your web page (one video unit per page) and based on the category you choose and your content, Google will try to deliver a relevant video, a banner ad above the video and text link ads embedded on the bottom of the video while the video is playing. To sign up for the video units, you need to create/have an account with Youtube, and currently the program is limited to publishers inside the US.

There is one major problem with this type of model, the publisher doesn’t have the ability to pick their own video. While the program tries to play off the viralness of Youtube, publishers don’t know what the actual video will be shown. The publisher is not being paid for the visitor to watch the video either.

“How do I earn with video units?

When you place a video unit on your website, you’ll earn revenue from two types of ad formats: companion ads, which sit above your video content within the player and can be either text or image-based, and text overlay ads, which appear in the bottom 20% of the video content area. Ads on video units can be paid on either a cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand impression basis.” - Google Adsense Help Section

If Google were to pay for visitors whom watch the video, that would be fine and would justify embedding the video on the web page. But not letting the publisher decide the video and then not paying the publisher for putting the video on the page is ridiculous. A publisher can already embed text links and a banner ad on a web page, why does the video unit have to be attached?

You look at your blog almost every day. You write the articles, you picked / made the design, but how does the blog look and read to your visitors? People with different knowledge and different computers are accessing your web page, can anyone come to your website and understand the blog right away?

Can people understand your Writing?

A few months ago, I wrote a lesson plan / tutorial for an art class on using Photoshop. I had written lessons in that subject before, but this time I was faced with a far less tech savvy crowd. One person in particular, the teacher had a particularly hard time following my directions. The things I took for granted, like what the menu bar is, was sudden pushed into the lime light because the teacher couldn’t figure out how to go to File >> New Document.

Does your writing make logical sense to the majority of your audience? Do you assume common lingo without explaining it? It is often said that your blog writing should be on a third grade level. Why? Because that big word or acronym you put in that article might confuse your reader. It is critical that your reader understands the information so they can decide if your website is informative and useful. If they can’t understand the terminology you throw around, you’ll lose potential readers. Make sure even if your article discusses advanced topics, you introduce basic concepts and link to other articles that explain back story.
Often times, you’ll see a news article cover follow up news to a previous story. It is important to brief the reader, and link to previous articles so that if a new reader comes along, they can immerse themselves in the story.
A great way to brief the reader, is to use an appositive, a short phrase that introduce the previously mentioned idea. For example:

The iPhone, Apple’s newest revolutionary product that combines cell phone and iPod, was released across the nation to store lines everywhere.

The appositive is the phrase in between the commas. Sentences like this go a long way to catching the reader up to the story you will cover.

Is your web site presentable on all computers?

I use a PC laptop and a Mac desktop, so I get two very different perspectives. Looking at a website on the PC laptop screen looks tremendously different to the Mac. I designed The Blog Beat on the Mac without consulting the PC during the process. Weeks later though when I viewed and began to read the site on the laptop, I found the font size painfully small (even at 12 pixel font) so I made the size large. I wouldn’t have thought the font was small on the Mac display, but since I changed up my perspective I was able to make my site better.

Testing for web browser can be a pain, even photos in different browsers look different, but it is important to test for all browsers. Your site will look slightly different regardless of your efforts, but if you can provide a similar experience you’ll know what your visitor is getting.

To wrap up, here are some key points to in mind when dealing with your blog day to day.

1. Inform A Beginner Write for the person who doesn’t know what you would be talking about. Bring your reader up to speed before introducing critical concepts in your article.
2. Visitor Audit Have someone who has no knowledge of the blogs topic and have them verbalize there thoughts and questions about the article. This will help you see ambiguities you might have overlooked.
3. Test your site design in different environments. Can a person on a laptop have the same experience as that on a 30″ Apple Cinema Display?

The first ever Blog Beat Contest has ended and I have randomly chosen: Blog Gigs & Extra for Every Publisher. I first though want to thank everyone that took the time to enter the contest, and I wish everyone could win. Don’t worry though, we’ll have new contests soon.

Congratulations to the winners. Blog Gigs will receive the banner advertisement for the month, while Extra for Every Publisher will hold the top spot on the button ads.

The winners have until Thursday at 12:00pm to reply, if not, then I’ll randomly select another winner, so there is a small chance you could win.

Thats all for now. I’ll be publishing so more informative articles very soon on getting traffic to your site. Also if you haven’t already, check out “What To Write About When You Have Nothing To Write About” & “Does Your Blog Deliver on its Promises to Readers?” I really liked how these articles turned out.

Cash Quests, a blog “100% about making money”, has recently crossed it’s 800th RSS subscriber. Now if you look at subscriber graph, it’s a pretty boring except for the fact that it gets higher and higher each and every month. There are no giant spikes or dips, just a steady increase over the blogs 8 month existence.
Cash Quest is one of the most unconventional blogs you’ll find these days. Articles like “All Guest Bloggers Must Die” go against the grain, and “AGLOCO Scam Tries To Silence Cash Quests” seek to persecute companies with spotty business practices. Continue Reading »

The results for the first day of Blog Rush traffic are in. What is Blog Rush? It’s a widgets built around a system that displays participating blogs to basically trade headline exposure with the hope that visitors will click on the headlines. Bloggers display the widget to receive traffic in exchange for showing other blog’s headlines. Blog Rush waited quite a while before releasing their stats to users stating,

“We encountered some minor issues with the batch processing of our first cycle of member statistics (it’s a lot of data to crunch) and we just about have it fixed. We hope to have your statistics up and running very soon as we know they are very important to you. We just need a little bit more time.” Continue Reading »

Over the last week, I’ve had trouble delivering quality articles. I have ideas that have turned into half baked articles, but nothing worth publishing yet. I wanted to publish guest blog articles on other sites, but since I can barely scrap up enough articles to publish on The Blog Beat, it looks like I’ll have to keep everything to myself for now.

So since I’m having trouble coming up with fresh material, I figured I’d answer my own problem. What do I write about when I’m lacking material to publish? So here is a list of tricks to get through tough creative times and create new material for readers. Continue Reading »

In the second installment of Link Love, we’ll focus strictly on driving traffic to your site.

• 1. John Chow breaks down how he gets traffic to his site on the Lab with Leo Laporte.
• 2. Mark at 45n5 shows how to market your content to other bloggers via email. Now what makes this video great was that he showed how he used an email campaign, and the success that resulted. This is the type of testimonial is a great way to convince and educate your readers.
• 3. John Robinson reported that he received 200 visitors alone just by being the first to comment on a John Chow article. I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna get my comment swerve on John Chow dot com.
• 4. Image SEO Taylor over at Super Blogging Tips shows how to properly tag your image html to get good rankings in Google Images. From my own personal experience, Google Images can send you a lot of traffic. Even more traffic then regular Google web results.

Thats all for now, but remember, The Blog Beat contest is still running and if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Blog Beat!

Web surfers have attention deficit disorder. They like to move from page to page in a whim, and if they can’t load your website in a whim, you’ve potentially lost your reader. If your reading this blog, your a web surfer and can attest to this yourself. If you can’t load a website in a certain amount of time, you ditch the site. While your web host plays is a large part of this mix, you can do your part in optimizing your website to its fullest abilities. Continue Reading »