I was just over at Live Alchemy reading a very interesting post about effective adverts. I contacted Andrew to ask whether it would be alright for me to post his article here, and just a few minutes later, I received confirmation. Thank-you Andrew.

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Here are two ads that we have been running on Google Adwords. Guess which one receives more clicks:

The .COM advert has been viewed 125 times, and nobody has clicked on it. The .CO.ZA advert has been viewed 73 times, and 4 people have clicked on it. The only difference is in the URL at the bottom - one displays YuppieChef.com, and one displays YuppieChef.co.za (both addresses go to the same place).

200 people is not a huge test-group, but if the trend continues it raises an interesting question about what our branding and marketing strategy should be. Until now we have been pushing the .com version of YuppieChef because we feel it looks more professional and allows us to expand internationally in time. However, for now our market is entirely South African, and this little test seems to suggest that South Africans would rather visit a .co.za website if they are looking for stuff to buy. Perhaps they have been disappointed too many times after looking at a lovely international website and then finding that delivery to South Africa is not available or too expensive.

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I found this article extremely interesting, and it actually added to something I was thinking about the other day. With this huge web interesting in South Africa at the moment, there is definitely an increase in supporting local websites. I must admit, I would have clicked on the .co.za advert above as well. I commented on Andrews blog saying that I would assume it has to do with one of two things:

1. Readers feel that visiting a local website is more ‘reachable’, in other words, if there was something to purchase or the need to contact the person authoring the advert arrival website, it would be far easier than an international comparison.
2. Bandwidth reasons, we all know the costs involved with South African bandwidth, and if an account has been soft capped, local websites are still an option.

I will do a follow up with Live Alchemy, to find out whether they have more information in a couple weeks, and report back here with the results. Thanks again Andrew, for letting me post your article.

If I had to take an educated guess about which affiliate network is most popular with publishers, it would have to be Google Adsense. I feel that I would be safe in saying that around 8/10 publishers use Adsense on their websites, and perhaps 7/10 people stick with Adsense and only Adsense across their websites. Amogst all the affiliate options available, the wide spread of knowledge and information on Adsense is far greater than any other, and this would be a big contributing factor to its popularity - not to mention that it is a Google service.

When it comes to Adsense, there is always lots of talk with regards to the topic of which colours to use; Should the adverts blend in with the website, or should they stick out? Most people will say that they need to blend with the website, which I don’t disagree with, but at the same time, this is basically a kind of trickery, is it not? This morning I surfed around various niche market websites looking for Adsense blocks, and it got me thinking. If you are running a niche website, which has a very tight topic, why would you want to hide your adverts? Of course, people normally stay away from adverts, but on a niche website, your content will revolve around one set topic, and therefore Adsense blocks will relate to your topic, and the chances are that your readers would actually be interested in seeing the adverts. Not every advert leads to a website which requires people to buy something, many adverts lead to websites with useful information. This being said, why not change the colours of your Adsense blocks to stand out slightly? I don’t mean change them to flaming red backgrounds with yellow fonts on a blue, white and gray website, but perhaps put a bright border around the block - this will make it stand out slightly, but not too much.

Google offers three different techniques on their website, which they feel work most successfully. Before we look at these three techniques, there is a useful table, which can be followed:

1. To blend, make the background and borders of your ads the same color as the background of your page where the ad is placed. If your site has a white background and you don’t want to spend a lot of time choosing ad colors, we recommend using our pre-designed Open Air palette.
2. To complement, use colors that already exist on your site, but don’t match the background and borders exactly where the ads are placed.
3. To contrast, choose colors that stand out against the background of your site. Contrasting is recommended only for sites with dark background, so we suggest using a palette with white background, white borders, and blue titles.

It is important to note whether the people on your website are returning readers or just visitors. This will play a role on your click through chances. If your visitor base consists mostly of returning readers, the chances are that your readers will become blind to your adverts. This will decrease your advert click throughs, and you will need to deal with this to keep your revenues up, there are two techniques to handle this:

1. Change the placement of your advert blocks
2. Change the colour of your adverts

Both of these points are self explanitory, but I have something useful for those of you interested in changing your colours. To reduce reader blindness, Google allows up to 4 colour variations when it comes to adverts. This means that there is code, which you can use, which will randomize the colours of your adverts, each time your website is loaded, without you having to do it manually. I will paste an example below, for you to see what I mean.

google_color_border = [”628098″,”628098″,”000000″,”000000″];
google_color_link = [”000000″,”BBB90C”,”BBB90C”,”628098″];
google_color_url = [”000000″,”628098″,”000000″,”000000″];
google_color_text = [”628098″,”628098″,”000000″,”000000″];

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I have recently been spending some time looking into various methods that bloggers can use to increase the awareness of their blog. There are a number of ways, which this can be done. I have been focusing mainly around increasing traffic with your current traffic though. The simplest way is to set up some kind of referral form, where your readers can email an article they enjoyed to a friend, this is a highly effective method. Another way is to offers users a badge, which they can copy and paste onto their website. I prefer the referral system, as it’s a very direct form of marketing.

I spent some time looking into this method, taking note of the pros and cons, and I came up with one magor area of interest - Users don’t want to do things, which involve page refreshes. There is nothing worse than filling out a form, or taking part in a poll, and waiting for a page to reload after submitting the form. I feel that the thought of waiting for a page reload is enough to totally discourage someone from using a service. This is where a little ajax, some html and some php come in really handy. The ability to perform a task, and have that task handled behind the scenes is invaluable to anyone who runs a blog. As a programmer, these kinds of things interest me from a programming point of view, and I took some time to read about ajax, and managed to put together a nice little emailer item.

The program consists of three files, this is for user simplicity, in case you are interested in downloading the program and want to be able to easily adapt it to your website. If you are familiar with programming, I am sure you will quickly be able to compile it all together into one neat file.

emailer.php - This file consists of some very simplistic html tags to create a form with 3 elements, a javascript include statement, and javascript function call and a <div> success message class.

backend.php - This is a standard, straight forward php mailer script. It is very simplistic, feel free to adapt it. This file, you will need to open in notepad, for example, and change accordingly, to suite your needs. I have included some easy instructions to guide you.

ajax.js - The Ajax handler file, which processes the functions behind the scenes. I am not going to go into detail as to how this file works exactly, as that is not what this blog is about. If you are interested in programming, I’m sure you will be able to easily figure out what is going on, and if you are not interested, and just want to use the code, you don’t need to worry about this file.

If you are keen to use this little source code snippet in a website, which you currently author, this is what you must do:

1. Upload the three files to your webserver
2. Type <?php include(’emailer.php’); ?> in your .php file where you want to have the form appear

It’s really as simple as that. I hope you enjoy the snippet, I would have loved to go into detail as to how the whole thing works, but that is not what this blog is about, so perhaps another time. Please feel free to email me though, if you have any questions.

Download Webtrepreneur Ajax Emailer.

Wordpress.org and plugin writers have created many statistical plugins for your blog over the years, but as skeltoak says, “However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface/”

The installation of the plugin is very straight forward. It follows the usual process of logging into your wordpress backend, and clicking through to the plugins page, and activating the plugin. This plugin requires an API Key, which you can get here. This is similar to the ever so popular anti-spam plugin, Akismet. The basic install guide, is shown below:

1. Upload stats.php to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. It will ask you to enter your WordPress.com API key, do so.
4. Sit back and wait a few minutes for your stats to come rolling in.

Once you have finished installing the plugin, it will start collecting statistical information immediately. This information will include things such as: pageviews, popular pages, popular posts, referal traffic, and an assortment of other useful bits and pieces. On top of this, the plugin will edit your DashBoard, allowing you to view your stats while logged in.

You can download the Wordpress stats plugin from this link, and if you require more information, you can click here.

This software is extremely useful if you are trying to monetize your blog, as it gives you a lovely breakdown on all the popular areas of your blog. Knowing what your visitors are interested in, and knowing where they came from, can only lead to success when deciding what kinds of adverts to place, and where to place them. Knowing your readers is invaluable ~ The Webtrepreneur.