Archive for February, 2011
Last week I had the pleasure of being on a panel at the Forum and Communities conference in San Francisco.
Since the inception of Lijit we have worked with publishers who have amazingly engaged communities of readers. Many of these publishers are in the mid- and long-tail. They have highly niche and conversational sites which encourages readers to engage by returning often, leaving comments, etc. My personal theory is that it’s because blogs tend to surface more of the personality of the author. Over time this personality acts as meta-data that the reader uses to form a bond with the publication, resulting in higher reader engagement. Lijit’s services were designed to help publishers foster this engagement.
Participating in the Forum and Communities conference introduced me to a different kind of publisher. Forums or message boards are places where extreme enthusiasts come to together online to share information about their deepest passions. For example, I regularly browse car forums to find information about the cars I own. I recently dug up some facts on the Camaro5 forum about how to install an aftermarket part. Forums are an amazing wealth of information. Many call forums the original social network.
Forums tend to get a lot of their traffic from Google and other horizontal search engines. That makes sense given all the original user generated content (UGC) that appears on forums. Interestingly, forums tend to receive very few referrals from social network services such as Twitter of Facebook which probably has something to do with their makeup. Forums tend to focus on the community without having a clear central personality. This makes it difficult to leverage a personality-based service like Twitter to drive traffic.
With a little creativity, however, forums could easily leverage these social tools. When I look at sites like icanhascheezburger.com, the CEO Ben Huh has done an excellent job with Twitter serving as a single personality who represents a curated site where content is created by the community. Ben highlights various posts and general information about the site which helps engage the community and keeps readers coming back for more.
I really enjoyed the time I spent with forum publishers and am committed to finding ways that Lijit can work with them to provide the same great business partnership we have with mid- and long-tail sites!
Tags: events, Lijit publishers | View Comments
We just wrapped up another successful software release cycle and can’t wait to share the fruits of our labor. We’ve got some great updates to our site that help publishers better understand their readers, create quality content, and monetize their sites.
Updated Stats UI
We completely redesigned the look and feel of the stats and analytics sections of our site. The code we used to generate charts and graphs has been completely replaced and given a new look and feel. The static maps we previously used to highlight where readers come from have been converted to Google Maps to make it even easier to find out where your readers come from. One of the best parts about this change is the additional support for mobile devices. Not only does everything just look “cooler”, you can now view your stats on your iPhone, iPad, Android, and many other devices.
New graphs are easier to read and more informative.
Google Maps allow you to zoom in and really see where your readers are coming from.
New Ad Stats UI
In the pursuit of transparency in reporting, we bring you ad stats you can’t get anywhere else (fill rate). We also want you to understand them, so we restructured the way we display ad statistics to make them easier to read and make it easier for you to, at a glance, see how your ad tags are performing. If you want to dig deeper, it’s as simple as clicking on an ad tag’s title to see more data.
Search Plixi Photos
We’ve added search results support for one of the most popular twitter photo sharing tools. Plixi (formerly tweetphoto) allows you to share twitter photos via mobile device and the web. Their API is also integrated into many popular twitter applications for mobile and desktop environments. By integrating your Plixi account with your Lijit search engine, you can expose relevant photos and tweets to people who search your Lijit profile. Check it out by selecting the “Content” section of your Lijit profile and providing your Plixi account name.
And More…
We’re constantly building tools to make our ad operations more efficient. This translates into more optimized campaigns and more revenue for our publishers.
As always, if you have any questions or feedback, let us know at support@lijit.com .
Are you interested in learning more about how to create and manage online communities?
Then come join us at the Forum and Communities Conference in San Francisco next Wednesday, February 16. Todd Vernon, Lijit’s founder and CEO, will be speaking on a panel titled “Technology and Community” along with executives from eBay, VigLink (a Lijit partner), and CloudFlare. The panel will be moderated by Dan Gill, co-founder and CEO of Huddler.
During this one-day event, a team of experts will provide guidance on how to effectively engage with communities, give tips on how to maximize the value of communities, and offer insights into new services to try and trends to watch out for. Click here for additional details on the event. We hope to see you there!
Tags: events, industry, Lijit publishers, publishers, Todd Vernon | View Comments
If you’re using Lijit for display advertising services, you’re already aware of the monetary value that high-quality advertising can bring to your site. With Lijit, you’ve got display advertising covered but how else can you monetize your site? How about trying some in-text contextual advertising that capitalizes on click traffic?
That’s where Lijit’s partner AffinityClick comes in. AffinityClick offers in-text advertising that is matched to your content. In-text advertising adds an unobtrusive roll-over link to relevant keywords that produce an interactive pop-up when a reader rolls over them with their mouse.
AffinityClick is easy to install: simply add a small Javascript widget to your existing blog. Ads are automatically matched to relevant keywords. You can configure how many (or few) ads you want to suit your content. Filters tailor exactly what types of products and retailers appear—AffinityClick has 25 million products from leading brands from over 5,000 trusted online retailers so there’s a lot to choose from. A customizable dashboard lets you monitor your website and offers useful network trends to help you optimize your content for better ad performance.
Best of all, it’s free so try it out! Register here to get started.
Tags: Lijit publishers, partners | View Comments
Lijit CEO, Todd Vernon Featured As Cover Story On VUE Magazine
Feb 2nd
by Grace Boyle in Company, Featured, employees, industry
Our fearless leader and founder, Todd Vernon was just featured on the cover of the January/February issue of VUE Magazine (the magazine of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association).
In the four-page spread, titled: Going Lijit: Mining and Monetizing Blogrolls, Todd discusses online publishing, advertising, and how Lijit has built a network of over 15,000 sites by providing tools that help publishers engage and understand their readers.
Introduction from author and Editor-In-Chief, David Hamburg:
The founder and CEO of Lijit talks about the tools and services his company provides to Internet publishers, the small as well as the large. It’s all about providing relevant information, connecting publishers to their audiences, linking them to advertisers, and monetizing their sites.
Here are a few highlighted questions from the lengthy interview:
VUE: Are your aggregate search returns truer than those of Google, where search engine optimization tactics often get the higher placings rather than the best search results?
TODD: Exactly. What happens – and this is one of the premises that we got into this space – is that people bond with blogs and individual publications for a reason. Theose blogs tend to be spicier, but the real reason they bond with those sites is bceause of the persona driving it. It’s about the author. You’re getting all the opinions and all the thought. And they really believe what they write.
One of the things that we do for these bloggers is expose all of their content. We provide a great search service on everything that they have written on the subject, but also we will include photos from their Flickr account and videos from their YouTube account and stuff they’ve tweeted about. So it glues the audience to the publication and forms that one-on-one metadata that you get when you really know somebody.
You are accessing numerous conversations with these small publications. They are kind of proxies for real relationships, because all ships float higher. SO when a message about whether a pain reliever works for my child is out there and those bloggers are super-engaged, it becomes way more interesting to the reader than an ad is.
VUE: Your goal is to deliver value to both sides. The bloggers get their analytics, and the agencies or companies get to have their message delivered to a wide but highly targeted and engaged audience – a perfect fit for their products.
TODD: Spot on. We can put an advertiser in contact with specific authors and then do something like either a campaign or product review. We are like a giant site rep firm from the agency side. Actually, our relationship is very large and far-reaching with all our publishers, because we contact them once a week with an email and they come back to our site to look at their statistics. It becomes an escalated sort of relationship with our publishers. We start with the free service: the bloggers learn something about their audience. And as they become more interested in monetization and getting contacted by marketers or even newspapers, we can also provide them with a monetizing service. We are kind of like a business partner on the publisher side. On the agency side, however, we are about finding those authentic conversations and getting the agency into it.
To view the PDF of the January/February VUE Magazine in full, click here.