The Daily Feed Issue #35: Feedjit launches Geo-targeted ads

September 27th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #35 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.


This morning we have a big announcement. A few minutes ago we launched a geo-targeted ad network that lets you run targeted ads on our global network of blogs.

I am excited because it lets many of our customers narrowly target to their exact demographic. For example, last week one of our customers was a Spanish social networking site. You can now select the top 22 Spanish speaking countries with a single click and show your ad in only those countries.

We have included a powerful feature that lets you select pre-defined lists of countries and then manually edit your list. For example, you could select the G20 countries and then add and subtract countries manually. You could also select all countries with over 50% Internet penetration or all countries with Portuguese as a first language.

We launched a test version on Sunday morning and a few of our advertisers discovered the geo-targeting feature and placed ads. One of our bloggers has placed a narrowly targeted ad in India, Kuwait, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The blog entry discusses a Hindi action film and he’s seeing an excellent click-through rate from the relevant target market.

Let me know what you think. As always you can email me at my personal email address mark@feedjit.com. I’d love to hear your impressions and feedback.

Regards,

Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO

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The Daily Feed Issue #34: Polar Bears and how to write your own press release

September 24th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #34 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.


We had another day of great ads with Feedjit Rush. There was one ad in particular that caught our eye, posted by Bob McKerrow, a New Zealander and titled “Save the Polar Bear”. Bob’s ad links to his blog which has some great data on the Arctic Ocean. He discusses the latest developments regarding mining and mineral rights in that area and the potential impact it could have. Bob’s blog entry contains a lot of well researched data.

If you would like to help share the message and data that Bob has on his blog, drop us an email when you purchase a Feedjit Rush ad tomorrow and we’ll add the same number of impressions that you bought to Bob’s Polar Bear ad at no extra cost to you.

Now, lets discuss writing your own Press Release.

By far the best book I’ve read on writing news releases is “The Associated Press Guide to News Writing” [Links to a Google search]. It’s an essential read and will give you the guidelines that the best in the business use for writing news and feature releases. Read it cover to cover before you put out your release. It contains a lot of great writing tips that you’ll use even after you’re done your PR campaign.

When you’re writing your news release, the most important component is the headline. You should spend three to five times as much time on the headline as on the body text.  It is what news men read to decide if they want to know more.

Start your body text with the date and the city in which the release is written. If the city is confusing because there are multiple locations or you don’t have a location then you can omit the location. The first sentence is your lead and it is almost, but not quite, as important as your headline. The next 2 sentences should expand on your lead.

The body of your news release is simply well presented data that journalists will mash up into an article they can call their own. It needs to be well written and present the facts starting with the most pertinent and interesting first. It should be concise but not choppy or clinical. It should convey data that is worth printing.

Don’t make your press release longer than 400 words. Journalists are busy and they will contact you if the are covering you in detail and need more information.

If you’re a company, include a brief company “bio” at the end of your release.

The absolute best advice I can give you if you’re doing a news release is to read releases from fortune 500 companies. They employ the best copy writers in the world to write their releases. Study the format and style and imitate them freely. Google’s press release archive is a great place to start.

When reading the press release archives of companies, note in particular how they use quotes. Not where the quote is positioned in the release and how it’s incorporated into the copy. Most company news releases I’ve seen include a quote that a journalist can lift verbatim and incorporate into their story. This acquisition announcement by Google is a great example.

That’s it for today. In a future issue I’ll cover how to get your press release out into the wild and covered by journalists.

Regards,

Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #33: A surprising discovery about what people like

September 23rd, 2010

Welcome to Issue #33 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.


Our Feedjit Rush launch yesterday was incredibly exciting. We’ve had everyone from major universities to gaming companies sign up and send a surge of visitors to their sites. We’ve also learned some surprising things about what kinds of ads generate high click-through rates. Rather than focus on PR today, I want to share one of the surprising things we learned.

We had a number of great ads appear today on Rush. Many of them were clearly written by experienced copyrighters. We saw a lot of variations in font size, font family, italics and so on. But early in the day someone posted an ad that generated a surprisingly high click-through rate.

The ad used simple Arial size 14 text with a bold headline that simply said: “Life is Wonderful”.

The positive message in this ad reminds me of a story Robert Cialdini tells in the book Influence about a car salesman. Every month Joe Girard sends over 13,000 cards to previous customers with a simple message: “I like you”. It may sound corny, but Joe Girard holds the Guinness world record for being the most successful car salesman in history.

It goes to show that people still love a positive message.

Regards,

Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder and CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #32: Get a Rush of Visitors

September 22nd, 2010

Welcome to Issue #32 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.


We have a very exciting announcement today. About an hour ago we launched a new product called Feedjit Rush. With Rush you can put a 2 line text ad in the bottom of our popular Live Traffic Feed and have it appear 1 Million times across our global network of blogs. We display your ad as fast as our network allows sending you a Rush of visitors in under 2 hours.

Standard CPM ad pricing for a blog ad would cost between $1,000 and $15,000 for 1 million impressions. At Feedjit we think that’s a little overpriced, so we’re changing the game. For a limited time we’re offering Feedjit Rush for $49 for 1 Million impressions. You won’t find better pricing that targets a global audience of bloggers and blog readers anywhere else.

We’ve also built great features into Feedjit Rush. You can customize the font and the text size of your ad. We also give you a link to a real-time report that shows impressions and clicks as they occur. Feedjit Rush even includes SMS alerts as your ad starts and finishes.

Click here to get 1 Million impressions for $49 and take advantage of this limited time offer.

Because Rush is hot off the press, I’d like your feedback. Please email me personally at mark@feedjit.com with your comments.

Tomorrow I’m going to complete Monday’s post on writing your own press release.

Kind regards,

Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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How Feedjit respects your privacy

September 21st, 2010

At Feedjit we are constantly reviewing our privacy policies and communicating with the online community to ensure that your privacy is respected at all times. We were the first analytics company to introduce the ability to remove yourself from our logs and to ignore your visits. Most competing products still don’t offer this feature and we encourage them to do so to respect the privacy of the online community.

We also allow you to modify the location that is shown on all Feedjit sites and that we log. If you’d prefer that we list your location as Seattle instead of New York, we can do that for you. Simply visit this page to change your location. This is another feature that we were the first and are still the only analytics company to offer.

If you visit a site that uses the Live Traffic Feed, simply click the “Menu” link at the bottom and you will be given the opportunity to change your location or ignore your visits on that particular site. If you would like to remove all visits we’ve logged for you, click the “Real-time view” link and then click the “Remove your IP” button and all your visits will be instantly removed. No other stats or analytics product offers this level of privacy control.

Most of the features I’ve described above were suggestions from our user community that we acted on. We welcome your continued feedback. Our customer service team gives privacy inquiries the highest priority. If you have questions, comments or feature suggestions regarding your online privacy, don’t hesitate to contact us by using our contact page.

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The Daily Feed Issue #31: How long does SEO take – Update!

September 21st, 2010

Welcome to Issue #31 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. If you have questions about SEO, SEM or getting traffic, please post them to 503me.com (it’s free).


Today I’m going to post an update on how long SEO takes. But first I’d like to draw your attention to the best traffic related advice I’ve seen on our question/answer site 503me.com so far. A few hours ago DomainNameNinja answered a question from a blogger asking how to get more traffic to their art blog. Great SEO and general marketing advice.
Today we also added a few new features. We launched spam filtering on comments. And if you are one of our top users (by karma) and you flag something as spam, it’s now instantly removed.
A week ago in Issue #25 I wrote about early stage SEO and how to measure your SEO progress. I used 503me.com as a case study and I said that we’re tracking a search query for “is the meta keywords tag still important” (without quotes) and monitoring where we rank for that query. At the time we ranked 250th.
As of today we rank #1 for that query. Not bad for a domain that was registered 12 days ago. Lets chat about how we climbed the SERP rankings so quickly…

We created a site with lots of new, unique and useful content. We made sure that Google could understand the site structure and that the URL’s were descriptive. We also let the right people know about the site i.e. we got a bunch of high quality links from sites related to SEO and to getting traffic. It’s that simple.

I know I’ve beaten this horse to death, but I’m going to (yet again!) remind you of my basic SEO philosophy:

“Create new, unique and useful web pages, host them on a user-friendly website that Google can understand and make sure the right people know about them.”
Now that we’re number #1 for our control query, we’re going to have to find another query to monitor our performance. I’m going to choose something similar, but more general and competitive. Lets go with the search “meta keywords tag” without quotes. Right now we rank 550th for that query. OUCH! But hey, the team at Feedjit likes a challenge. We’ll keep using 503me as a control for our SEO conversation and we’ll track how we do for that query in the coming weeks.
I hope your week is exceeding your expectations. Have an awesome Tuesday!
Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #30: Are press releases worth it?

September 20th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #30 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. If you have questions about SEO, SEM or getting traffic, please post them to 503me.com (it’s free).


Today we’re going to chat about press releases and if it’s worth the time and money to put out a press release. First lets define what a press release is. There are generally two kinds: News releases and feature releases. News press releases are announcements. Feature releases are columns, articles and essays that are designed to be republished by newspapers and magazines verbatim as filler content.

Press releases are generally hit and miss. I have had no success putting out press releases on free services. I’ve also had no success getting feature releases covered. You may have better luck, but in the last 5 years and 4 separate companies, that has been my experience.

Paid services like PRNewsWire have shown us better results. However, commercial newswire services are very expensive. The last release we did on a commercial US only network cost over $700. However, a few weeks later when a competitor was featured in the New York Times, we were mentioned in the article too. I’m reasonably sure that the press release was responsible for the coverage.

There are certain kinds of releases that are almost guaranteed to get covered. A friend who used to be part of Microsoft’s marketing team once told me that the press loves transactions. If your company just raised a round of funding, if you’ve merged with another business, if you have just signed a significant strategic partnership, these are all announcements that are very likely to get covered.

In general I find that paying a large commercial PR wire service to put your release on the wire is not worth it. However, I have good news: You can put out your own press release, it won’t cost you a cent and you may see better results than a wire service. Tomorrow I’m going to tell you how to do it.

Regards,

Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #29: Why testing matters

September 17th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #29 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. If you have questions about SEO, SEM or getting traffic, please post them to 503me.com (it’s free).


So far as part of our focus on quality and testing on your site this week we’ve covered which browsers you should be testing your site in, how to create a mini test lab on your Mac or PC and what you should be testing. So what does all this testing get you? Here is why testing is important and why you should spend an hour or two each week on QA (quality assurance) on your site:
  • It will help your search rankings. Checking your site speed, catching dead links, making sure all your pages link to each other and there are no orphaned pages. All these things will help your search ranking.
  • It will decrease bounce rate. If your visitors find a fast, attractive and highly usable site they’re more likely to view a second and third page.
  • It will increase loyalty. Good quality sites get return visitors.
  • It will make your visitors more likely to take the action you want them to. You are more likely to buy on a site that looks great and works great.
  • It will make other sites more likely to link to you, giving your long term SEO a boost.
If you run a small business or you’re just getting started, you don’t have the resources to hire a QA team or outsource your QA. So my recommendation is that you make Thursday’s QA day. Take a few hours on Thursday morning and run through your site in all the browsers I’ve mentioned. Check for the problems we’ve covered this week. Run your site through the W3C’s dead link detector. Spending a few hours each week will ensure you have a great site that is climbing in the search rankings and is building a loyal and growing visitor base.

Thanks to our top users on 503me.com late this week for helping out answering questions while I’ve been on the road.

Have a great weekend and we’ll be back on Monday.

Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #28: What to test on your site

September 16th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #28 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. If you have questions about SEO, SEM or getting traffic, please post them to 503me.com (it’s free).


Today I’m going to chat about what you should be testing on your site. Earlier this week I covered which browsers you should be testing in and yesterday we chatted about how to create a mobile test lab on a Mac or PC.

Always test the most important pages and components on your site the most. If you run a shopping website, test every page in your funnel all the way through checkout. On a typical shopping site that would include your home page, your product catalog, your shopping cart pages and your credit card page.

It sounds obvious that you should test the most important pages and functions the most, but often when you release a new feature, you’ll focus on testing that specific feature and you might miss that it’s broken your shopping cart and that you’re going to be losing money for the next few days.

When we release a new feature on Feedjit, no matter what it is we’ll go through our checkout system and place a few orders in all major browsers we use for testing. Those orders cost us a few bucks in transaction processing fees, but it’s worth doing the test to make sure we’re not going to lose thousands of dollars in revenue.

When testing your site you should be looking for the following in all your test browsers:
  • Site speed. I’ve chatted about this a lot so you already know how important it is and how to measure it. Different browsers use different rendering engines and javascript engines, so they’ll perform differently.
  • Javascript errors. Some browsers will generate errors on Javascript code that others will execute just fine. For example, Internet Explorer doesn’t like certain javascript data structures that other browsers are OK with. So test them all.
  • Rendering bugs – where the page doesn’t look the same across all browsers. I find the most common issue is a site looking fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer 8 and it looks awful in Internet Explorer 7. Remember to check your site using IE8′s compatibility mode.
  • Applications that don’t work e.g. check your commenting system and make sure the comments are posted and that they look the way you’d expect.
  • On secure sites, make sure your SSL certificate is up do date and there are no browser warnings about insecure components on secure pages.
  • Flash applications that don’t run.
  • Animations that slow down the browser too much.
  • Check all your links to make sure they work. See below for more info:
One of the most common problems that even the pro’s still encounter is dead links. One of the best dead-link checkers available is run by the W3C and it’s completely free. You can find it on this page. It takes some time to run because they have put in a 1 second delay between each link checked, but it’s worth the wait. At the end of the check you’ll get a report at the bottom of the page showing dead links.

In general you should behave like a user on your own site. Don’t take a mechanical approach to testing and keep your objectivity. It’s easy to learn to ignore problems that make a big difference to someone who has never used your site. Always look at your site with fresh eyes and always work at constantly improving it.

Tomorrow I’m going to chat about why quality matters when marketing your site.

Regards,

Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #27: Creating a mobile test lab for your site

September 15th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #27 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. If you have questions about SEO, SEM or getting traffic, please post them to 503me.com (it’s free).


Today I’m going to describe how to create a basic mobile test lab on your PC or Mac. Before I do that, there was an interesting question posted a few hours ago on 503me asking whether RSS is dead. I’m curious to know how many of you still use RSS, so post an answer and let us know.

Lets chat about setting up a mobile test lab for your site on your PC laptop or Macbook. First, lets cover the easy one: PC.

PC or PC Laptop

The great thing about PC’s is that they come with Internet explorer. The Mac guys have to jump through a few hoops to get this set up (see below).

Here are the browsers you need to install on your PC laptop to get your lab set up:
  • Internet Explorer 8 (and use compatibility mode as described yesterday to simulate version 7)
  • Google Chrome 6
  • Firefox 3.6
  • Opera 10.62
  • Safari for Windows (optional)
The above setup will catch most rendering and page execution bugs. Google Chrome uses the same rendering engine (called WebKit) as Safari, so testing in Chrome will catch a lot of problems that would have also shown up in Safari, so I’ve marked Safari as optional.


Macbook or Mac workstation

You absolutely must test your site in Internet Explorer version 8. It’s essential. So you can’t use a Mac as a test lab unless you run a virtual machine. My mobile test lab runs on a Macbook Pro. I run something called VMWare which allows me to simultaneously run Windows inside Mac’s OS X. Unfortunately VMWare is a commercial product and it costs about $80 bucks. You’ll also have to get licensed copies of the Windows versions you want to run.

VMWare is great. I can run multiple versions of Windows simultaneously and switch between them as I’m working. I usually run Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. On these I run Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 respectively. Then on OS X itself (the Mac operating system that is hosting all these virtual machines) I run Chrome, Safari and Firefox. I even have a Linux version running in a virtual machine in case I want to test that too.

With this setup I can grab my Macbook, hit the road and if a customer calls with a problem on a certain operating system in a certain browser, I am 100% sure I can reproduce the problem on an operating system and browser that is exactly the same or very close to what the customer is using. As a blogger, if someone tells you your new blog commenting system isn’t working in Internet Explorer 7 on Windows, you can test it right away.

There are several other virtual machine platforms available for OS X, but I stick to VMWare because it’s the most stable and reliable.

Assuming you have a virtual machine running a Windows version on your Mac, you need to test the following browsers:
  • Internet Explorer 8 (and test in compatibility mode)
  • Google Chrome 6
  • Firefox 3.6
  • Safari
  • Opera
  • Bonus points for testing IE6 and 7 in separate virtual machines.

Tomorrow I’ll start chatting about what tests you should be doing on your blog and website to make sure your site quality is excellent in all browsers.

Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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