The Secrets to Blogging Success (Minus the Secrets)
March 10, 2010 Posted by GlenThis is a post by Glen who writes about viral marketing at ViperChill. He’s had a lot of public success with blogging over the last 18 months so wants to share some of the things he’s learned.
At 16, I built my first ever blog. That was almost 5 years ago, and I’m still blogging to this day. Despite having recently sold the 10th biggest personal development blog in the world and gaining 2,000+ subscribers on my marketing blog in the last 4 months, I used to be a total blogging failure.
ViperChill, the site I recently relaunched, is the first blog I ran. In my naivety, I didn’t write at all for human visitors at all; I didn’t care. I simply wrote for search engines, and aimed to get as much traffic from them as I could.
Obviously this wasn’t a very good strategy, ending my first year of writing with 0 blog comments and 6 subscribers, which were probably all me on different Google reader accounts. But hey, I was getting some search engine traffic.
Thankfully, I have managed to turn that 1st year of blogging-hell into experience, and now run some very popular websites. I recently sold my biggest blog, PluginID, for a mid-five-figure fee, so I want to share the story of how I went from being a nobody in a niche to dominating a market.
The Story of PluginID
PluginID was my blog built for the personal development niche. When I started it, I was an absolutely nobody in the industry. And, if I’m totally honest, I didn’t read any blogs in the industry either. I was going through a lot of personal growth in my life after having recently moved to South Africa at 18 (where I didn’t know one single person) and decided to document my experiences.
Having been in the internet marketing space for 3 years prior to starting the site and having companies like Land Rover and Hewlett Packard receiving my services, I was confident I could make the site a success. Yet, dreams and hopes aren’t anything without taking action to make things happen.
As I had a full-time job when running the site, I would usually work on my blog from 7pm onwards, and sometimes wouldn’t stop until 2am in the morning. I really loved writing about topics like motivation, productivity and being who you want to be, so the long hours didn’t bother me.
I worked hard on the site and finally reached what I view as a respectable milestone – 500 feed subscribers – after 7 months. I say finally as with my background, I expected a little more. Little did I realise that blogging really does have a ‘hurdle’ to cross when you first start, and 5 months later the site was at 4,000 subscribers.
After 18 months of running the site I sold it to someone I know for a fair, five-figure fee. The site was making around $3,000 per month on average through selling ads and products, so it was a nice deal for both involved. I honestly never thought I would sell the site as I loved the topic so much, but I had been longing to get back into the topic of internet marketing where I had spent so much of my earlier years online.
I’m all for doing what you love, so I decided to relaunch my “baby.”
The Success of ViperChill
In October 2009, I posted a “I’m back” message on the site. I hadn’t posted on the domain for over two years, but was fortunate to start with around 2,000 subscribers, although I doubted many of them were still active. After writing that first post, I just felt really excited to start getting into the swing of things again. In fact, this was exactly how I felt when I started PluginID.
As you’re reading Tyler’s blog, you probably know of quite a few other sites in the internet marketing space. I sure did, and besides Tyler’s blog there was clear factor about most of them: they write short, dispensable, throwaway posts. For every 20 articles on most of these sites, there might be one gem that you can learn from.
Through my experience with PluginID, I knew I didn’t want to be like that. I wanted every single post I wrote to be valuable and one of the best resources on that topic you can find. In other words, I decided not to churn out 7, 500-word posts per week like a lot of these sites. Instead, I post once or twice per week and write articles that are usually over 2,000 words in length.
The result? In the last 4 months the blog has grown by over 2,000 subscribers and I’ve been mentioned frequently on some of the most popular blogs in the industry.
What this has to do with you…
I’m not sharing my story to show off or so that you think of me as some sort of guru. There are lots of other people who would prefer that kind of Ego boost or guru status. Instead, I’m sharing my story because the secret to making each of these blogs successful is simply that there are no secrets.
Sorry if that annoys you and you were looking for something to overcome your “competitors” (there are no competitors to valuable bloggers), but it’s the truth. Sure there are tweaks and tricks you can apply to get the most out of your site, and your audience, but for the most part, there’s just a few fundamentals that matter.
Here’s What I Want You To Do
I don’t have any ads or affiliate links on my site, so there’s nothing I want to sell you or convince you to do. However, I write in this space because I genuinely want to help people share their true value with the world (often in the form of blogging) and live the life that they want to live (making a living online).
Therefore, I have a few suggestions for you.
1. Stop Making Excuses
Picasso wasn’t born with a paintbrush in his hand and J.K. Rowling wasn’t possessed with some special talent that has made her over $1bn through writing. When you’re born, everyone starts on the same playing field. I understand that some people have a wealthy family or aren’t born into the best environment, but if you’re able to read this article, then you’re better off than most.
I look back on how I spent a few years online and honestly cringe. The countless hours I spent browsing Digitalpoint and buying the latest ‘make money overnight’ product could have been spent doing things that really helped me.
I am not lucky, I simply provided enough value to my audience on a regular basis and received the success I did because of that. If you do the same, your position will be the same. Get rid of your excuses right now, because they aren’t helping you progress, they’re just holding you back.
2. Stop Caring About What You Get Back
It wasn’t until I stopped focusing on monetary or subscriber rewards and started focusing on providing value to people that my websites actually became successful. It makes sense right? If you genuinely focus on helping people then things will come back your way.
Look at the top sites in this industry like Problogger, Copyblogger and Chris Brogan. They have been consistently providing value for years and now they’re being rewarded for their efforts.
The top blogs are the ones that have a core focus on helping their readers. Do you think Seth Godin needs to sell more books? Do you think he needs to blog everyday to continue to make a living? Of course not, he’s a multi-millionaire, but he just genuinely loves helping people.
Unless you run a news or some form of entertainment site, then everything you do should be around your readers and providing massive value. Again, it’s not surprise that those who give the most get the most back in return.
3. Finally, Stop Looking for the Secrets
As I mentioned earlier, there are great tips and tricks to pick up for your blog around the web. One I particularly liked was by Tim Ferriss where he found that changing his ‘Categories’ section to ‘Topics’ massively increased their click-through rate.
I love reading things like this, but they’re only going to take you so far. Having a blog with awful content that is plastered with ads isn’t going to take you very far, even if you do use the Thesis theme for Wordpress and rename that category label.
Look around at the top 100 Technorati blogs and the biggest sites in your industry. Notice how they are consistently providing massive value to their readers. They may do it in different formats (text, images, video) and they may have different posting schedules, but they’re still doing it.
The real switch happened for me when I stopped looking for the tricks and secrets to make me money, and just started building sites around the things that I loved with the aim to really help people with that topic. It’s not the same as most of the advice you read online, but most of the advice about making money is from people who only make money by teaching you.
Now, can you please promise me you’re going to share your value with the world? Because I can promise you, the world is waiting for it.
Glen Allsopp writes at ViperChill on the topic of Viral Marketing. He recently posted a guide to Wordpress SEO that you may learn a lot from.
Jonathan Volk’s Free Affiliate Marketing Guide
March 8, 2010 Posted by Tyler CruzIf you do any kind of affiliate marketing online then chances are you’ve heard of Jonathan Volk.
You may also recognize his name from when we competed against each other in a weight loss challenge last year. He’s also one of my blog link partners.
Jonathan Volk is a well known name in the affiliate marketing industry as he is a true super affiliate, regularly generating around $400,000 a month. Okay sure, that’s gross, but you could still assume around $150,000 net profit each month. That’s $35,000 profit a week!
Oh yeah, and he’s only 23.
For the first time ever, Jonathan Volk has written an e-book which is a comprehensive affiliate marketing guide. It covers everything including the absolute basics (such as defining what affiliate marketing is), demographic analysis, social media, PPV, PPC, media buying, etc.
Best of all, the guide is completely free. You simply need to give your name and e-mail and the guide is completely yours.
Download it now, for free.
Since Jonathan covers all the major aspects of affiliate marketing in this guide, this is the perfect opportunity for those of you who always wanted to get started in affiliate marketing but never wanted to pay for an online course.
What’s nice, too, is that since Jonathan just wrote this guide, that means it’s up-to-date. The affiliate marketing world evolves and transitions pretty fast, so having a recently written guide is paramount to avoiding saturated sources, marketing tactics, etc.
Below is a list of the guide’s sections:
- Section 1. Introduction
- Section 2. What Is Affiliate Marketing?
- Section 3. What Is An Affiliate Network?
- Section 4. Recommended Affiliate Networks
- Section 5. How Does All This Come Together?
- Section 6. The "Pregame"
- Section 7. The "Pregame" Pt. 2 – Know Your Demographics
- Section 8. The "Pregame" Pt. 3 – Setting Up Hosting / Domain Name
- Section 9. Setting Up A Simple PHP Redirect
- Section 10. The Landing Page
- Section 11. Affiliate Marketing Methods (Basic Overview)
- Section 12. Social Media Affiliate Marketing Guide
- Section 13. Pay Per View Affiliate Marketing Guide
- Section 14. Pay Per Click Affiliate Marketing Guide
- Section 15. Media Buying Affiliate Marketing Guide
- Section 16. After Your Campaigns Are Ready To Launch
- Section 17. Conclusion
Jonathan Volk is such a beast in the affiliate marketing industry that you should really hear what he has to say. The guide is free and Volk knows his stuff, so download it now and learn a thing or two 
An In-Depth Review and Case Study of Infolinks
March 2, 2010 Posted by Tyler CruzThe following is a paid review and is completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having me review your site or product, please view my advertising page.
Five weeks ago, the Vice President of Infolinks, Tomer Treves, contacted me asking me to try their In-Text advertising network as a publisher.
I replied saying I wasn’t interested as I had previously used other In-Text advertising networks such as Kontera and IntelliTXT with horrible results (incredibly low payouts, irrelevant ads, etc.).
Tomer was persistent and replied by saying that “Infolinks is different”. He then offered me a rather significant up-front signing bonus if I were to run Infolinks on my network of sites for a year. His sign-up bonus offer was indeed significant and I did think about it carefully as it would have made a nice additional down payment on the house I’ll be buying.
However, I really had a strong negative disposition towards In-Text advertising networks and decided to decline his offer – after all, a year is a long time. In response, Tomer decided to buy a paid review from my blog, which was a smart move as it basically forced me to try Infolinks
Even though I was negatively biased against In-Text advertising, I tested Infolinks for my review with a fresh state of mind, even optimism.
Here than is my review of Infolinks:
Infolinks is an In-Text advertising network that pays out on a CPC basis. In-Text ads are those ads you typically see when keywords are double underlined. When hovered over with the cursor, a small ad, which is supposed to be relevant to the contextual text that is linked, will appear.
I ran Infolinks on two of my websites, CookingForums.net and Movie-Vault.com (now removed, in case you’re looking for the ads), for 2 weeks in order to get a decent amount of sample data.
Signing Up & Implementation
Unlike many ad networks, Infolinks welcomes all legitimate (obviously nothing illegal or offensive) websites, big or small. There are no minimum requirements for page views or visitors which right off the bat makes Infolinks a very desirable solution for small website owners.
Applying to Infolinks was very easy and I believe I was approved the next day, if not instantly (I really can’t remember unfortunately). However, while account approval may be quick, you will then also require separate approval for each website you add to your account.
Unfortunately, in my case, this turned out to be a bit of a hassle. I had correctly added the ad JavaScript code to my sites, which was required for verification purposes, but customer support kept telling me I didn’t add it. After several e-mails and 3 days later, they finally apologized and admitted that I was correct and had added the code correctly. Their apology was sincere and they approved my sites.
Adding Infolinks to your site is as easy as it gets, simply adding a snippet of JavaScript to the bottom of your HTML code, right before the </html> tag. Below is how my JavaScript code looks:
<script type="text/javascript">
var infolink_pid = 69197;
var infolink_wsid = 0;
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://resources.infolinks.com/js/infolinks_main.js"></script>
The variables are there for optional advanced customization (see below).
Customization
Infolinks offers a decent amount of customization to their ads.
First, you can decide which portions of your website you want to allow Infolinks to link. This is a vital customization feature; without it, you could have important areas such as your navigational sections turned into ads which would be extremely confusing and frustrating to your visitors.
By default, if no tags are implemented, the Infolinks ads will appear in all appropriate sections. The boundary tags are simple to implement, simply requiring either a <!–INFOLINKS_ON—> or <!–INFOLINKS_OFF—> in appropriate sections. This may be a bit of a pain to implement in certain CMS’s, however.
Another way to customize your ads is to take advantage of the Advanced Customization Wizard. The wizard, as seen below, allows you to easily customize the colours of your links, choose the underline style, set your website’s category, and set the ad saturation level you want to appear per page.
You can also customize your ads by adding and editing variables within the JavaScript code. This is nice for power users, but there appears to be no option to set the underline style through this method, so you’ll have to use the wizard if you wish to customize that.
Furthermore, making modifications to the JavaScript code by modifying the variables does not appear to update the ads instantly, while using the wizard does appear to show instant changes.
Customer Support
I already mentioned the little hiccup with customer support during the website approval above, but that was really minor and they did apologize rather sincerely.
However, I did have another run-in with customer support when my forum members on CookingForums.net were complaining about a bug. Apparently, Infolinks created a bug on CookingForums that prevented the back button in Internet Explorer from working – you had to click it 3 times in order for it to function correctly.
There was no way I was going to keep running Infolinks on my site if it caused such a severe user interface issue, so I quickly removed it from the site.
However, the next day, Tomer e-mailed me stating:
“I heard you had a bug on one of your sites so you’ve removed the Infolinks script. Despite being rare, bugs happen (especially with IE), and we’re proud of being very fast to fix anything. Recently, for example, we were the first ad network to overcome a problem that PayPal had with customers in India (you can easily Google this).
In your case, even though you didn’t approach our support (as far as I know), our monitoring team found your problem, duplicated it, and in fact fixed it already…”
While I did contact support about it, Tomer was correct and the bug was fixed very quickly so I re-added Infolinks to CookingForums the next day to proceed with the testing.
While the bug was certainly annoying, I do give them credit for fixing it so fast.
However, as is mentioned below, there was also a bug on Movie-Vault.com which I notified customer support about 10 days ago. Two days later, they replied, telling me that they “forwarded this issue to their technical team for further investigation”, but I haven’t heard anything since then (8 days ago) and the bug remains.
Therefore, I think their customer support needs work. It’s not horrible, but I think they should follow up on issues more and perhaps be a bit more proactive.
Bugs Galore
The main reason I was so antagonistic about In-Text advertising when Tomer first contacted me, apart from the historically low payouts from other similar networks, was the bugs and irrelevant ads that these networks tend to have.
Below are 3 bugs that appeared on both sites I tested Infolinks on:
Irrelevant Ads
The whole point of contextual advertising is to provide higher targeted and relevant ads which benefits everybody including the advertiser, publisher, ad network, and visitor.
While some ads were indeed relevant to the keywords they targeted, I found that 90% of them were not. The majority of them appeared to be ads for search engines or “top sites” which basically tell visitors to find more information on x keyword(s) by using their search engine or viewing the top sites for x keyword(s). This is not relevancy, and does not engage users to click on them.
Since Infolinks is a CPC network and you only get paid when visitors click on the ads, relevancy is of HUGE importance to publishers. This can not be understated.
I am listing this as a bug since Infolinks states on their front page:
“Infolinks will automatically insert highly relevant In-Text ads into your website’s content”.
Below is a screenshot of an example of the typical Infolinks ad:
No Images
While this may not technically be a bug, it certainly looks like one to visitors: I would estimate that roughly 90% of the ads don’t have images, as seen below:
In many cases, this is likely due to their system not being able to grab or cache a screenshot of the website, possibly because the page does not actually even exist until it is visited.
Whatever the reason may be, the fact remains that the majority of ads do NOT have images. This makes the ads look trashy and unprofessional. I can understand situations where a screenshot may not be dynamically possible, but there is no reason why there should be a blank “Image Not Available” placeholder graphic showing. Require a default image or simply do not show any image and just the text, but don’t show a blank placeholder image as that is just too unprofessional.
Perhaps Infolinks may even want to consider requiring advertisers to submit images with their ads ala Facebook instead of taking website screenshots dynamically. This would dramatically improve CTR in most cases anyway.
HTML Tags Showing
This one is definitely a bug. Some ads, perhaps as many as 20% in fact, show HTML tags in the description and title instead of stripping them out or implementing the actual tags, as can be seen in the screenshot below:
This is yet another thing that makes the ads look unprofessional, unenticing to click on, and just rather silly.
When you combine the 3 bugs above, it really shows that Infolinks has a lot of work to do.
Link Style Bug
This bug appeared only on my Movie-Vault.com website, not CookingForums.net, and only appeared on the front page news posts. This was somewhat odd, since when you viewed the same content on the individual news pages, the bug was not present; it was only present on the front page news posts.
Basically, the bug had the ad links incorrectly positioned. The underline links were often several pixels below where they should have been, and were sometimes directly through text.
An example is shown below:
Now, it’s possible that this is more an issue with the fact that Movie-Vault.com uses a WYSIWYG toolbar editor when staff submit news, and therefore the news posts may have more complicated and obfuscated HTML tags for the Infolinks JavaScript to parse, but that doesn’t really seem to make sense when you consider that these same news posts appear fine when on their individual pages…
Whatever the reason, this bug was never fixed, nor did I ever receive any update about the progress of it from customer support.
I should mention that the underline links appeared fine everywhere else throughout the site.
Income Analysis
Ah, the most important part. While everything I mentioned above is important, in the end the only thing that really matters in an ad network is how much money it can make you.
The reports page on Infolinks is pretty simple, but has all the basic information and date functions you need. However, one thing that is a bit of a pet peeve for me is that the reports aren’t live or even updated hourly. Instead, you can only receive stats up to the previous day.
This is obviously not a big issue, but for those who love checking their stats like me, this is a bit difficult to get used to. I don’t see why the reports can’t be made live or at least updated hourly, so it’d be nice if this would be changed in the future.
Anyway, I started receiving ad impressions on February 19th and ran Infolinks on my two sites until the end of the month, although I did remove the code for several days on CookingForums while the ‘back button’ bug was present. I also set Infolinks on both sites to show the maximum amount of ads available, in order to see the maximum I could make.
Things started off great. After only having put Infolinks on my sites for half a day, I saw a $5.72 eCPM on CookingForums.net! This is a huge eCPM and so when I saw it I was naturally quite surprised and optimistic. However, it was odd that Movie-Vault.com only had a $0.66 eCPM in comparison:
However, things quickly changed for the worse. While the following couple days saw an average of an $0.89 eCPM, the 4 days thereafter showed a combined total of $0 (for my CookingForums.net site)!
At first, I thought this was undoubtedly a bug on Infolinks end and was naturally rather annoyed, but then I remembered that Infolinks pays on a CPC basis and not CPM. Therefore, these stats could be legitimate, and I just didn’t have a single person click on an add during those 4 days.
It’s certainly possible, but it’s also uncharacteristic as my daily click average at the end of my testing phase turned out to be 5 per day. So, it’s rather strange that I didn’t receive a single click during those 4 days when statistically I should have received around 20…
This is why I believe there was some type of bug that occurred during those 4 days, although I don’t have concrete proof to back it up since my sample traffic data is quite low.
I continued to let Infolinks run uninterrupted until the end of the month, and you can see the overall results below:
While there were days with a $1.58 eCPM and a $0.99 eCPM, the average ended up being $0.49. Now, if that was the eCPM for a traditional banner, then it would be an okay rate, but I personally consider In-Text ad links such as Infolinks to be more intrusive than the typical banner since the ads are directly entrenched within your site’s text, and so I therefore expect higher rates.
I wrote the majority of this review last night, and am finishing it this morning. Out of curiosity, I decided to check yesterday’s stats a couple of minutes ago, and was surprised to find another high eCPM, akin to what occurred on the very first day.
It showed a $3.58 eCPM for Movie-Vault.com (the stats below are only for Movie-Vault.com) which is great!
Now, this could easily be explained by somehow getting a click (or two) on a very high-priced keyword or keyword phrase. After all, people have received as high as $20 CPC’s from Google AdSense before. So that is probably what happened. My average CPC is $0.27, and if we estimate that it was just 1 ‘superclick’ that occurred yesterday, then it would have paid out $2.77 for that one click.
Below are the overall stats that occurred between CookingForums.net and Movie-Vault.com during a period of 10 days (impressions didn’t begin to appear until the 19th):
I ended up averaging only $0.49 eCPM which is too low for my liking considering the types of ads.
Referring back to my Bugs section above, if Infolinks provided actual relevant ads with working images that are bug-free, then I would expect the CTR to increase dramatically which would in turn increase the overall eCPM dramatically as well.
I should mention that I used the dotted underline style on both of my sites and the Infolinks customer support did mention the following to me:
“I would suggest that you use double underline for your highlighted links. We recommend you choose double underline as it’s considered less intrusive (since it isn’t confused with regular hyperlinks). Double-underline will get higher quality, better paying ads. Our experience shows that in general double-underline generates higher revenues than single line.”
So I wonder if that explains for my lower eCPM. But I do disagree with “it’s considered less intrusive” as double underlines to me are just so incredibly ugly.
But I’m now curious if advertisers actually pay a premium for double underlines, and/or if advertisers can bid differently depending on the underline styles. This is something I’d be interested in getting an official response on.
Summary
While I went into my review process of Infolinks with an open mind, having been admittedly biased against In-Text ad networks, my experience during the past 2-weeks only reinforced my negative disposition towards them.
While they claim high relevancy, I saw very little (almost none) during my test run. Improving the ad relevancy is the #1 thing that Infolinks should focus on. There are also many bugs that need to be ironed out, and they seem to be simple fixes so I’d like to see those eliminated or at least improved.
Customer support was a hit and miss.
Registration and ad implementation was fast and easy, and their system is very basic and simple to use. Ad customization was also simple to implement.
Earnings were rather unpredictable, with some days having fantastic eCPM’s as high as $5.50+ yet some others with as low as $0.
I gave Infolinks an honest shot, but they’re going to need to fix the bugs I wrote about and address many of the other issues I brought up in order for me to try them again.
To be fair, out of all the In-Text ad networks, I do think I like Infolinks the best. Even though their payouts weren’t too great, they did appear to pay better than their competition. But that’s not saying a whole lot…
I’d be happy to do another paid review of Infolinks if they do decide to improve and work on things.
I actually hope they do seriously heed some of my advice as I actually do want to use them. Those were some nice eCPM’s! If I could average a $5 eCPM with them I’d be extremely happy and would most likely use them on all of my sites and promote them.
I’m pretty confident I could refer 300-400 publishers to them so it’s really in their best interest to get me on board
Yahoo and Microsoft Search Platforms Merge
February 28, 2010 Posted by Tyler CruzYahoo and Microsoft have been in discussions to merge their search platforms, Yahoo Marketing Solutions and Microsoft AdCenter, for some time. Not too long ago, they announced that they had come to an agreement and would be merging in the future.
Last week, both Microsoft and Yahoo! sent out e-mails to their search marketing advertisers, announcing that they have now received regulatory clearance to form a search alliance. So it looks like things are moving along and this merger is really going to happen.
In the announcement, they introduce us to SearchAlliance.com, which gives more information about the search marketing merger including news and answers to commonly asked questions.
On the site they state:
“Our aim is a high quality transition of advertisers and partners in at least the US prior to the 2010 holiday season. However, we may wait until 2011 if we determine this will be more effective.”
So it appears that advertisers should be able to take advantage of the merger within this year.
(It took me forever to find an image to modify that would work for this post, so please enjoy this one.)
This makes me wonder how this merger will affect pricing, quality score, among other vital factors important to advertisers.
Also, the demographics of Yahoo! and Bing users differ a fair bit. While Yahoo users tend to mimic the behaviours closer to those Google, Bing users tend to be more business-oriented. With this merger, this could effectively hurt many existing campaigns.
Below are some key points as mentioned on SearchAlliance.com:
- Search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft, and their respective partners will be combined into a new unified search marketplace.
- Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10-year license to certain Yahoo! search technologies.
- Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic (powered by Bing) and paid (powered by AdCenter) search results.
- Full implementation of the terms of the Search Alliance is expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory clearance.
- Yahoo!’s Sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients, and Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft AdCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.
It kind of sucks that AdCenter will be the new platform, as I really don’t like it. It’s cumbersome and awkward… I would have much preferred to use Yahoo’s, but maybe AdCenter will undergo some improvements as a result of the merger.
However, there is some good news. The following points are taken from the MSN e-mail:
- Reach up to 150 million searchers and get approximately 62% more search volume than on Yahoo! alone through a new, unified search marketplace combining the Yahoo! and Microsoft networks.
- With just one buy, you’ll reach users on Yahoo! and Microsoft sites, as well as other premium partner sites.
This will make scaling much easier, as now you will only have to work with 2 search engines traffic sources instead of 3.
Then again, the merger opens up traffic to possible competitors of yours who were only advertising on one of the networks, which could possibly raise bidded prices. I’m not really sure how the merger will affect the market in terms of whether or not traffic will be cheaper, more expensive, or stay the same, but one thing is certain: advertisers will now have access to a lot more traffic volume in one unified source.
What do you think about this merger? Share your comments.
