Web Marketing Strategy Update

Want to display ads in your blog’s RSS feed, but haven’t been accepted by the gods at Google?

Well, you could always edit the feed yourself — I did that. Trouble is, your ads soon get stale when they’re hard-coded in. But who’s got the time to mess about updating them? And that’s assuming you have the technical knowledge required to edit the various PHP files in your blog, that generate the feeds.

A while back, after applying to Adsense for a second time with no luck (God knows why they won’t let me run ads in my RSS feeds), I looked all over for an alternative to Adsense RSS ads.

I couldn’t find one.

Then last week while clearing through some email clutter, I discovered that in January I had received an email from BidVertiser informing me that they now offered ads for RSS or ATOM feeds. Actually, what I’d stumbled on wasn’t the original announcement, but an update two weeks after the fact:

Following the successful launch of BidVertiser Ads for Feeds, we have now added 3 unique solutions that allow you to keep your current feed address (including FeedBurner!) when running BidVertiser ads for Feeds:

1. WordPress Plugin to allow you to seamlessly embed the BidVertiser Ads in your feeds.

2. Solution for FeedBurner that allows you to embed the BidVertiser Ads in your current FeedBurner address (and keep your Subscribers Count!).

3. Solution for Blogger that allows you to embed the BidVertiser Ads in the footer of each of your post feeds.

All of those great features are now available for you in your publisher control panel under the Get Feed Widget button (after registering a feed).

It sounds like exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, so I’ve signed up. I can’t give you any idea of results yet, because I have literally just this minute done it. In fact, initially I logged in here simply to posts my feed verification code, BDV-808928-BDV for Bidvertiser to check. But then I realised I should tell you about the service as well.

So if Adsense have given you the cold-shoulder over feed ads, you can now just as painlessly display ads in your RSS or ATOM feeds using BidVertiser.

Just a quickie…

Minutes ago I came across Linktator2, which is a low-cost backlink service, and as part of my new, “just post what you’re doing” initiative brought about by my long hiatus, I thought I’d briefly tell you about it.

I’m not sure if you know or not, but there are quite a few backlink networks about now. These services provide one-way links to members, by ensuring websites in the network never display links to the sites that link to them. Sites are categorized so that the backlinks can be somewhat targeted, and of course they use the target site’s preferred keywords in the anchor text.

Generally speaking these systems work very well. Google doesn’t discover the networks (of course there’s always the possibility that may change in the future. Anything is possible) and the sites climb in the rankings.

They are all costly though. Ranging in price from expensive, all the way up to more than your mortgage. Except this one that is — and thus the post. It’s cheap. By far the cheapest I’ve seen for this kind of service.

You get a hundred backlinks per site you add to the network, up to a maximum of 50 sites, with the option of an additional 3 deep links per site. You can create three different anchor texts, and the backlinks are added gradually on a daily basis to keep it looking natural and avoid courting the wrong kind of attention.

Of course, being new, it’s something of an unknown quantity. But as other Linktator scripts from Dave Wooding have been good, I’m cautiously hopeful that this will be too. Cautious only insomuch as I wouldn’t put my best sites in there right from the get-go, just the affiliate niche sites, blogs, etc. Take a look at Lintator2 yourself