Advertise This: Today’s Ad Placements Suck

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few weeks working on TechWhirl’s advertising program.  Currently, we have sponsorships, which are large money long term relationships but as of now there’s nothing for smaller companies who need or want a smaller relationship.

The work has been some classic MBA work with a hint of benchmarking, a little strategy and marketing.  I know enough to not expect a great day of data so I’ve made do with what I could find; and what I could assume.  As of today, I think we have our upper bound on the amount we can charge the market.

Pricing aside, online advertising sucks.  The placement sucks.  The designs suck.  It’s as if all the bad things about TV ads were magically transported to the web but without 99% of the entertainment value.  Sucks. Sucks. Sucks. Our philosophy with our magazine is that we want to respect the reader with great content and a nice and elegant design.  Part of this means that we have to avoid flashing ads, rotating ads, and anything designed to “interupt” the reader.  Why in the hell would we want to “interupt” the reader – to me that just irritates the reader and doesn’t actually get a quality click for the advertising company?

Our first version of the advertising will be a field experiment into good placement so that a reader sees the ad at the moment they’re ready to make the decision to click.  Either they’ve already read the article and they’re ready to do something else, or they were searching for that company or product to begin with.  I certainly wish we had more cash in hand to allow us to try and build a better advertising placement model, but since my partner and I couldn’t live with ourselves if we didn’t do what is right, I guess we’ll have to bootstrap innovative designs as well.

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Search Engine Optimization – the Death of the Pronoun

It’s a rainy Sunday morning in the Martine house. I’ve been outside my house awake for the last two hours now, not because I’m worried about the fact two of my largest sponsors haven’t returned my emails concerning a pretty high percentage of next year’s total revenue, or even because of any of the now nearly constant issues occurring in Morgantown these days. Nope. It’s because my damn gutter near our bedroom window is overflowing thanks to a couple birds, leaves, and no doubt some terrorist like activities from our backyard squirrel. I probably should delete the last line or Mrs. M will escalate her shadow war on the fuzzy little pest.

The above paragraph was not search engine optimized. See, I used pronouns and didn’t repeat the same word 25 times for density. If it had been search engine optimized, by that I mean SEO, or also search engine marketing I’d have repeated SEO, search engine optimization and search engine marketing numerous times in hopes of creating “key word density”. SEO is the new driver of my world thanks to a number of things.

First, TechWhirl ranks remarkably low on most searches other than our own name. Second, frankly I mistakenly thought that if we created a good looking site, which was structured well for search (copy instead of images for labels, CSS vs. table layout) and it had killer content Google would find it without a problem. And, before I hear the black helicopters of big G start circling the house they’ve already documented from space Google and Bing have sort of indexed the site. What hasn’t happened is that many of these posts don’t rank very high, nor do we rank particularly high on big picture technical communication searches such as “what is technical writing.”

Currently search only brings us about a third of all visitors. Since we have almost no budget other than a couple special events and the occasional free $50 on Facebook this number is far, far too low. Search should contribute to around 80 to 90% of all visitors since our marketing reaches around 400 people and there’s a couple billion people conducting searches for everything from car reviews to new pictures of clowns and donkeys.

Now that a majority of our technical work is done, it’s time to start increasing our profile with search engines. Connie and I have gotten ourselves a good little book called Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day and have been working through it.

My biggest take-away so far is that the bad guys who try to game the Google and Bing algorithms are winning. They’ve figured out how to fark with the priority system so much that G and B have had to make less than useful changes to their ranking systems. Now, if you don’t have a good landing page with the right page name, title, web title, description and those darn key words then forget about a high ranking unless the search is pretty obscure. Maybe it’s just bad memory, but I don’t remember it being like this eight to 9 years ago when I was doing a good bit of web work (and launched this blog).

So far, the search spiders can’t seem to understand pronouns and what they are referring too. This isn’t that surprising considering I doubt a decent percentage of American youth (or my age to be fair) really understand the concept either – yo. However, until these search engines become better and figuring out the nuances of the English language the poor pronoun is going to take it in the pants.

Connie and I have decided that while our posts certainly will keep an eye on key words and ensure that we do a lot of the stuff the SEO book suggests, we will not sacrifice good writing. We’re a magazine and website network for writers for goodness sake. Our hope is that the big brains at Google and Bing when they’re not inventing cars that drive by themselves or killing remarkable next-gen tablets (Courier we never knew ye’) can either build or buy technology that helps those little spiders become more like a well educated English majors at Princeton rather than a high school dropouts with lobotomies.

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Biggest Challenge Yet: Playing Real Journalists

Lavacon TechWhirl BusThis entire thing started off innocently enough.  Connie and I wanted to go to a Technical Communications conference in Austin so I wrote the organizer and asked if he would like to trade some advertising and coverage for a couple spots at the event.  This was the same thing we did for the STC conference in the spring. 

And then the dam broke.

The organizer of the LavaCon Conference, Jack Molisani, quickly replied and said that he was very interested and wanted to know what we could do.  Connie and I said that we could do a little coverage but since we were a small team so Jack suggested a contest for a couple additional bloggers.

Water starts rushing down the river picking up me and Connie.

We run the contest.  In addition to those two spots, Jack is kind enough to also allow a couple of our regular writers to attend. So, at the end of the day we’re going to LavaCon with a team of five people (contest winners Lois Patterson & Roger Renteria & SWU’s Jacquie Samuels) and a pretty aggressive coverage plan.  It’s been a pretty fast and furious few weeks as the contest moved to the planning and as of Saturday now moves to the delivery.  We’ll do our first live blogging Monday morning and have around 11 interviews lined up.

As of now, TechWhirl’s design is setup for planned feature articles and the occasional podcast but next week we have to have two different content streams.  The first is our normal feature content and the second is our LavaCon coverage since we’re uninterested in becoming the LavaCon all the time channel.  The plan of live blogging and content curation (separating the wheat from the Twitter chaff) for activities at the event.  I’ve been forced to dive into some new services out there that helps turn an unmanaged flow of data into something useful and interesting and it’s been very interesting.

Riding the rushing water hoping not to fall off.

This process has also helped us think through some additional areas of content including providing industry news into the mix.  I have this feeling we’re nearing a strategic moment with the company when we really start seeing a lot of progress.  Of course, that feeling may just be the loopy feeling that occurs when someone spends far too little time sleeping and far too much time planning and preparing.

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Dilbert: Digital Media Curation

,Dilbert.com

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