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.

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

The DealDotCom affiliate program pays 35% commission on your own referred sales, plus 15% commission on the sales by people you refer. If the person you refer promotes the site and refers more people, you get paid on all the sales they generate too.

Best of all, you get paid every time someone makes a purchase, not just the first time.

That’s for the lifetime of the customer, whether they buy today, tomorrow, or 5 in years from now. Multiple orders from the same customer are common, because when someone buys from DealDotCom they get an email ever single day promoting that day’s discounted product.

The plugin automatically shows the latest deal every day, doing all the work for you. Just drag and drop the widget into the sidebar of your WP blog and forget about it. There’s no need to mess with any code to install the Wordpress DealDotCom widget.

At the bottom of the widget there is a link so people seeing the plugin in action can put the deals on their own website. When they download the plugin via your website they will join under you, earning you more money as they also promote DealDotCom.

Download the Wordpress DealDotCom Widget.

From the site:

“DealDotCom is the place on the web to find all the Internet Marketing products you really want for rock bottom prices. We sell products and services that help save you time and money when it comes to running your online business.”

Unfortunately, there’s no prior notification of which product will be on sale when, nor how much you’ll save. So you have to visit the site regularly — well, daily really — to be sure you don’t miss out getting something you really wanted for a lot less than normal.

Sounds very promising though, and of course you can just bookmark it.

DealDotCom Affiliate Program

There’s also an attractive 3-tier affiliate program, that pays you commissions for life on purchases made by anyone you refer. You also get a commission on sales generated by people introduced by anyone you refer.

As Jason and Marc say on the site, this could bring you some healthy commission checks and a nice passive, residual income.

It’s brand new, launching tomorrow as I write. So now is the best time to sign up and start getting your links in front of people, before they hear about it elsewhere.

Click Here Now To Join

Your Product Promoted Free At DealDotCom

If you’ve got a quality product of your own, you can also submit it to be reviewed for possible inclusion on DealDotCom.

Get your product in, and you’ll benefit from the promotional efforts of tens of thousands of DealDotCom affiliates.

And it won’t cost you a thing.

All you need to do is sign up for a free account, log in and click the “Make Money” tab at the top. That will take you to a form to complete about the product you want to submit for review.

True, your product will only be promoted for 24 hours, but for the effort of submitting a form you’re looking at one heck of a payday!

Source: DealDotCom: Discount Internet Marketing Products

Has it ever occurred to you how contradictory the goals of these two activities are?

One being to provide perfectly targeted search results, the other to sell as much advertising as possible?

What would happen if every time someone performed a search, they found EXACTLY what they were looking for in the first few results?

This is what would happen: people would hardly ever click on the Adsense ads displayed on the results pages.

Why do people click on ANY link?

Because they think that it will take them to a page about whatever it is they are looking for.

Why do people click on the Adsense ads around the search results?

Because they think the ad is more likely to take them to a page about whatever it is they are looking for than the other links they see on the page.

Key Point:

If every time you did a search on Google the first 5 results appeared to be closer matches for whatever it is you are looking for than the ads, you would click on those links, not the ads.

(Studies that show most users prefer the organic listings).

It’s the same with ads for content. If all the sites in Google with top placements for a particular keyword phrase provided comprehensive and high quality content about that keyword, hardly anyone would click on the Adsense ads for content displayed on the website.

Google are performing a balancing act.

It doesn’t make sense that Google should want to provide *perfect* search results. That would result in a massive drop in earnings. On the other hand, they need to be seen to be striving towards the goal of perfect search results, because that’s what consumers want, and Google’s stated objective.

Think for a moment. In the last few years, as technology drives us further and further into the world of sci-fi, what great changes have we seen in web page search?

Have we seen the introduction of ground-breaking new technology? The introduction of artificial intelligence perhaps?

No.

All that’s happened is more filters and “tweaks” have been added to what we already have, making the algorithms more complex and better able to catch the more obvious spam pages, but barring that, no vast improvements in the accuracy of the search results you get.

(Who knows, maybe even part of the reason Google switches their result sets around so much is to give the illusion of greater accuracy and a company hard at work constantly testing and improving the search results for you? This “here today, gone tomorrow,” situation in the SERPS might enable Google to get away with more junk pages, because ironically it probably has a tendency to make consumers more forgiving, by leading them to think “Google are obviously working hard to improve the results, so there’s bound to be errors sometimes.”)

Innovations like search preferences add to the illusion that search quality is getting better while we are distracted by exciting new areas like video search, instead of seeing real technology improvements in the core business of plain text search.

And surfers concerned enough about the quality of results they get to bother using search preferences are probably the most likely to make noise and/ or go elsewhere when the results are poor. Giving them their own SERPS pulls them out of the pool of potential complainers.

Google wants to filter out the more obvious spam a) because users get annoyed when it comes up in their search results, and may defect to the competition, and b) because it is damaging to their image, showing that even in 2007, with all their hi-tech wizardry and money, the truth is Google still can’t tell the difference between a quality page of useful information and one of overt, right-in-your-face gibberish.

But Google doesn’t want to get rid of ALL the cheap low-value pages because they bring in a LOT of revenue.

On the other hand, they can’t have too many, because not only do users complain about the search quality, Google also starts to lose revenue from Adsense advertisers as the CCL (Critical Crap Level) is reached and they decide that results from the Content Network have passed the point where they are still willing to advertise.

Like I said, it’s a juggling act.

If Google really wanted too, they could remove 90% of the MFA (made for Adsense) sites overnight.

One simple way would be to flag every Joe Publisher ID appearing on more than 10 or 20 domains and drop the sites from the Google index pending a 2 minute manual review to check the quality of the site content (10 seconds is enough too spot most MFA sites).

Few regular account holders not playing the MFA game would have so many domains showing Adsense.

Instead Google uses the Adsense TOS to scare publishers into building better quality sites, whilst simultaneously providing catch-all clauses to justify closing any account that’s causing a problem.

In it he attempts to predict the defining aspects of the next phase in the evolution of the Internet, which is being tagged Web 3.0.

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Here are a couple of excerpts:

Definition [Web 3.0]: Highly specialized information silos, moderated by a cult of personality, validated by the community, and put into context with the inclusion of meta-data through widgets.

And:

Analyzing Web 3.0 is an exercise in understanding how human beings naturally consume data. We tend to gravitate towards specialized information silos for the majority of our information. That’s why we have television stations instead of one massive GooTube, and why we buy magazines about our favorite subjects instead of white sheets containing random news articles.

Web 1.0 lacked context, Web 2.0 lacked interoperability, Web 3.0 will be a web where websites become web services and access to any information you desire is no more difficult than installing a widget onto your website.

Although very informative, it is a long post. The summary below should tell you if you’d be interested in heading over to read it in it’s entirety:

• Search engines will be replaced by smaller, specialized searchlets
• Search engines will be able to understand context through tagging and community interaction.
• Search “profiles” will become portable, allowing us to have the digital equivalent of body language.
• Natural language search will be improved once search engines have a stronger understanding of context.
• People search will become more important.
• Guided / Editorial search will be a stopgap where search engines still fail to provide relevance.

Personally I’m having greater success at Hubpages than Squidoo. Not only is it easier and faster to use, but I get more visitors — I assume because of fewer pages and therefore less competition.

Of course if Squidoo has been targeted by Google, the same thing will happen to Hubpages in due course. You’ve probably time to make a good few bob before that though.

The lab has been investigating the recent drop in ranking for Squidoo lenses in Google’s search engine results. It appears that as of the 7th of July nearly all Squidoo lenses have dropped in ranking in the Google search engines. There is a lot of speculation in various forums at present (including Squidoo’s own SquidU forum) but the reasons are uncertain.

At this stage, the lab feels there are 3 potential causes.

1. Recent Squidoo changes have resulted in Google indexing Squidoo lenses in a different way that is resulting in lower ranking scores compared to before.

2. Google are applying a virtual penalty on the Squidoo domain for reasons known only to them.

3. Google is undergoing a re-indexing process that is resulting in unusual SERP rankings which will re-assert themselves after the re-indexing has completed.

The lab currently favours the penalty cause because websites now ranking above previously high ranking Squidoo lenses have much fewer backlinks and lower page rank than the Squidoo lenses they have replaced.

Use it on Web CEO 7.0 Professional Unleashed and get $230 Off

OR

Use it on Web CEO 7.0 SmallBiz Unleashed and get $190 Off

Both versions include professional training and hard copy certification from Web CEO University.

Of course Web CEO is still available as a great free SEO tool as well, and that may be all that you need.

If you do decide you want to upgrade, you simply put your promo code into the free version of the software and select your package from there.

Either way, I’d get over there and download the free version right away:

This special offer is time-limited — the promo codes have to be used before July 31st. After that no discount will be given.

Spend a few days testing it out and deciding how you like it, and whether you want to upgrade or not in plenty of time before that July 31st deadline rolls around. You know it will be here sooner than you think!

Download the Web CEO 7 free SEO tools and get your special discount code here.

There’s a whole raft of improvements in Web CEO 7, with some of the highlights including:

• Import settings from other tools and projects in a few clicks. Easily import keywords, competition URLs and other similar information from one tool and project into another. For example, say you have previously entered some competitor URLs to check how they rank, now you can pull those URLs into the link popularity tool to analyze their linking scheme.
• More import options. Import data like keywords and URLs from the clipboard, META tags, a text file, or by scanning website links. For example, say you want to analyze your competitors’ pages to see how well-optimized they are, you can import a text file with a list of competitors’ URLs directly into the Optimization tool.
• Bulk-import new websites you want to add as Web CEO projects from a text or CSV file.
• You can now fine-tune KEI highlighting to quickly identify which keywords in the list of suggestions have the highest potential.
• Regional Yahoo! bids. Choose which countries you want bid values to be shown for.
• WebCEO now enables you to submit your content to Article directories, Press Release sites, and Shopping sites to increase your link popularity and visibility.
• If your pages have META descriptions, you can repopulate them automatically to use as page details for submissions.
• Web CEO notification system has become much more helpful in detecting the reasons and severity of errors in your pages, as well as guiding you how to correct problems.
• In Optimization Advice and Analysis, poorly optimized page areas are now marked with warning icons in the advanced section of the report enabling you to easily locate them.
• Page Editor is now Dreamweaver compatible, so you can edit Dreamweaver templates with no risk of losing important HTML regions.
• On startup, you can now have Web CEO automatically restore the last session, launching the tools that were open when you last quit.
• Web CEO has a new, enhanced user interface that matches Vista Aero.
• New version is 32-bit Vista compatible (including support for 64-bit Vista).

You can find a complete list of What’s new in Web CEO 7.0 on the main site.

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And just like the software I talked about there (and the other paid solutions), Jetspinner enables you to create hundreds of unique variations of your articles for use on your website and submission to article directories, etc. That in turn means you can quickly and easily establish yourself as an expert in your field and create hundreds of natural-looking backlinks whilst avoiding Google’s duplicate content penalty.

An added twist is the optional ability to send Jetspinner’s output directly to the Jetsubmitter article directory submitter and have it send a different version of your article to each of the almost 500 directories in it’s database.

Jetspinner’s a nice application with all the features you need plus a few you may never use. To see it — or, more to the point — to use it, you certainly wouldn’t guess it’s free. If you’ve never used an article spinner, you might want to take this opportunity to try out the process yourself and see both how you take to it, and the results you get.

If you’re interested, here are some of the other article content spinners out there: Article Post Robot, Article Uniqualizer, Artemis Pro
and Content Rewriter Pro.

The other day, I decided my Awstats installation was overdue an update and popped over to SourceForge to pick up the latest version.

While I was looking over the docs to refresh my memory on the upgrade process, I came across a link to a page of Awstats ExtraSection examples on another website.

Awstats ExtraSections enable you to create your own special reports not provided by default with AWStats. I personally only started putting them in my domain configuration files a few years ago, and then only as a means of tracking clicks on exit and redirect links, etc.

It seemed much easier than having separate scripts to track clicks on my affiliate links, for example.

The AWStats Enhancements and Extensions page covers quite a bit more than that though, and provides copy and paste examples of the code to add.

Amongst others, there are modifications that enable you to see which keywords and phrases are bringing traffic from which search engines, what’s the most popular RSS reader accessing your feed, which pages the different search crawlers are visiting, the top downloads, basic clickstream analysis, and blocking spam referrers. All you need to do is add them in your Awstats config file and you’re away. I copied a few myself.

There’s also an example that shows you how easy it is to monitor particular pages, as well as lots of resource links for further reading.

If you’ve never used the Awstats ExtraSections this is the easiest way to get started. You can find a few more examples on Adding extra reports using the ExtraSection feature from the official Awstats docs.