I've always wanted to try out Blogads. Unfortunately, it's invitation only. So, how do I get an existing blogger in the network to sponsor me?

http://www.blogads.com

The Inside AdSense Team has provided a set of blogtimization (blog optimization) tips for bloggers.

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/01/blogtimize.html

The latest blogosphere marketing blitz by NBC has a BlogAds employee emailing bloggers who have NBC BlogAds ads running on their blogs asking them to link to a blog run by NBC on the subject of child predators. I think this is a great idea! Now, add "MSNBC is spending about a $1 million dollars in advertising on the following: [cut] 800 blogs (largest blogad buy in history)" and you have a company that is serious about using the blogosphere to create buzz!

http://www.perverted-justice.com/

cross-posted

Andrew Teman: Every day there seems to be another toolbox that pops up out of nowhere and spins wild tales of AdSense riches.  [cut] I am calling bullshit on guys like this. I don’t buy it. Call me jealous, call me skeptic, call me whatever…but I am not going for it.

http://andrewteman.org/blog/2005/07/18/i-am-a-google-adsense-millionaire/

Randy: Hehe, I thought Andrew's entry was pretty funny. Read Andrew's entire blog entry for the whole joke. I'm not saying anything about Darren, but it does seem like there's a new Darren every week. Darren has a few subscribers, but I've seen others claiming the same with 5 subscribers. I've also validated their claimed CPM against their Alexa stats. Sure, that's all wild math, but none of it makes any sense. Remember Monolo's Shoe Blog? A six-figure blogger with 49 subscribers? It's four months later and he still has 49 subscribers. Too funny!

Toivo Lainevool: This is a list of sites where AdSense publisher can use their own AdSense IDs to earn money.

http://www.admoolah.com/blog/index.php/adsense-revenue-sharing-sites/

JenSense: AdSense has decided to celebrate Chinese New Year, and the Year of the Dog, with a dog doodle in the AdSense ad units.

http://www.jensense.com/archives/2006/01/chinese_new_yea.html

Chitika is asking all publishers who made more than $600 in 2005 to fax them W-8 or W-9 U.S. tax forms.

MSN Spaces: You can earn money by allowing Kanoodle ads to run in your space.

Elinor Mills: Google is partnering with Seattle-based Zaaz to offer a fee-based service for advertisers who need more support, consulting and training than they can get from the search giant's free analytics service.

http://www.zaaz.com/

JenSense: Google AdSense is moving beyond the traditional text and graphical advertising to rich media, including interstitials, expanding ads and floating ads. [cut] Floating ads are ads that either stay on top as the page is scrolled, or ones that "float in" from the side of the page to the center of the page. Expanding ads are those that require user interaction to expand, either with a mouseover or a click. Interstitials [cut] appear when you click through to read a page, and before they will show you the page, you are bypassed through to a full page ad that you must view before seeing the actual content you were wanting, often by having to click a link on the interstitial ad page.

http://www.jensense.com/archives/2006/01/google_adsense_8.html

JenSense: A thread over at DigitalPoint points out that Google AdSense has quietly added a new term to all AdSense referrals generated by a publisher.  They have now instituted a 90-day time limit on that referral, meaning a referred publisher must earn the $100 within the first 90 days, before the referring publisher is eligible to earn that $100 for a completed AdSense referral.

http://www.jensense.com/archives/2006/01/adsense_silentl.html

One thing that has always bothered me about Google Analytics is that most of my key pages have query parameters (those parameters in the URL after the question mark). Turns out you change the way Analytics reports on them with the a filter.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=27258&hl=en

I also engaged an exclude filter for my home and work IP address.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=26913&hl=en

Patrick Chanezon: We will be performing routine AdWords system maintenance starting at 8pm PDT on Friday, January 27, 2006, and ending at approximately 2am PDT on Saturday, January 28.

http://adwordsapi.blogspot.com/2006/01/system-maintenance-january-27.html

Randy: I only found this note on the AdWords API blog, not anywhere else. I'm not sure if this is affecting only the AdWords API or the AdWords Website. Either way, I'm not taking any chances. I'll likely suspend all my AdWords campaigns Friday afternoon until Monday morning. My campaigns don't perform as well on the weekends regardless. Of couse, I won't be reducing my AdSense impressions.

Update: Confirmed on the Inside AdWords blog, the AdWords Website will also be unavailable during the maintenance period.

JenSense: Yahoo Answer accounts have something new in the control panel, namely a section for contributors to include their YPN login information, which is currently labelled as coming soon.

http://www.jensense.com/archives/2006/01/yahoo_answers_t.html

Randy: This will be interesting to follow. If you Yahoo! Answers contributes enough back to its members, then I could see this as a viable marketing ploy going forward. Comment on my blog, enter your YPN or AdSense and you make money.

Philip Kaplan: What better describes AdBrite's "pick your sites" model for advertisers?

http://www.adbrite.com/mb/blog.php#post55

Randy: AdBrite is definitely the best site targeting advertising platform. Maybe not for publishers, but definitely for advertisers.

adverlicio.us is to ads as del.icio.us is to Webpages.

http://adverlicio.us/

Joe Tan: If you want to know how many people visited your site, which pages they viewed, or where they came from, you’ll need to either rely on your raw web logs or use an online tracking service provided by a third party. There are many different third party web tracking services out there, but the two free and popular third party solutions that I highly recommend are Google Analytics (for web traffic) and Feedburner (for syndicated traffic).

http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/

Randy: This is exactly how I track my feed and Website usage and recommend to everybody who need such information.

Matt Cutts: Here’s some quick advice. If you’re going to ask people to give you money, spell-check your site. For example, here’s a banner from an SEO site I heard about:

Randy: You can always count on Matt finding the funniest Web content. This is likely my biggest issue. Even though I try to spellcheck each article, I often forget and often it's a grammar check that I really need.

Before the holidays, I sent an email to AdSense about using AdGenta and AdSense together, they responded on boxing day. Talk about dedication. At the same time, I sent an email to AdGenta (Dec 23rd) and they never responded. I then sent another email (Jan 12) and they didn't respond to that one either. Oh well, there's lots of Web advertising alternatives.

Update: I got an email not long after I posted this entry. The blogosphere works!

A.C. Nielsen: Leading the top 10 most popular search terms for November was “ebay” with 13.9 million requests.

Nielsen//NetRatings today also released the top 10 search engines for November 2005.

http://www.netratings.com/pr/pr_060118.pdf

PR: dMarc connects advertisers directly to radio stations through its automated advertising platform. The platform simplifies the sales process, scheduling, delivery and reporting of radio advertising, enabling advertisers to more efficiently purchase and track their campaigns.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/dmarc.html

Randy: dMarc was the AdWords of the Radio. Sounds like an awesome marriage. Can't wait till my $0.01 per click campaigns hit the radio waves.

NY Times: Google.com and the company's foreign search sites contribute more to Google's bottom line than AdSense, because for every dollar the company brings in through AdSense and other places that distribute its ads, it pays roughly 78.5 cents back to sites like Digital Point that display the ads.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/technology/16ecom.html

Randy: That's the first time, I've seen someone quote a figure. The NY Times doesn't link the number to a source, but since the article is about Shawn Hogan and largely quotes from Shawn, I can only speculate that it was from him.

Every once in awhile, I'm looking for top AdSense/AdWords keywords. Now, if you try to search for that on Yahoo! or Google search, you get a lot of crap. And I keep finding my way back to the same Website. I don't know how good the information is, but it's free and interesting.

http://www.top-adsense-keywords.com/

John Cook: [Microsoft] announced Thursday that it would release the first components of its adCenter technology in the United States by June.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/255538_msftads13.html

Chitika Blog: November and December final earnings reports are ready. Please log in to your accounts to see the final audited reports for both November and December.

Randy: And I got my money for November via PayPal. One thing I noticed, even though invalid clicks were filtered real-time in December, my audited earnings still dropped 6% from the unaudited earnings. Overall, my CPM was about half in December that it was in November. The early numbers in January indicate that my CPM will again drop in half from the already reduced half, that is, January CPM will be about one quarter of Novembers.

Henry Blodget:  The company has dozens of cool products, but with the exception of AdWords, none of them generate meaningful revenue.  From an intermediate-term financial perspective, therefore, they are irrelevant. So, the question is, what could happen to AdWords, and what will happen to the company (and stock) if it does? The first thing that could happen is that, for a variety of reasons, AdWords revenue growth could slow.  [cut] And then there are the disaster scenarios.  Chief among them: click fraud. 

Randy: It's amazing how many scare articles around Google are based on click fraud.  Now follow all the links about click-fraud and his entire research is based on one article by Wired magazine. And as we already know, that article was written on hearsay and no real research or data. Ooooo! I'm scared.

EcommerceTimes: North American advertisers spent US$5.75 billion on search engine marketing in 2005, a 44 percent increase over the previous year.

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/48209.html

Eric Giguere: Yes, it's almost "C-day", judgment day for Chitika. In a posting made on the very last day of 2005 and widely reported elsewhere, the folks at Chitika indicated that audited earnings for November and December would be available by January 15, which is next Sunday, with payments to follow thereafter.

Chicago Business:  In a quiet and small-scale experiment, Google is running classified-like ads in the pages of the Sun-Times, which so far is the only newspaper participating in the Web-search behemoth's test.

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=19053

Google Adwords: The ValueTrack tag is a simple tag that you can add to your Destination URLs. It will allow you to distinguish the clicks you receive from search and content sites in the Google Network. [cut] For example, if your URL is www.yoursiteinfo.com, you can use the following tag for your Destination URL:

www.yoursiteinfo.com?type={ifsearch:GoogleAdWordsSearch}{ifcontent:GoogleAdWordsContent

When using this code, your third party tracking will be able to identify how many of your visitors enter your site via your Google AdWords ad.

https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=14816

Randy: Of course, if you use Google Analytics, this all comes for free. I can even track the performance of various ad text.

Here's something I found very disturbing on the Game Certainty blog. Notice in the ads to the immediate left that two of the three CPC ads have phone numbers on them. The whole point of CPC is to pay for leads when the user clicks on the ads. Allowing phone numbers in the ad text is simply wrong and Google must disallow this practice, if they don't already.

Note: Please don't mistake the ads with the red highlight as real AdSense ads, they are simply screen dumps from my browser that I marked up by hand.

It's just about time for your tax accountant to ask you where your AdWords invoices are. You can print them from the AdWords Website. Here's how.

• Go to My Account
• Click on the links Payment received for receipts
• Click on the links after Invoices for invoices

https://adwords.google.com/select/ReviewInvoices

Search Engine Watch: Google is not offering a timeline (except saying that they hope it's by midyear) when new users will be able to register and use the free service that launched in November.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060105-183906

Randy: That's too bad. Analytics is quite amazing. The amount of information I'm pulling with Analytics is really helping me manage my AdSense and AdWords campaigns.

The Google AdSense team has some 10 suggestions for 2006 resolutions. I enjoyed two of them especially.

1. No more clicking on my own Google ads (tempting though they may be!).
...
10. Quadruple my revenue, retire at a young age, and buy an island in Tahiti.

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/01/lets-start-resolution.html

Matt Cutts explains URL canonicalization and why it's important in SEO.

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.example.com
• www.example.com/
• example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

Chitika: We are currently running into unexpected delays in our monthly audits for November. [cut] We are trying to complete both November and December audits by January 15th.

http://chitika.com/blog/?p=32

Randy: Chitika's PR nightmare continues. Not only did Chitika miss their 30-day November payments, but announced only after the deadline that it would be delayed 15 days. The good news is that they will clear December payments in 15 days, rather than the usual 30. I assume we'll find out in 15 days if Chitika is gonna sink or swim. I've already reduced my Chitika impressions by 60+% because of existing problems with Chitika. I'll likely continue to reduce them further. Chitika has now become the joke of online advertising. At what point do we begin referring to them as a scam?