Goongee Blog

Traditional print media and internet publishing continues to morph and the latest deal between
Yahoo and McClatchy’s will bring more news from abroad online.

Yahoo already regularly publishes news from sources like the Associated Press, Reuters and National Public Radio. The deal with McClatchy’s will bring stories from four of McClatchy’s eight foreign bureaus, mainly in the Middle East and Asia, as well as exclusive online material including blog postings from correspondents, links to other resources and travel tips, according to Howard Weaver, McClatchy’s vice president for news.

McClatchy’s owns 31 newspapers.

“We’re going into it with a small subsection of our content and see how it goes,” Weaver said. “We have really high quality, exclusive content. Yahoo has the largest audience in the world. That seems like a pretty obvious thing to do.”

Do you embrace the switchover to digital news?

Resource

I can’t help but notice how much time Google has been devoting with experiments concerning the different ad formats the company uses. They’re even messing around with fonts, basic sizes, and other elements that you might have thought were untouchable. What does this suggest about the Adsense plan?

1) It could mean that the program is getting a bit dogeared and people aren’t clicking as much as they used to. My own data tells me that’s probably true.
2) The company is interested in preserving their primary means of revenue and realize they have to continue to innovate.

Either theory seems relatively accurate. There’s no way that “banner blindness” can be avoided by Google or any company. Adsense is not revelutionary these days. In order to try and keep their position of leadership, Google will have to come up with some new and exciting products that actually spike revenues.

Which of the new ad formats do you like the best?

Keyword research is always mentioned as a very important SEO tool, and it certainly can be. But sometimes the research is flawed beyond recognition. Let’s mention some of the drawbacks that can and do occur.

• Most of the data for keyword research tools comes from meta search engines. These engines are probably not going to have the exact same traffic patterns as searches do on the three major search engines.
• Many of the terms are “news-driven” and are months old. Outdated information can’t help you at all when it comes right down to it.
• Some of the terms are outright nonsense. Always use a reality check to make sure the terms make any sense before you embark on a major campaign

You have to do keyword research, but you can’t overly rely on your initial learnings. You’ll have to actually track your logs for the maximum benefit. When you look through your log files, you’ll see what words people actually use to find your website. Here’s the area where you can find additional ideas for development.

Ten years ago there were a lot of non-profit style websites around. But these days, you’ll see less and less of that type. The web is a great place to monetize websites, so there’s almost no reason to build a hobby website anymore.

With simple ad programs like Google Adsense, any website can make a profit. Websites always cost money to run (well nearly always), so you have to at least make sure to have a way to pay for hosting costs. If the development of the website takes up a lot of time, you’ll need to account for that. You can’t just volunteer and pay hosting costs. That means you’re completely devaluing your own time. If you don’t respect your time, who else will?

Almost any website subject can be monetized, but some subjects lend themselves to earning revenue more easily than others. With some thought, you can probably find a profit motive for your website. Once you make some money from your efforts, the satisfaction of running a commercial website will become obvious.

If you monitor search engine traffic for any length of time, you’ll end up seeing some clear patterns. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of peaks and valleys, and traffic seems to come and go in cycles. This effect shouldn’t be surprising. People have long noticed that crowd pyschology can be graphed on computers. And with search engine traffic, the trends for search terms are closely related to real life demand.

With the summer coming, many keyword categories are bound to hit a valley. Some will hit a peak. Searches for summer activities like beach travel and baseball will go up and school-related searches will go down. What happens in the real world is what pushes cause and effect online.

If you expect peaks and valleys in your keyword category, plan accordingly

If you expect your traffic to decline mightily in the summer, you’ll need to make plans. There isn’t much else you can do. In fact, if you expect enough of a decline, then you may still have time to diversify your income. The simple best advice is to make sure your peaks can carry you through the valley. That’s as true of the online world as of the offline one.