Marketing
Upcoming Events
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/06/2009 - 14:56There is an old saying that time is God’s way of making sure that everything doesn’t happen at once. However, as the spouse of a person who has worked as a scheduler for politicians, I can tell you that it doesn’t always work that well, especially as we approach an election. It is with this in mind that I write my latest update of upcoming events. This time, I’ll probably just sort them chronologically, especially since there are so many conflicts
October 7th
Wednesday is International Walk To School Day. I received a media advisory that Mayor DeStefano, Superintendent Mayo and others will kick off this day at the Yale Bowl with students from Edgewood school who will then walk to Edgewood school. I am trying to organize a walk with my daughter to her school, perhaps with some of her classmates.
At 7 in the evening, there will be a Meet the [potential] Gubernatorial Candidates Evening sponsored by the Shoreline League of Democratic Women. It will take place at the Old Saybrook Democratic Headquarters on 105 Elm Street. Secretary of State Bysiewicz, Stamford Mayor Malloy, State Senator Lebeau and former speaker of the house Amann are expected to attend. It is not sure if Ridgefield First Selectman Rudy Marconi, who has just set up an exploratory committee will also attend.
Also at 7 in the evening there will be a Mayoral Debate in New Britain at Tercyak Lecture Hall in the high school. I would love to go up and show my support for Tim O’Brian, but I doubt I will make it.
In addition, the New Haven Democracy for America group will be meeting at Wall Street Pizza at 90 Wall Street in New Haven. Jen Just will talk about what is going on with Organizing for America here in Connecticut and State Sen. Ed Meyer will talk about the State Budget process.
Also starting on Wedneday is The Association of Internet Researchers 10th annual meeting in Milwaukee and Digital Media West.
October 9th
On October 9th, there will be a fundraiser for United Church on the Green, in New Haven. It will take place from 6 to 8:30 in the Church Parish house. The host committee is a list of some of the most influential political and religious figures in the state.
Post EntreCard Blog Promotion
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/04/2009 - 17:47Monday, the latest changes to EntreCard are scheduled to take affect and various people are saying their goodbyes. I think I’ll weather this latest storm out as well and stick around. However, I have thought more seriously about leaving and offer up recommendations for people leaving as well as for those of us being left behind.
EntreCard is different things to different people, so depending on your own reasons for using and/or leaving EntreCard, different parts of the recommendation may mean more or less to you.
Promoting your blog
One of the most important reasons I use EntreCard is to promote my blog. There are people that have visited my blog in the past through EntreCard that will no long be coming to my blog because they are leaving EntreCard. Many of them have moved over to CMF Ads and I’ve placed ads on their site through CMF Ads. Some of them are also on Adgitize, so I show up on their blogs from time to time as well. A few of them that filled out my survey include Turnip of Power, Top Ten Blog Tips, A Postcard a Day, Healthy Lifestyle Blogzine, Mom's Cafe Home Cooking, Internet Marketing with Steven Wilson, libdrone, That Grrl, and sixmats.com.
So far, I’ve found Adgitize ads to drive more traffic to my site than EntreCard or CMF Ads.
Monetizing your blog
Another aspect of advertising is monetizing your blog. I’ve used several different sites, including Google Adsense, Chitika, Amazon, and other large ad networks to serve ads. I don’t do a lot with this advertising and don’t give it prominent positions. Each of them provide a small amount of income from time to time, and every once in a while, provides a nice payoff. I did finally get around to linking my Google Analytics to my Google Adsense.
In terms of the bloggers advertising networks, Adgitize has consistently been the best performer. It usually only brings in a couple dollars after expenses, but essentially, I get paid by Adgitize for generating traffic to my site. A very stark contrast to EntreCard.
For Adgitize, I pay $14/month for my advertisement. As an advertisers, I earn about $4 worth of credits each month, so my real cost is more like $10. I earn another $4 by writing a post every day. It is good practice to write a post every day, so the added discipline helps. Then, I get about $4/day for visiting other sites through Adgitize. If these are EntreCard sites as well, which they usually are, it fits in with the EntreCard dropping. That leaves me with $2/month to cover through advertising revenue. My calculations are that most sites get up to about $8/month for advertisements on Adgitize.
Adgitize calculates the earnings based on the number of page views and the number of ad views. Traditionally, I had three Adgitize ads showing at a time. I like the idea of showing multiple Adgitize ads. People surfing my site through Adgitize have three exit points. Others add Adgitize at the bottom of their page, thus increasing the number of ad views, the number of exit points, and providing good above the fold and below the fold locations. I’ve now added three more ads at the bottom of my page.
My guess is that I make about $5/month on CMF Ads which I re-invest by advertising on other CMF sites. It doesn’t bring me a lot of traffic and I could perhaps optimize my advertising there as well as the rate that I charge for CMF Ads. Sometimes, you may get better total revenue by lowering your ad rates or adding more ads to view. On my survey, a lot of people said they used CMF Ads, which I do as well. However, I just don’t use it as extensively as other sites.
Recent Readers
Another thing that EntreCard does is that it provides information about people who have recently dropped cards on you. This is a nice improvement over the recent reader sites like MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog. With those sites, someone might have read your site and not liked it. In theory, a person visiting with EntreCard would only drop cards on sites that they like. However, in practice, that does not seem to be the case.
In my survey, I found that many more respondents use BlogCatalog than use MyBlogLog. This fits data that I get from Google Analytics that I get four times the traffic from BlogCatalog as I do from MyBlogLog. Because of this, I’ve moved BlogCatalog up on my screen and MyBlogLog down. These sites don’t generate a lot of traffic and 40% of people leaving EntreCard do not use them. However, if I were leaving, I would use BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog the way I use the EntreCard inbox now.
MicroPayments
The one thing that EntreCard has that I haven’t found a good replacement for in other sites is a working system of micropayments. The EntreCard micropayment model is broken in that there isn’t a good way to cash out credits. Personally, I think a micropayment system, tying into some of the big players in micropayments from the gaming space, like Offerpal would be great. If I could easily drop credits on friends that would be great. Anyone who wants to collaborate on a viable blogging micropayment system should drop me a note.
Traffic Exchanges
For many people, it seems like EntreCard was an informal traffic exchange. Drop a card on me, and I’ll drop one on you. The only traffic exchange that I pay any attention to is BlogExplosion. I sometimes use this to find new sites to visit and get surprisingly good traffic from them. Interestingly, nearly half of the EntreCard diaspora that filled out my survey does not use BlogExplosion.
Of course, the best way to increase readership is to write good content, and I enjoy visiting the blogs that have well written articles. With that, I’m giving a shout out today to Ask the Blogster for EntreCard: Great Concept, No Business Plan and Advertising Is Not Free—It’s Too Expensive & Other Paradox In Entrecard Town. Writing great content and linking to other articles that you like is always a great way to promote your own blog.
So, have I hit the way you promote your blog? Are there things I should have suggested and missed?
Update:
As I continue visiting various sites, I just came across EntreWas, which is an effort for people who connected via EntreCard to stay connected. It seems like a great idea.
Blog Networking: EntreCard, Adgitize, CMF Ads and Beyond
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/03/2009 - 11:22There are many blogs out there, and many reasons that people write blogs. Some blogs are personal, some are news, some are commentary, and so on. There are many different reasons that people try to bring traffic to their blogs. It might be to earn money from advertising, to get more people exposed to ones viewpoints, or perhaps just another way to compete. The ways that people try to get traffic is also manifold and frequently changing.
EntreCard is one of the most notorious sites. It can drive a lot of traffic, but people question the quality of the traffic and even more significantly the ability of their management to run the site effectively.
A Geek's Review of the Starbucks iPhone App
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 15:52The latest Starbucks apps for the iPhone is generating interesting comments on several different fronts. It seems as if there will always be innovators and early adopters trying out new technology when it comes along, even if it doesn't provide immediate benefits, in the hopes of some future benefit. There will also always be laggards and late adopters criticizing them.
I do not have an iPhone. It is too closed of a platform for me. I still use a fairly old rather dumb mobile phone. However, I have changed my habits even as a result of this older mobile phone. I take pictures and videos from my phone and send them off to sites like Flickr, Facebook and YouTube and I send text messages to many different systems.
So, when people ask, "Why not just use a card?" in response to the latest iPhone Starbucks app, I have to ask, why not just use a human teller instead of one of those new fangled ATMs?
People have complained that the new app is cumbersome. Yes, technology innovations are often cumbersome when they first come out. They often end up serving different purposes than they were initially designed for or what some of the laggards think they are for. As an example, a person on a financial technology community website did ask “why not just use a card”, thinking that the iPhone App is primarily about payment systems. Yet on marketing websites are wondering about how well this promotes Starbuck’s brand.
As a technologist, I find a few things interesting about the application. 2D code reports that it uses QR codes in an innovative way. It displays a QR code on the iPhone which can be scanned by a different device. Usually, I think of mobile devices as a QR code scanner instead of a QR code display device. It will be interesting to see who else comes up with interesting uses of mobile devices as QR code display devices.
The thing that I’m least interested in about the Starbuck’s app is that like the iPhone itself, it appears to be yet another closed system. If someone makes this more of an open micropayment type system, then I’m much more interested. If I could transfer money from my Starbuck’s account to a babysitter’s account, a pet walker’s account, the account of a blogger who wrote something brilliant, or any other person I might want to make a small payment to, then it becomes a much more interesting social application.
Right now, I’m not rushing out to get an iPhone, or another Grande Decaf Cappuccino, but I’m not going to bash the Starbuck’s iPhone app. Instead, I’ll sit back and watch to see who takes the innovation to the next level.
(Cross posted at DigidayDaily.)
Navigating the CT Media Ecosphere
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 11:32Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the future of journalism here in Connecticut. Back on September 14th, Colin McEnroe talked about the decline in local news coverage, and asked about whether or not local bloggers are filling the gap. Then, on September 22nd, Tom Brokaw spoke about the Future of Journalism at Yale. Two days later, Where We Live ran a segment on Hyperlocal journalism, which was followed by a panel, “Hyperlocal: News In My Back Yard." sponsored by PRSA-CT.
These discussions have become more common and fairly predictable. No, bloggers haven’t filled in the gaps. Some will say that they aren’t even journalists, and the discussion will turn towards how journalists can make a living these days.
I do agree that bloggers have not done enough to fill the gap left by the decline of traditional news organization and I have a few suggestions for bloggers interested in this. First, for the time being forget about whether some representative of the waning wing of the fourth estate considers you a compatriot. Get out and cover the news. Cover the stuff that others aren’t covering. Go to local school board meetings and provide information that doesn’t show up in your local papers and that you can’t get simply by watching the recordings of the meetings on your local government access channel.
Beyond that, go out and get some training in journalism. I strongly recommend courses that the Investigative Reporters and Editors provide. In their commitment to investigative reporting, they welcome bloggers to their organization and their classes. While you’re at it be sure to take the online course Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Online Publishers at NewsU developed by the Media Bloggers Association, the Citizen Media Law Project and the Center for Citizen Media. It is a free online course that I believe everyone doing online media should take. Then, get out and collaborate with other news organizations. I am fortunate that various traditional news outlets pick up and carry some of my blog posts.
The legal issues are important for bloggers and citizen journalists. Recently, a fellow blogger in North Dakota received his first subpoena to turn over information that he considers protected under North Dakota’s shield laws. It illustrates why the NewsU course is so important and why the question about who is a journalist is so important.
I made a comment on Where We Live about volunteer and paid journalists. I believe it is useful to look at journalists in a manner similar to how we look at firemen. Large cities have fire departments staffed by professional firemen. Smaller cities will have fire departments with professional firemen, which are supplemented by volunteer firemen. Small towns have volunteer fire departments where professionals only arrive if there is something really big going on. Yet even with that, the volunteer firemen often receive great training. We should be looking at this model for news organizations.
The issue of how journalists get paid is very significant. A recent article in Editor and Publisher reports that journalists are losing jobs at three times the rate of other workers. There has been recent talk about what can be done to address this, including President Obama expressing concern about the future of journalism. At the PRSA panel, I mentioned Spot Us which is a great organization to raise money to fund investigative reporting.
Yet there are other important issues that need to be considered in the future of journalism that too often get overlooked. Recently, I received an email from the Waterbury Republican American. This is not a paper that I typically consider leading the way on journalistic reforms. However, a note at the bottom of the email caught my attention. It urged readers with questions, comments or wanting to advertise to contact Kevin Johnson, Online Sales Manager.
I was curious about how many papers have ‘online sales managers’ and what sort of experiences Mr. Johnson had had to make him a successful online sales manager. It seems like too many news organizations simply take their print sales managers and ask them to sell online ads as well, without really understanding the differences between print and online advertising. Indeed, there is little about the Republican American site that would make you think they have made any great progress with online advertising, with the exception of the peel away ad for their dining guide.
The peel away ad and the dining guide are good examples of what can be done to improve online advertising by local papers. I spoke with Mr. Johnson who acknowledged that he had grown up in the world of print advertising, but has spent considerable time learning about online advertising. When he came to the Republican American, he came in as the Online Sales Manager, and besides spending time finding advertising he spends a lot of time mentoring print sales managers so that they can be more effective in selling online advertising. It seems to have worked since the Waterbury Republican American has had a substantial and impressive growth in online advertising revenues.
It is not only sales people and advertisers that are having difficulty connecting in this new media ecosphere. As more and more people leave traditional news organizations, it becomes harder for public information officers, communications directors, public relations staff and others to find the right people to pick up their media advisories and press releases and write about them. To address this problem, I’ve created CTNewsWire. This is a Google Group where local and state officials, candidates, agencies and other organizations can send press releases and media advisories about things of importance in Connecticut to bloggers, citizen journalists, and anyone else who wants to subscribe to Connecticut related releases. The list has been going for several months and continues to grow.
The media ecosphere around Connecticut and around the world is changing. There are lots of great opportunities to sit around and discuss these changes. However, here in Connecticut we are seeing some interesting efforts to move beyond the discussions and actually take action on ways that we can keep the media ecosphere vibrant in our state. If you’re a blogger, I hope you spend more time covering local events, and perhaps get some training in reporting and join the CTNewsWire. If you’re an advertiser, I hope you press the local news organizations to provide better and more innovative advertising opportunities, and if you are a newsmaker, I hope you find ways, like the CTNewsWire to reach out to some of the new players in the Connecticut media ecosphere.
