Mykarma.in

This is one was specially asked for… So writing down what I feel should be done to attract advertisers.

1. Product - Get your product ready. The website should have a clean interface and well defined navigation. The ad space should be clearly demarcated and should not be adhoc. A poorly presented site never clicks with a advertiser and will be ignored. Most of the advertisers/agency neglect such sites because of a general perception that the site may contain offensive content.

2. Ad serving – Choose a good ad server and ad serving script… Most of the publishers loose money due to faulty ad serving and delays in ad display. Google ad manager and Openads are good options and are free. If going for a paid option you can opt for atlas, realmedia, doubleclick etc. The ad serving should also have a good reporting system built in. An advertiser/agency would love to get in depth details about the performance of his ads.. Like clicks, creative, day wise and mixmatch daywise creative performance etc….

3. Analytics -Use a good analytics software. You need to know your traffic before you start adserving.. A number of analytics services are availble. You can opt for a free open source or the google analytics (Google analytics may not represent a true picture of your traffic).

4. Contact – Provide a link in every page of the footer… “Advertise with us” This makes it convenient for the advertiser/agency to contact you. Make sure the contact number and email always work and are updated. A number of publishers just place email ids on their contact us form.. Due to that a number of advertisers/agency are turned away.

5. Presentation -Make a presentation or pdf based on your website with a download link on the “Advertise with us” page stating the Traffic numbers, Type of audience, Properties and placement, Screenshots, Innovations, Case studies, Clients, Rate card, Contact info and anything else that a advertiser needs to know about your site. Use charts wherever possible it gives the advertisers/agency a holistic view about the site. Send the presentation via email whenever a advertiser/agency contacts you.

6. Marketing – Every single site needs to reach media planners and advertisers…. Market your website on the industry related sites through banners, mailers. Exchange4media and Agencyfaqs are few of the trade sites for the internet industry. Sponsoring a industry related event is also a great way to gain mileage. give out some freebies (Pens, Card holders, Notepad etc) too so that atleast the advertisers/agency will remember you whenever they use the freebie. . Be an active member of a Industry related association it always helps. Take part in Industry related seminars, meets so that you can grow your network. Keep business cards handy (A good business card. Spend some money on it). You can also give your sales presentation in Business card kind of small CD’s

7. Team – No site can sell itself if they dont have a proper sales/servicing team in place or a sales guy or the owner himself etc. Always prioritise and give the advertiser/agency much needed attention to fulfill his requirement. The servicing people should be always pro – active like sending screenshots, reports etc. Hire a smart team (heavy on Logic) not dumb. They should know each and every part of the website and the stats regarding the site should be on the tip of their tongue. Smart Girls preferred (makes business sense).. It motivates the advertiser/agency to stay in touch. Keep your sales team updated about everything regarding the site. No dumb questions please !

8. Listings – Get yourself listed properly in every search engine or a business listing site. Google ad system categorises your site according to your site description etc.. So an ad network should be placed in a news category or a Horizontal should not be placed in a vertical category. (I found this problem in a number of site when I used the Google ad planner).

9. Creative support – Provide creative support to the advertisers to make banners, emailers etc. You can charge for it too… This can attract lots of unconventional advertisers/agency.

10. Value adds – If an advertiser is not satisfied with the performance of the campaign. Provide him with some value adds… (Make it a point to include text links in your ad inventory as they can be given away as value adds) This will make him happy even if it doesnt match up to the expectations of the performance. Atleast this will gain you a brownie point in the advertisers/agency mind and will help you to get back on board.

11. Personal contact - Keep bugging the advertiser/agency (Dnt take it literally). Keep following up with the advertiser/agency for new campaigns and keep sending screenshots of latest innovations or latest clients on the website or start of a new property. Go and meet the client/agency whenever there is a campaign coming up. This will help get the website a place in the media planning. Dropping a simple email will also do. . Take them out for casual dinner or drinks (Helps a lot).

1 more important point….

12. Pitching - Whenever you pitch for an advertiser/agency business always know about the product you are going to advertise. Get to know about the budget, the requirement etc.. In short a brief by email or over the phone. Send them a customized plan according to the need of the product. Give them a plan that suits the requirement of the product including properties, placements and innovations. And show them in a sample screenshot how their ads will look in different placements and properties on the website.

Go get some business !! I know this will have very serious repercussions.

If I have missed anything let me know !

Here are 10 tips to optimize your RSS feeds

1. 20 or more items, not 10.

2. Use full feeds, not partial feeds – “It’s the links, stupid,” says Klau. “The mass reader base strongly prefers full text feeds. If you don’t have full text feeds, you are missing out on a potentially huge amount of traffic.”

3. Use multiple feeds, organized by category, including latest comments by post.

4. Include compelling site description.

5. Don’t put tracking codes in URLs.

6. Free is good. Feedburner’s Pro features are free and they are good.

7. RSS feeds that contain enclosures (like podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories and engines.

8. Google Sitemaps supports feeds. If you can’t make an XML sitemap, you can use an RSS feed as one.

9. Add show notes to your podcast feeds.

10. Facebook allows you to import and promote your feed through the “import notes” feature.

10 Ways To Optimize Your Blog

1. Tag clouds and tag pages; check out Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for creating these. Spencer says he doubled traffic to one his blogs by adding it.2. Add a “Related Posts” feature. Spencer recommends the Contextual Related Posts plugin for WordPress.

3. Top Ten posts feature to display most popular posts

4. Add “next” and “previous” post buttons

5. Build inbound links

6. Title tags – use SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress to assign unique title tags to individual posts.

7. Claim your blog at Technorati and use Technorati tags

8. Use “sticky” posts that always appear at the top of the page as a way to add a keywords-rich introduction to category pages. Adhesive plugin works for this.

9. Use the Buzzlogic tool to find out which bloggers are most influential in conversations – refer to them and try to get them to link to you.

10. Get into other bloggers’ blog rolls (trackbacks and comments won’t help in link gain.

1. Knowledge is power - Look at your channel data to find what layout works best for your site. If you don’t know what channels are, get some!
2. Size does matter – Our medium rectangles (300 x 250) and wide skyscrapers (160 x 600) are easy on the eye and attract a lot of natural attention, so maximise their beauty and add them to your site! Advertisers are in love with these formats too.

1. Integrate and conquer – Don’t hide your ads – make them part of your site and you’ll see your AdSense performance soar. By placing ads where they are relevant and useful to your website’s community, you’ll find their experience with your site actually improves.

I think I have to implement these tips tooo

What to do and what not to do to improve your google rankings… Check out these tips.

 

1. The Quick Fix

There are no quick fixes in creating higher rankings in Google so dont expect a good ranking overnight. You have to have a lot of patience in the search engine optimization game. It will take months for your efforts to come to fruition. That’s why it’s important to get things right from the start and plan out your strategy.

 

2. Keywords

Keywords are one of the most important part of search engine optimization. You must do your keyword research before starting your website if you can, because this will form the basis of all your search engine optimization.

 

There is no point going for broad keywords such as “website design” since there is too much competition for those keywords and you will find it very difficult, if not impossible, to reach the top spot in Google. You are better off using long tail niche keywords. They will have a smaller search volume, but it will be easier to obtain top position. People are more likely to find what they are looking for with long tail keywords. For example, if someone needs a website, they may type “web design” into Google and visit a few websites. They may then discover they also need hosting and a domain name and do another search for “website design hosting and domain name services” and this may be your niche keyword or key phrase.

 

How do you find keywords that people are searching for? Well a good free tool can be found at SeoBook.com or, if you want something more professional, you can use wordtracker an excellent service for finding niche keywords. You should try and get at least 10 keyword phrases.

 

Once you have found your keywords, do a search with them on Google. First of all look at how many results there are. If it’s in the millions, then maybe your keywords are not that good and would be too competitive.

 

If you can find keywords with results at about 50,000, then you could be onto a winner. You should also check out your competition. Click on the top result for your keyword in the SERPS (search engine results pages) and check out their pagerank. This will give you a rough idea of what you need to achieve to get top placement. Also, you should check to see how many links they have pointing to their website as this will give you a rough idea of how many links you will need to get to the top position. To do this, in the search box type link: www.thedomain.com and you will get a list of websites that link to that domain, but it’s a good idea to do this in the Yahoo search engine because it provides a more extensive list of back links. Google will only show you a percentage of their links, usually pagerank 3 or higher.

 

Remember, these are only rough estimates because every website is different and less, more relevant links will achieve better results.

 

3. Title Tag

 

Google sees the title tag as the most important and relevant part of the webpage it retrieves. This is one of the few things you have any control over in Google’s search results. The title tag is the underlined header for your result in the SERPS. It also appears at top of your browser window. Keep this descriptive and readable but at the same time include your newly found niche keywords. Google will also highlight the keywords in your title that were included in the search query.

 

 

4. Description Tag

The description tag is the description of the webpage which resides under the title tag in the results. Again use your keywords in here, maybe some of the lesser ones you discovered. This is the only other part of the results you have any control over. Google will also highlight the keywords in here that match the search query. Again remember to keep it descriptive and readable.

 

 

5. Domain Names

If you can, try and include your main keywords in your domain name. Google will highlight them when they match the search query. This can give your ranking a little boost bcause it will show that your website is relevant to the search query.

 

6. Content

 

Content is very important. If you have ever changing fresh, unique content on your website relating to your topic, Google will love you for it and other websites will link to you. In return, this will increase your rankings, but you should really be doing this anyway. A website with no changing content is a dead website. Your content should contain your keywords, but don’t spam your content with your keywords. Use them at the start and end of your webpage and sprinkle them in-between. Also use them in your header text and even bold a few as this shows Google that these words bear more importance.

 

7. Pagerank

Why are people so obsessed with that little green bar on the Google tool bar? Well I’m here to tell you that you can stop obsessing about it right now.

 

The thing about the pagerank bar is it can be at least 3 months out of date as Google only updates it in roughly a 3-month cycle. Only Google knows your true pagerank which changes all the time. Google regularly spiders your website and scans for new content and links to show the most relevant content in its results. Therefore pagerank is pretty inaccurate.

 

The other thing people get confused about is that it’s called pagerank not siterank. What I have determined is that your website will get assigned a pagerank figure and then it will be distributed through your indexed pages, for example if your website gets a figure of 5, then your home page may get a pagerank of 3 and your other pages get a 2 or maybe a 1 and so on. If these other pages also have links to them, this will increase their own individual pagerank.

 

The only advantage of that green bar that I can see is for exchanging links. You can get a rough idea of what a website’s ranking is and you can decide whether or not to exchange links.

 

 

8. Linking

One-way links are better than 2 way links, but one-way links can be harder to obtain. Why should someone put your link on their website; what’s in it for them? You can do this by writing articles like this one and submitting them to article websites, social media websites or on your own blog, but remember to add an author’s bio which includes some links to your website.

 

Reciprocal links are easier to come by, but in the early stages, when you don’t have a good pagerank will be more difficult to obtain. Once your pagerank increases you can be more selective of the pagerank you exchange with.

 

Don’t forget about the guys starting out when your green bar starts to increase. If they have a website with good quality content, then you should consider linking with them. Remember we all need to start somewhere and today’s page rank of 1 is tomorrow’s pagerank 5. Try to link with relevant websites because Google likes this, and you will receive quality traffic from these websites for years to come.

 

Also, I have found a great little tool which checks potential link partners to see if they are linking to bad neighbourhoods. A link exchange with a penalized website could also result in a Google penalty for your site. The tool can be found at:

 

 

http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

9. The Open Directory (DMOZ)

 

You should always submit your website to DMOZ since it can take an age to get listed there and Google uses these results in its organic results sometimes. I recently wrote an article discussing this topic and some people commented on this and said that they haven’t submitted to DMOZ and their rankings are fine. This may be true, but one thing you should remember is that lots of directory websites use DMOZ results, which in turn will get you more one-way links.

 

 

10. Blogs

Blogs are loved by Google because they have lots of text and are constantly getting updated; so start your own blog on your website. Include articles, stories and anything that’s related to your website. If you give people something of interest, they will come back for more and link to you.

 

That’s all for now, take care and good luck! And remember, you only get out of something what you put in to it.

 

As Learnt from Kevin Gallagher article