Lijit

The last few days I was in New York at the OMMA Global Conference. The OMMA Conference gathers Ad Industry experts to discuss where online advertising has been and where it’s going. This year, the title was “The New Socialism” and talked about how social media is often the key to engagement between brands and audiences. Of course, we already knew that. Lijit is based on engaging your readers with your Brand through all the social connections you have. It was fun to see Madison Avenue coming to the same conclusion.

There were lots of good panels including one entitled “The Mommy Bloggers - What It’s Like When Marketers Really, Really Want You”. That panel featured a couple of Lijit publishers and many thought-provoking insights.

OMMA was very interesting to me because lately, we have been approached by some major brands to help them reach very specific audiences within our publisher base. When there’s a convergence between a publisher’s audience and a Brand, we offer the opportunity to the publisher. Sometimes these are specific Ads within a publisher’s search results page, sometimes these are display campaigns that we offer to our publishers for the content pages, and sometimes they are cool interactive applications that run on the publisher’s site.

Of course, we only offer these opportunities to our publishers if they have expressed an interest in monetizing their site with us. We respect that many publishers simply want to deliver a great experience for their readers and monetizing is not important. For those that are interested, major brands are looking for audiences like yours, and we talk with them every day.

If you’re a Lijit publisher and have not heard from us about a specific opportunity, it’s most likely that we haven’t found the right opportunity for you yet. If you are interested in hearing more, please send us a note. If not - no problem, we want to make sure we are the best solution in helping your readers effectively connect with your Brand!

In the middle of 2007 I began a blog.

And, like more than 11,000 other people, I installed Lijit on my blog.

And, like more than 11,000 other people, I got an email from a person named Tara Anderson welcoming me to the Lijit family.

“This must be automated,” I thought to myself. So I replied to the email. “Hey Tara, I think Lijit is awesome. In fact, I have a couple of clients that this would work well for.”

A couple of hours later, Tara responded.

“Thanks, Micah! We think our wijit is pretty cool too. I would like to introduce you to Todd Vernon, our CEO…”

And, a few days later, I headed up to Louisville to meet the Lijit team. While there, I ran into Seth Levine, who was an investor in ServiceMagic , the first company I worked at in Colorado. We talked for a bit, and made plans to connect later.

Over the next few weeks, Todd and I continued to talk. I introduced him to a few of the clients I had worked with at Current Wisdom, and then one day at lunch Todd asked if I would be interested in joining the Lijit team. Initially, I was unsure, until Seth gave me this advice:

“Micah, you are an idiot. Take the job.”

So I did.

Now, almost two years later the time has come for me to move on.

I was asked to help run a 2009 Techstars company as their CEO (not Techstars itself), and after talking it over with, well, a bunch of my mentors, and with Todd’s support, I decided it was the right thing to do.

My time at Lijit has been amazing. We have grown from 1,000 publishers to more than 11,000. From 11,000,000 monthly pageviews to more than 325,000,000. From 12 people to just over 30. Other than Google, we are the most used search widget on the web.

And, what amazes me most, is we still reach out to each new user and welcome them to our family.

I am not leaving Boulder, and as I told the team at Lijit, “I’ll just be up the street.” I say the same to all Lijit users (both current and future), I am always available.

And, while I might be leaving Lijit as an employee; I am still a member of our family.

Thanks Lijit for the last two years. I’m excited to see whats next.

Think about all those times you visit an unknown place. And I mean this in the analog world…e.g. a ‘real life’ place such as when as you walk into a new building and don’t know if you’re even in the right place, what floor you need to be on, etc etc. You have enough stress in your life, right?

Got the mental image? OK, hold on to it for a sec…

Now repeat that real life process I speak of above. You have your Google map printed and in hand, you generally have building location nailed. You walk in and…behold!…a concierge waiting to welcome you to the property and fundamentally telling you you’re in the right place and where to go and hopefully lots of other insightful information. Makes you feel are warm and fuzzy, right?

Ladies and gents: Welcome to the software equivalent of this example above, now available for your site:

The Lijit Welcome Wijit!

Let me give you a bit of a background on the Welcome Wijit. Frankly, it doesn’t deviate too far from the ‘real life’ example above!

Your content is extremely valuable to you and even more so to your loyal readers. Yet how many times have you done a search on a horizontal search platform like Bing, Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc and clicked on a link in the result set only to land on the page, not dive deeper into the content other than a 2 second eye scan and bail on it via back button to return to the search results and keep on searching. Admit it! What we’re attempting to do with Welcome Wijit is prevent this from easily happening to YOUR content. Fundamentally Welcome Wijit is about….

• Welcoming new readers to your site when they’ve linked in from somewhere else…e.g. a search engine, blogroll that includes your site, etc. They land on your property and they get a true ‘greeting’ to say thanks for stopping by!
• Better content discovery: Readers landing on your site for the first time will have an initial experience right off the bat of mining your content. What is old to you is all new to your new readers! Welcome Wijit will help them find it easily.
• Tools tools tools for your readers: The Welcome Wijit by design is about improved loyalty and return visits. The Wijit offers features to quickly add your feed to RSS readers, My Yahoo and iGoogle home pages to ensure they have you earmarked for return visits.
• Pre-selected search results: When a reader is searching the web for something and they stumble upon your site, Welcome Wijit knows that search term and will provide a pre-selected list of the top 3 relevant items fitting that search on your blog, within your content and throughout your network…given them a true ‘feel’ of the Lijit search experience.
• Advertising opportunities: We’re committed to doing what we can to make you more money! Similar to your Search Engine Results Page advertising, Welcome Wijit provides Google Ads to ensure more relevant ads are seen and clicked through by your readers.

So how does the Welcome Wijit Work? Let’s show ya!

Turning the Welcome Wijit On:

If you have the Lijit Search Wijit installed, Welcome Wijit is ready for use! You’ve got to turn ‘er on though first. You do this by visiting your Wijit management console and you’ll see a new tab for Welcome Wijit. By default Welcome Wijit is turned off. Simply check the ‘Show my readers the welcome wijit’ and you’re done. In addition, the Welcome Wijit management console provides you certain customization features and a preview of the wijit as you see here:

By default, the Welcome Wijit is set to appear above the post your reader is clicking in from via search engine, etc. The position of the Welcome Wijit can be set to be seen below the post, however:

How your readers interact with Welcome Wijit

You’re probably asking: “So how do my readers interact with Welcome Wijit?”. Easy! Assume that the reader has found your site through prototypical means…e.g. a search engine search, a link from someone’s blog roll, a link in an email, etc. The Welcome Wijit determines things like where your reader came from, what search terms if any were used to find your content, etc, before unveiling itself and providing the pre-selected content for your reader.

From a mechanical perspective, Welcome Wijit will invoke and appear within the content post region of your site. In cases where we can not automatically detect this, our team can work with you to ensure this fits to the place you need it to. Welcome Wijit automatically determines characteristics of your blog and assumes styling traits of your Lijit Wijit to inject itself into your site elegantly.

What are the main features of Welcome Wijit?

Let’s walk you through the UI. Note that the screen shot below is what is referred to as ‘expanded mode’, controlled by the reader to unveil more tools (and more of your content!)

1 Welcome Wijit will ensure we say hello to your reader from the place they came from. A Google search in the example above.

2 RSS Subscription feeds have been added to put them front and center. By design we want new readers to come back to your site time and again to enjoy the content your publish.

3 Your Network is key! Providing a link to traverse over to your Lijit user page so readers can see your network, popular search terms, etc is designed to help readers see your larger presence on the web.

4 Like RSS, we’ve added one-click tools to insert your site’s feed into iGoogle or My Yahoo gadgets so your readers can scope out your new prose first thing in the AM with their coffee.

5 The Lijit Search Field is front and center and designed to incentivize readers to search more of your content. It will be pre-loaded with the search term the reader was hunting for on their initial search when they found your site.

6 Pre-selected content based on the search term will be unveiled to ensure the reader will see the historical depth and richness of your content. What’s old to you is new to them! Let ‘em find it easy!

7 Thumbnail previews of the content items will help attract readers to see your content and visually parse its relevance. Plus it’s pretty cool.

8 Advertising like that on your Search engine Result Page are included on the Welcome Wijit in a slim and non-intrusive implementation. We’re about making you more money and advertising opportunities like this will help ensure this with better and more creative visibility to your readers.

So there you have it folks! The first release of the Lijit Welcome Wijit! The team is pushing to produce more tools for  you and your readers, dear publisher! Better discovery of your content, improved time on site as they see really what you have published all yield improved loyalty and more opportunities for you to make money and gain more exposure.

So go ahead and enable your Welcome Wijit! Start giving your readers that big ‘ol warm electronic hug when they enter your domain for the first time. Not unlike when your Grandma used to hug you when you visited. C’mon, you know you have a soft side….

Check out our FAQ if you want more info !

Little Ben Matson has been with our company for long enough now that we can easily make jokes at his expense. That’s always the true test, isn’t it? And fortunately for us, he can laugh at himself AND he has a blog designed to document his D&D adventures. Really…what more could we want from a co-worker?

Let’s not forget that Ben is an extraordinary team player who is willing to help out anyone at any time. Since he’s been at Lijit, he’s been put in many situations of extreme pressure and has passed all the stress tests with flying colors. Of course, he has yet to experience the famed Lijit Holiday Party. We’ll see how he does with that one. In the meantime, enjoy getting to know Ben. I can honestly say that the picture he provided me of his summer internship has to be one of the best of all time.

What is your Lijit contribution?

I am one of two Publisher Support Engineers at Lijit, and we do a variety of things around here. Whenever a blogger has a technical question, or runs into a problem with something, we work to provide the answers and solutions they’re looking for. Whenever we can’t handle an issue ourselves, we track down the people that can and make sure things get resolved properly. But my job is not just troubleshooting, I also get to trick-out the special accounts we create with a bunch of custom features for the different business development deals that go on around here. One of the things I really enjoy about my particular role at Lijit is seeing all the different ways our products get used, and all the neat things our company can do.

What is your least favorite word and why?

If I could remove any subset of words from the human vocabulary, it would be racial slurs. They are a bane on our advancement as intelligent and benevolent creatures, and generally come from a place of ignorance and hatred.

What is your favorite sound and why?

The ambiance of the natural world. When you can get away from all of the cars, all the humming electrical boxes, and all of the noise that society makes, you can hear what the world sounded like before the modern age. Admittedly, it is mostly just wind, but it can really have a profound effect on you if you let it. I also really like the sound of eggs cracking open.

What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt and why?

Before joining Lijit I spent some time as an intern in an intergalactic mercenary syndicate with a focus on mounted dinosaur assault squads. They had their hands in everything from galactic warfare to spice smuggling, plus they had amazing dental benefits. Ultimately though, Lijit just made me a better offer.

Something you’re guilty of…

Living a total bachelor lifestyle. I very rarely cook for myself, or even buy groceries. I’m pretty sure the only things in my fridge right now are some shredded Parmesan cheese, half a jar of raspberry jam, and a couple beers. A few of the girls in the office have tried teaching me the ways of healthy and responsible food purchasing habits, but I have thus far proved untrainable.

Actually, Ben, speaking for many of the girls in the office, we think you’re highly trainable. Thanks for all you do, even when we continually bug you for tech support help. If you’re interested in learning more about Ben, follow him on Twitter, take a look at the outtakes from our photo shoot, or ask him if you can join him on the next quest to raid the Green Dragon’s lair. I’m sure he’ll let you play. He’s nice like that.

Next month is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and around the country, many chapters of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure will be raising funds through the Race for the Cure. Since we love a good cause (and we all love the ladies), it only seemed right that we feature a blog that is out to educate folks about breast cancer and is working hard towards finding a cure.

The Denver branch of Susan G. Komen for the Cure is one of only two branches in the nation that even have a blog and since Colorado has one of the highest rates of breast cancer cases, the Denver Komen blog is an amazing resource. In addition to providing information about the upcoming Race for the Cure, the blog also seeks to share educational materials with young women and provide information about how Colorado is doing in treating breast cancer cases.

We’re fortunate that Michele Ostrander, the Executive Director of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Denver Affiliate, was able to take time out of her schedule to answer a few questions we had about the Komen blog. Read on to see how blogging has helped her non-profit…

How long have you been blogging and what made you start?

We’re actually fairly new to blogging, as we just started about two months ago. But we’re only one of a handful of Affiliates to start blogging, and we are even blogging before National. We see this as an opportunity to reach a wider-range of women and keep in close touch with our breast cancer community. Comments give us instant feedback, and we’re excited to have this tool as another way to engage with our survivors, fundraisers, grantees and volunteers.

What has been the greatest benefit you’re received from blogging about the Komen cause?

We recently heard from one of our survivors who is in Stage IV, and the blog served as a great way for her to get in touch with us and give us needed feedback on the community. Now we’re going to feature her story and her feedback on the blog.

Can you tell us more about the Survivor Stories?

The women who have had breast cancer have incredible stories. Every time they gather at events, they have so many stories to tell and are so inspiring to each other. We hope that by hearing about each other’s triumphs and struggles, we’ll help everyone understand that they’re a little less alone than they thought they were previously. We’ve been able to feature a woman who creates jewelry in honor of her sister who passed away from breast cancer, a marathon runner, a mother of two and a mother of seven. Breast cancer affects one in seven women in Colorado, so it affects a lot of different women, each with a story to tell. Despite just blogging for a short time, we’ve already had people reaching out to get involved and tell their story.

As a non-profit, how does blogging fit in with your marketing and fundraising strategy?

The blog serves as a way to keep those already involved in the fight for cures for breast cancer, but also a way to get more people aware. Plus, with Komen Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure Denver, 75 percent of the money we raise each year stays local. The blog serves as an important way to feature and put a face to those that we’re helping. Plus, we love being able to spotlight the great grantees that are able to benefit from the money we raise each year.

We also hope to raise awareness for the Komen Denver Race for the Cure on October 4, 2009, and the Pink Tie Affair on November 7, 2009, which are our top two fundraisers for the year. We’re lucky to have an energetic and creative group of people helping us so we also have fundraisers to feature like Bat for the Cure, Cupcakes for the Cure, and Massage for the Cure throughout the year.

How has Lijit helped you to become a better blogger?

As we’re trying out new ways to keep in touch with our community, Lijit helps our members find what they’re looking for amongst all our new communication channels. Plus, it’s fun to see the top terms that people are searching for on our blog and knowing that Lijit helps our visitors find the information they need.

For more information about Komen Denver, check out their website for more information or follow them on Twitter. And by all means, use the Lijit search on their blog to find out how you can help raise money to find a cure for breast cancer.

I write. A lot. And as I’ve done this blogging thing now for quite a few years, with 1000’s of posts now under my belt and submitted to the open interwebs for lurkers and loyal readers alike to enjoy, I’ve learned a few things:

a) Man, that’s a lot of posts. How the hell do I get people to enjoy my old stuff?

b) Man, I want people to HANG OUT on my site a while! How do I keep ‘em from leaping off too soon while trying to add color to my content with external links or anchoring text?

As it pertains to a) let’s just say that I discovered a little gem to help my readers do just that. Sometime in 2007 I started using Lijit Search and featured it prominently on my main blog and my other various blogs and sites I manage. Readers immediately started exploring my older content by searching for content and Lijit would take them directly to it where it lay on my blog as well as my social media content and where it lay on my friends sites via my trusted social graph. I liked it so much, I just HAD to work there (although I cannot say “I liked it so much I bought the company…ha!).

Now as it relates to b) there’s a lot of strategy that goes on by bloggers to keep those precious time-on-site metrics ticking ever longer. Ultimately, keeping folks on your site is about your content…good content…that engages readers and fundamentally shows who you really are. But very often it is about other content…content that can and should be used to help punctuate points within your posts and typically done by referencing something external to your site via hyper-linking. Yet the world of hyper-linking fundamentally jeopardizes time-on-site goals desired by bloggers because people LEAVE!

Enter: The Apture Experience.

All over this post and any of my blogs are examples of what Apture provides. The product offered by this Bay Area company essentially satisfies point b) above by creatively and elegantly displaying these punctuation points you desire to add color to your posts. Have a YouTube video that reminds you perfectly of that prose-like sentence you just wrote? Use Apture to link to it and pop up on your site. Have that perfect image that can elicit an emotive reaction to your text? Link to it with Apture and have it too pop up on your site. The installation of Apture caused zero brain damage (installed in ~2-3 minutes) and is just as easy to use. Once a post is either published or in a pre-published state, simply select text and allow Apture to search for similar content on the internet or input specific URLs to explicitly pop up content you desire.

Apture is so similar to Lijit in our focus on creating powerful tools for our publishers which at their core both help inspire and engage readers more thoroughly with your content. Lijit helps mine and discover content, Apture helps expose and punctuate your content with it. Like peanut butter and jelly. 

Finally, as blogger AND a manufacturer of publisher tools for our community. I am truly inspiring you to take a look at Apture and the types of features it can provide for your readers to creatively punctuate your content while ensuring the enjoyment of said content happens directly on YOUR site, keeping readers engaged and entertained post after post. Open up the “Apture” for your readers and keep ‘em engaged!

In the United States, we have a three-day weekend coming up in which we celebrate the struggles we’ve endured in our labor. We’ve been observing Labor Day in the U.S. since 1882 and it was something we borrowed from Canada–only to make it our own. Some view Labor Day as the end of summer, while for others, it means the beginning of the school year.

In case you don’t already have plans, may we suggest a few options gathered from our wide range of publishers?

You could try out a new hobby. Perhaps this is the weekend that you finally get around to pursuing that birding dream you’ve always had. If you need help, be sure to check out the Little Brown Job and use it as your blogging birding bible.

You could go shopping. Whether it’s for back-to-school or some of the newest fall fashions, a three-day weekend is the time to take advantage of the sales which will be all over. Two of our publishers, Bargain Hunting Moms and Vintage Indie, have the inside track on some special sales going on. Who doesn’t love a deal? Especially combined with a day off work?

You could cook something yummy. There are many people who celebrate this holiday with a backyard BBQ, and for those folks, La Jolla Mom provides a recipe for gourmet sliders, Cupcakes Take the Cake offers a recipe for sweet corn cupcakes, and The Perfect Pantry serves up ideas for everything in between. Whether in the kitchen or manning the grill, there is no excuse not to eat well this weekend.

You could go outside. (Crazy, I know.) A three-day weekend presents an opportunity to enjoy the outdoors and spend some quality time with nature. If your preferred method of getting away from it all includes four wheels, then the German Car Blog might hold some interest for you. Like biking? Check out VeloNews for everything going on in the cycling world. And if you’re one of the crazy few that actually packs everything on your back, then the Backpacker blogs are more your bag.

You could use the holiday to challenge yourself. The Happiness Project shares twelve ways to create a happier workplace, if you’re looking to get a heads-up on the rest of your week. The Simple Dollar suggests trying new ways of doing things that will result in saving money. And Duct Tape Marketing is helping with a contest that asks online workers to redefine what it means to work in today’s workforce. The grand prize? Healthcare coverage for 2010. Whether you’re looking to be happier, richer or simply to have health care, Labor Day weekend is the perfect time to start on these goals.

Whatever you end up doing this three-day weekend, be sure to have fun and be safe. We’ll be back to laboring next week, making search an even better experience for everyone.

Strike that. Reverse it. WAY too much to do and so LITTLE time to bring it all to you, dear publisher.  New functionality and increased value…all designed to improve your site’s experience and benefit your readers so they’ll come back for more of your emotive diatribes. Or, that’s what I hope happens on my own blog.

First an aside and a howdy. I’m Greg Keller, Lijit’s new product guy and this is my dream job. Why? Well, I essentially get to be the Willy Wonka of the establishment. My team and I compose a new discipline here at the Mother Ship called “product management”. This essentially means we ‘are the dreamers of the dreams’ and put pen to paper to scope-out and formulate the products and services which, by their design, help expose your content in new and innovative ways. Our team then inspires our unbelievable engineering staff through agile methods to make these designs and specifications become real for you…and me! Oh yes, for me as well as I too I am a blogger (therefore I am, I guess). Writing has been an immense part of my life over the last few years and now I am building better tools to help expose my own content!

So consider this post a first salvo of sorts out to you. I will be publishing a regular column to keep you abreast of all the rad things we are doing here in Boulder. I want to ensure you feel some of the energy from here on Walnut Street as you continue to write and publish your content and engage your readers. We’ll be there with our search-powered tools to help more people find and enjoy it. These posts will be timed with major milestones of product releases and will help educate you on what’s new and showing you repeatedly release after release why you chose to install Lijit on your site. We’re growing….and you should see the results!

These past few weeks have been prolific for Lijit. We’ve turned a major corner in the history of the company vis-a-vis our search product and its architecture. We’ve finalized a phalanx (yes, I said phalanx) of new features we’ll be unveiling in the coming weeks (I’ll blog about these specifically upon release) which will dramatically enhance your reader’s interaction with your content. They all are of demonstrable examples that will/are affecting you and your readers directly.

With respect to things we’ve done now and have released ‘live’ to you, the first example is pretty huge. That is the routing of our entire network of publishers onto a shiny new content delivery network. We’ll be making an announcement soon on this subject so stay tuned! The choice to invest engineering and business cycles on our content delivery network gives us an infinitely more efficient…and global…mechanism to scale our search network and ensure it rips for your readers. What this means to you as a publisher is that your content returns results much quicker during searches while providing way more scalability as our publisher base scales (and is doing so at a rapid clip!) into the 10’s of thousands of publishers. It also provides a reliability and fail-over system to ensure our content returns to your reader when the search, the moment they search around the globe.

Second is something super cool which your readers will LOVE! That is the implementation of thumbnail previews in your Lijit search results. What we have essentially done is crawled all of your content (as normal)….and that of your network (as normal)…and where possible grabbed all relevant images from posts and injected them next to each of their results in your Lijit SERP (Search Engine Result Page) overlay. This provides your reader a very quick ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ of the result link to enable quicker visual parsing of the results. This is what we call: COOL. We think your readers will wildly appreciate this and be able to discover the right results in all of your content in quicker time. We are moving massive blocks of our publishers to this new platform each week so if you do not see this on your SERP tomorrow, do not fret. You’re queued for it. If you want to see what these results look and feel like, check out my blog and try a couple of searches. Or go to my Lijit Account and use the Search Cloud interfacing with my blog as my daily readers will have queued up some great searches relevant to my (maniacally cycling focused) content. You can also see some larger implementations of this technology on mainstream/commercial sites such as VeloNews.com, a world wide leader in cycling news.

So, again, consider this a first salvo of product and platform information for you, Lijit publishers! We have TONS queued for you and as a blogger myself, know that there is a voice of your own here in Boulder helping to guide and shape your search-based publishing tools.

Stay cool.

Greg