Archive for November, 2010
Jeff has patience. All day Jeff is the trafficker responsible for answering (or ensuring they’re answered) your technical or support related inquiries as our Publisher Support Manager. Although Jeff isn’t “new” at Lijit, it’s better late than never to do a Get To Know series this month for rock-n-roll, futbol and football-loving Jeff.
What is your Lijit contribution?
I help provide support to our existing customer base as well as to our sales team to help get new accounts off and running with our search and advertising services.
What is your least favorite word and why?
It’s a phrase, “cool beans,” I hate it. “What does it mean?” (Please reference double rainbow).
What is your favorite sound and why?
Well, Jack White’s guitar is pretty good but I think my kids laughter takes the cake.
What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt and why?
Something in the alternative energy sector. I just think creating energy from sources like the sun or wind is a very cool thing.
Something you’re guilty of…
I have seen Twilight.
Yesterday we released the latest revision of the iPad app, now with full support for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Now, no matter what iDevice you use you can stay up to date on what is happing on your site in real-time!
This project has been a lot of fun. We had a few different reasons for experimenting with this platform so I thought I would give a little insight into this thought process.
First, of course, was the publisher use case outlined in my first blog post. It’s difficult to be an individual publisher because by definition you are forced to be jack of all trades. Most high profile and influential publishers are great content producers. They write things people want to read. Lijit’s publisher app helps publishers keep on top of real-time traffic behavior. Now, they have the freedom to attend to other things in life while still keeping their finger on the pulse of their site.
Secondly, we wanted to explore an alternate stats metaphor with the app. All existing stats packages tend to be roll-ups of past activity, telling you what happened yesterday rather than right now. We wanted to play around with the idea of experiencing statistics as they happen. Some of these features we are planning to roll into the web dashboard. The mobile platform gave us the opportunity to experiment in a sandbox outside our production environment and with more UI freedom than we had with the web version.
Finally, we wanted to lay a foundation for an entirely new level of audience information we could provide our publishers. In the coming months we will be rolling out more global audience information that we have insight into because we power search and ads on so many different publisher sites. We are pretty excited to make this larger body of information available to our publishers in a consumable and actionable way. Your traffic stats will expand to include more specific information about your readers including detailed demographic information and content interests.
We like to do something outside the box from time-to-time and the mobile platform for our publishers was a fun and interesting project. We intend to keep developing on the platform so that it remains valuable to publishers already using our web version. Drop us a note to tell us what you think.
Tags: Lijit publishers, lijit stats, release announcements | View Comments
Beer Is Lijit – Beer Bloggers Conference 2010
Nov 12th
by Grace Boyle in Community, Company, events, speaking
This past weekend Perry and I headed to the inaugural Beer Bloggers Conference here in Boulder at The Marriott to present about Lijit during their Boulder Tech Session.
Three other local, online/tech companies presented alongside us – our friends, Pete Sheinbaum, Jason Cormier of Room 214 and Holly Hamann of The Blog Frog.
Perry and Grace at the helm, early Saturday morning
When you tell people you’re attending a Beer Blogging conference they might think “Oh yeah, bloggers and beer,” or “Wait, there is a group of people big enough to have a conference about beer blogging?” The latter is true. It’s a strong, niche community filled with passionate bloggers and writers.
The Beer Blogging Conference sold out and 108 beer bloggers from around the United States showed up in Boulder for the conference.
The Chief Beer Blogger for the conference (like: evangelist attendee) was Ashley Routson of Drink With the Wench. Great name, right? Ashley also uses Lijit and part of our presentation in learning more about your readers through our search and stats, was using her blog as a demo.
We didn’t attend the entire conference, but we loved what we saw during the Saturday morning sessions. We followed their #BBC10 Tweets and know they’re a fun group, who thoroughly enjoyed the local Boulder beers and breweries that we have to offer. The conference was a first of its kind and I think it was a great mixture of learning, connecting, enjoying (and of course, drinking).
Some of the enjoying included visiting Oskar Blues Brewery in Longmont, Boulder Beer Company and even ended the event with a Boulder Beer Crawl. To check out the pictures here is a great Flickr Group Set from the conference and if you’re interested in next year, they’re already planning 2011 (it will be in Portland, OR)!
Special thanks to Allan of Zephyr Adventures, the brains behind the conference (they also do wine and food blog conferences!) His team was great and they put together a great event!
We just released another software update and wanted to give everyone a heads up on what we’ve been working on. We continually strive to bring value to our publishers and advertising partners , and this release is no exception.
Share your Stats:
We are now making it really easy to add one of our engaging “Recent Readers” stats widgets to your site. Show your readers who else is visiting your site, where they are from, and how they found your site. It’s a fun way to show your readers more about your site and the community you are building around it . You can use the “Recent Readers List”, or the “Recent Readers Map, or both. Just login and visit your ”Wijits” menu and select the “Stats Wijits” tab to get the easy to install code.
Ad Tag Hints:
Having trouble deciding how to configure your Lijit ad tags? You can always contact us at support@lijit.com, but we also want to help you help yourself. Whenever you are creating or editing ad tags and setting a floor price , we now offer you helpful hints about the *average performance of that floor to help you make a more informed decision. Also, keep an eye out for our helpful hint image 
and just hover over it to get easy to understand descriptions of the terms and functionality on the Lijit website.
* These are examples only and your experience may vary based on how well your site aligns to existing ad campaigns.
Goodbye old friends:
We decided to remove some old features from our search widget that weren’t being used and tended to clutter the user experience for publishers configuring their widgets and for readers trying to interact with Lijit on your site. We removed the “Explore” and the “Surprise Me” features from the search widget. This will give us more room and flexibility to bring new enhancements and features to our search tools in the future. If you have any feedback about this change , don’t hesitate to drop us a line at feedback@lijit.com.
Everything Else:
This time around there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes. We spent a lot of time and energy(as we always do) further enhancing our advertising offerings to help us better optimize our ad campaigns and ultimately bring more value to our publishers.
As always, we build this product for you, and your feedback is invaluable when it comes to what we build next or what we should change. Leave a comment here or send us an email to share your feedback.
Mr. Castleberry
I fancy myself a stylish gent to a certain extent. I dress for the occasion meaning I don’t wear t-shirts to black-tie affairs nor do I don tuxedos at beach parties (though few and far between here in Colorado). At any rate, as dapper as I would like to consider myself, it pales in comparison when I peruse the pages of Unabashedly Prep, the brainchild of one Mr. F. E. Castleberry. As the url suggest, the site is an homage the prep look and lifestyle, featuring high-quality photographs of various looks that illicit positive and negative comments. But when you put yourself out there as Castleberry does and be, well, unabashed, as he is about his style, you have to learn to to take the good with the bad… and how to look good doing it.
Without further ado, on behalf of Lijit and myself, a Q&A with F. E. Castleberry:
What initially got you into the world of blogging, etc.?
My previous career as a wedding photographer essentially required that I blog as part of a business strategy to remain relevant.
Your site is definitely geared towards the style-side of life. What got you into fashion?
My mom essentially. Not that my style is anything close to that of my mom’s, but she had her own voice. I picked that up from her at a very young age.
Name a few of your style icons and why:
Sid Mashburn, Ralph Lauren, Michael Bastian, Mark McNairy…they all do the Classic American thing so well yet each put their own twist on it. There are key elements of preppiness in each of their bodies of work.
How do you generate revenue, if you do, off of Unabashedly Prep?
Selling advertising.
Dapper
What are you most proud of both in life and with U.P.?
In life, it would have to be learning to listen to my heart, pursuing what I’m passionate about. With Unabashedly Prep, I am most proud of the tight content curation around the prep aesthetic.
What has been your biggest challenge?
My biggest challenge has been the transition from my wedding photography career to what I’m currently doing now with Unabashedly Prep. Transition can be uncomfortable but is often necessary.
What is the most interesting thing you have learned?
That I actually enjoy writing…and that no one else on earth loves me more than my mom. She is my number one supporter.
The comments on the site can, at times, be a little brash. How do you deal with that and find the motivation to keep going?
I moderate comments in a fashion that keeps the responses on the subject matter. Anything personal I just let roll off my back. You get a pretty thick skin very quickly putting yourself out there for everyone. What drives you has to come from within…it can’t come from a place of seeking the approval of others.
What else besides running U.P. do you like doing? What keeps the lights on?
Spending time with my two sons (introducing them to the fine arts), experiencing live music, playing soccer, photography, and traveling.
What recommendations do you have for other publishers/bloggers/etc?
You get out of your blog what you put into it.
How has Lijit helped you become a more successful publisher?
Lijit has enhanced my readers’ experience when it comes to searching for specific content while presenting them with other relevant content/publishers.
Tags: publisher spotlight | View Comments