“Monetizing Your Site” Powerpoint
Here’s the Powerpoint from my “Monetizing Your Website” session at the Search Engine Room conference last week in Sydney. It’s mainly about how to improve your monetization (as a publisher, not an advertiser) of the Google ads (and other contextual ads) that display from Google AdSense, but some is also relevant to YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) and other contextual advertising platforms. Enjoy!
Download PPT (1 meg)
Clever YouTube Marketers
It can be really hard to compete for eyeballs in YouTube with so many videos being posted every day. Some marketers manage to stand out in the crowd with their videos. Here are a few I think are worth mentioning…
- Will it Blend? by Blendtec — Tom Dixon, founder of Blendtec, made a whole series of videos of himself blending all sorts of crazy things in his rugged and seemingly indestructible blenders, including marbles, iPods and rake handles.
- Sue Teller by Mountain Dew. Here is an elderly lady who is really down with the haps sharing her streetwise tips for young people. It is a real hoot.
- TaxRap contest by Intuit’s TurboTax division — They recruited rapper Vanilla Ice to kick off their video contest where you can rap about taxes and maybe win $25,000. Nice integration of celebrity endorsement (which incidentally, Intuit got for a very reasonable price), consumer generated content, and a contest with a highly motivating prize.
- Mr Cupid by Ice.com. Ice.com founder Pinny Gniwisch made his first foray into YouTube marketing as “Mr. Cupid” — his code name on the streets of Manhattan, on the slopes in Utah, and places in between, where he asks passers-by questions about Valentines Day. Some of these clips are quite humorous and Pinny shows his stuff as being a very talented interviewer.
- Zeros by NBC. This is a spoof on the popular TV show Heroes. Very funny. It isn’t immediately obvious that NBC is behind it, but it’s a bit too professional to have been done by an amateur. So when it was revealed that NBC was behind it, it wasn’t a big surprise.
- Tea Partay by Smirnoff — This one is done as a music video and is really hysterical.
The most important WordPress plugin for SEO
As you know, title tags are the most important on-page factor. They are given the most weight out of anything on the page as far as the search engines are concerned. So it is a huge weakness in WordPress (and most other blog platforms for that matter) that the post title is used as the title tag, usually with some other extraneous bits added on like the name of the blog. That is far from optimal SEO! Instead, you should be able to handcraft your own title tags independently of the post title — interject synonyms, rearrange the word order, and so forth.
My SEO Title Tag plugin, which has been out since middle of last year, allows you to do just that. But wait, there’s more…!
I am happy to tell you that I, along with some of my talented programmers here at Netconcepts, have made a major update to the plugin. Indeed, we have really made some magic, as you shall soon see!
I’m pleased to announce the SEO Title Tag WordPress plugin… Version 2.0 beta!
The plugin now allows you to mass edit title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages, tag conjunction pages, archive by month pages, indeed any URL, all in one go.
It also now has a title tag input box on the Edit and Write forms for pages and posts, so no more having to use the custom field box.
It allows you to set a title tag for your 404 error pages and for internal search results pages too.
Not only can you now view all your title tags across all of your posts/pages at once. You can also revise your titles right there within that report! This mass editing functionality is available under the Manage > Title Tags tab in the WordPress admin.
Here’s what the mass editing admin looks like:
Maybe I am tooting my own horn a bit too much here, but I think this plugin is the best thing to have ever happened to WordPress — as far as SEO is concerned! 
The plugin also plays nicely with the plethora of meta tag plugins out there, such as Add Meta Tags and Another WordPress Meta Plugin. You can choose to use category descriptions as title tags on category pages, or you can choose not to. The latter is the preferred option if you are using a meta tag plugin, because most of those use the category’s description field for the meta description tag on the category page. Don’t worry though! You can still set custom titles for your category pages — even if you are using the description field for your meta descriptions.
The plugin is WordPress 2.1 compatible. If upgrading from the previous version of SEO Title Tag, be sure to deactivate the old version before installing the new version. When you activate the new version, it will create some new database tables.
I welcome any and all feedback to that plugin and I hope it is of value to all you bloggers using WordPress.
I’d love to hear of any success stories using this plugin and the rankings and traffic benefits that ensue. Please report back and regale me with your stories of hockey stick graphs! 
Now go get the plugin! Enjoy!
Make the most of your ‘Thank You’ pages
The confirmation/thank you that you get when you first sign up for an email newsletter, a webinar, a special offer, or what have you, is a really important first impression. If you send a confirmation email, that email sets the tone for your email relationship and, if it is personality-free and dry and offers no value, not only is it a wasted opportunity it really starts things off on the wrong foot.
I have blogged before about how to write Thank You emails. Now MarketingSherpa has covered the related topic, of Thank You web pages…
According to MarketingSherpa: “When a prospect signs up for a webinar — or a white paper or newsletter for that matter — be sure to include more hotlinks or offers on the ‘Thank you’ page they see right after submitting their registration. Prospects are in the perfect mood right then to learn more about you, so they may click on links for white papers or other offers. Why not deepen the relationship right then?”
In fact, their research pointed to 39% of viewers accepting offers on ‘thank you’ pages.
It is amazing the proliferation of “thank you for (ordering/signing up/inquiring)” pages that contain … well, nothing else. No offer. No suggestions like ”if you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy reading this …white paper, article, news release.” As MarketingSherpa says “they are wasting valuable real estate.”
A fundraising/nonprofit consultant I know says that the ‘thank you’ is the beginning of the next ‘ask’. There’s a lesson here for us for-profit folks too: don’t let an opportunity go by where you could be cross-selling and up-selling.
Speaking at Search Engine Room in Sydney
I’ll be at the Search Engine Room conference in Sydney on March 20 and 21. I will be presenting two different sessions; one on monetization strategies, e.g. Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, affiliate links, etc., and the other is “Not Quite Search Marketing 101.”
It should be a great conference with hundreds of delegates and some great speakers. For example, Lee Odden will be speaking about SEO PR, blog optimization, and social media — he’ll be coming all the way from Minneapolis. The conference will also have the first live demo in Australia of Yahoo’s new Panama platform. Google will be speaking as well, specifically Google engineer Aaron D’Souza and Google business exec Richard Kimber (Managing Director of Sales and Operations – SE Asia).
It’s worth noting that Google really is the 800 lb gorilla in Australia, even more so than in the U.S. Google commands 89% of the Australian paid search marketplace, leaving only 5% to Yahoo. And 76% of Australians use Google. (source: BRW Magazine). You’ll find similar ratios in New Zealand as well.
There is also a Sydney Webloggers Meetup at 7.00pm on March 20, scheduled that date in order to coincide with Search Engine Room. I will be there, as well as at the conference of course. So if you’re going to be attending either, please come and introduce yourself to me. I’d love to meet up with some of my readers… the drinks are on me!
Now a columnist at Search Engine Land
For those who are into search engine marketing, you should definitely be reading Search Engine Land if you don’t already. I am happy to announce that I am now one of five columnists writing their brand new 100% Organic column. I just had an article come out last week called “Good Cloaking, Evil Cloaking & Detection.
The other columnists for the 100% Organic column are: Greg Boser, Todd Friesen, Shari Thurow, and Jill Whalen… so I will be in great company. The column will appear every Thursday and my articles will appear every fifth week.
Now you can draw on the wall and not get in trouble
I am a sucker for cool gadgets like the multitouch display that I blogged about last month.
The latest cool gadget that I just discovered is a laser light crayon from Philips. Mostly it’s a toy for kids. But I think it also has applications in the workplace, particularly for those executives who can’t express themselves unless they are in front of a whiteboard with marker in hand. This is just the sort of creativity tool that I could imagine Googlers at the ‘plex really getting into.
Check out this video and see how it works:
The key to the whole thing is the bucket. It is a laser projector that projects light onto the wall. Thus, unlike real crayons, the scribbling is totally nondestructive. Along with the magical bucket comes a multi-coloured brush, an eraser, and a magic wand to bring the drawings to life. The magic wand was the most surprising bit — with a flick of the wrist you can animate your drawing.
This is unreal. I want one!