Archive for the 'Advertising' category

…all the services able to do statistical analysis for your web site and it contains the excellent Google Analytics of course.

Stop!

Since when did Microsoft recommend products from its arch-rival, Google? Well, just since they decided to close their own solution known up to now as ‘adCenter Analytics Beta‘.

So, there is only time to arbitrate between the excellent products of web site statistical analysis not sold by Microsoft, but nicely recommended by Microsoft:

AT Internet

Auriq Systems (RTmetrics)

BLVD Status

Coremetrics

DC Storm

Digital River (Fireclick)

etracker

eVisit Analyst

Facilitate Digital

Foviance (WebAbacus)

Google Analytics

Intellitracker

Lynchpin

Lyris (ClickTracks)

Marketwave

Nedstat

Omniture

RedEye

Site Intelligence

SmarterStats

Speed-Trap

Unica (Affinium NetInsight)

Urchin Software from Google

VisiStat

WebTrends

WiredMinds

Woopra

Yahoo! Web Analytics

I love the 15 Didier Grossemy Golden Business Rules I found first on Wired How-To. Not because they are original or counter-intuitive. But merely because they are right.

Moreover they can be translated into rules for your web site design and development.

With the new year, let’s see a few things to start the year well:

• A little change of looks and colours
• Removal of the constraint to log before writing a comment
• Creation of a favicon and a simple logo for the pages
• Also, I checked my Google Adsense revenues of 2008. No month has been under $370 and I always stayed under $600 (even in December, it seems that recession is with us). Naturally, Roumazeilles.net was the most powerful with more than 800k visits during the year 2008. We’ll see if 2009 allows the new web sites to grow at the same level or better.

And, of course, I wish you a happy new year.

It is often difficult to precisely evaluate the services offered here and there for affiliation (offer products/services against a commission paid by the advertiser). Here is a list of such possible services:

• Advertising.com
• Advertstream, French-speaking
• AffiliNet, from a German origin
• Affilipub, French-speaking
• Commission Junction has clearly been a leader on this market
• Leadium, French-speaking
• Netaffiliation, French-speaking
• Public-idées, French-speaking
• Reactivepub, French-speaking
• Tradedoubler, French-speaking but confusing
• Zanox

The only ones I really tested are Commission Junction (strictly no result) and Tradedoubler (which brought me so small an amount that it cannot be transfered to my account probably because of a User Interface nearly unusable that requires an impossible energy to build campaign links – you must change/modify them again and again).

This is something simple, but you should not let pass the occasion to promote your web site. Be sure to have a simple but clear message pointing to your web site in your email signature. It will appear at the end of all of your emails and will make sure that plenty of people know about this great wbe site of yours.

Since you will be sending a lot of emails to wish a happy new year…

And it’s free advertising.

One thing is clear: The recession is upon us, the crisis is here. Nobody will be spared. But as an entrepreneur (web site creator), what will be the impact on our site(s)? I think that there will be a small number of significant impacts. These issues may even be very noticeable.

The impacts

First, Recession means reduced activity. Let’s be prepared to see ad spending and the overall activity go down. After September 11, 2001, I had observed a drastic fall-off in non-essential spending (I was working in the business of art on the Internet). This end of 2008 and year of 2009 will probably follow in the footsteps of 2001-02. I would not be surprised to see visits/trafic seriously reduced in the coming months as Internet users concentrate on issues more “important” for them.

If your sales (of ads or anything else) are linked to “consumer-oriented markets”, everybody will tell you that they will slow down. Companies can easily reduce spending by cutting the ad budget (and this will be fast on the Internet). And the Internet users will not be compelled to buy T-shirts, caps, photo prints, etc.

Another issue (but what direction will it take, really?) is the exchange rate of Euro against US Dollar: It wil keep changing. For European site owners like us, this is critical since most of our sales are made in US dollars and paid in Euros. During the recent period of depressed US dollar, my ads revenue (biggest part of my web sites income) was under serious pressure (I kept less and less Euros for the same amount of ads). It starts being corrected; If the US of A are the first to get ou of Recession, the exchange rate wil soon favor the US dollar (and so, my own income).

What can I do?

This is the question asked by Lenine! What can I do? Most of these factors cannot be influenced. But, against all odds, it is possible to counter-act the ineluctable. My proposals:

• It may be time for you to start your own campaign ad, to get more visitors, to increase your market share. The ads price should go down and this is a good investment if you succeed at it.
• Beware! Reduce all accessory spending. Anything not clearly aimed at increased traffic or revenue is nto really important. It may not be time to replace your PC now.
• Create new services (or new web sites) susceptible of kicking new life to your activity(ies) without waiting for an external improvement.

With this advice, we may be able to go through the Recession in the best possible conditions. As you noticed, I am already implementing several of these ideas by myself.

One of the big questions open to bloggers and web site publishers seems to be: Should you create 1 web site per idea or 1 big concentrating web site?

Actually, it seems that the answer lies in what you want to do with it. Probably, if you are interested in getting a lot of traffic and personal visibility, it seems better to have one and only one webs ite (certainly holding your name). This is what I did a few years ago when I created Roumazeilles.net, my personal web site and blog. It has been quite representative of my own interests (varied, diverse, changing). If your are mainly targetting friends or fans, this is perfect. But this approach has a lot of issues. The main one is that people (your visitors) may not appreciate the exact mix of information that you provide and unless your are able to compete alone against big-media, some visitors will not come back because they will not perceive the aim of your blog/website.

This is exactly what led me to create several independent (but cross-linked) web sites, like YWantVisits.com (here) or YLovePhoto.com or YLoveBigCats.com.

There is also an advantage of separate web sites when you monetize your web site with advertising. Some of the advertisers who contacted me before only wanted their ads to appear on some of the pages of the Roumazeilles.net site. They were not interested in the rest of it. This is manageable if you are prepared to tweak the web site code often. But really, who wants that?

Furthermore, for ad networks like Google AdSense, the more subjects you cover in one web site the more difficult it becomes to choose ads according to context. In the case of Roumazeilles.net, I often observed that there was photo-related ads on software-discussing articles or vice-versa. This quickly becomes counter-productive (less people click on the ads), and annoying to your users (they see totally unrelated ads, so they loose the possibly useful commercial information).

Of course, if you aim at very little web sites (a few pages only) this may have no meaning, but I strongly advise now to have separate web site. And YWantVisits.com will stay the location where I am trying to talk only about Search Engine Optimization, increasing traffic to other websites, optimizing the revenue from the web sites.