Lijit

You’ve been told that it’s important to know about your audience. What audience? Oh, you know, just all those people that are visiting your site to read your fantastic content. With Lijit stats, you already have some of that information right at your fingertips. But let’s say you want to find out something specific about your readers or ask them a question…maybe you want to find out what they think you should be writing about or what color they think your theme should be.

Enter SurveyGizmo. And yes, they are another company here in Boulder that we love.

Founded in 2006, SurveyGizmo emerged to fill a gap in the survey software market between high-priced market research software and online tools that did not include the required flexibility or features to conduct complex surveys. They quickly found their niche and have been growing ever since.

But how can SurveyGizmo help you as a blogger? Simply put, you can use their software to understand your audience further by gathering data about your readers with surveys, polls and forms.

SurveyGizmo can act as a dynamic contact form for your site. For example, this embedded contact form on the SurveyGizmo site is an example of a super easy way to collect detailed contact information that you might be interested in. If you notice, as you click on each radio button, you can see how the contact form changes to accomodate each request type, and generally helps SurveyGizmo users gather more useful information about the people visiting your site.

Also, bloggers can choose to poll their readers about what content they’d like to see more of, such as this example…

The best part of all is that SurveyGizmo gives you a free trial so that you can test out their software on your own. With a variety of different plans available, from the most basic to the enterprise and dedicated levels, there’s sure to be something there to suit your surveying needs. And, should you run into trouble, SurveyGizmo’s customer service and support are top-notch.

Check out what our friends at SurveyGizmo have to offer and let them help you to understand your readers better!

Today, I’m guest-posting over at one of our publisher’s sites, Elementary Spirits, discussing this very topic.

If you’re unsure about how to interpret some of our stats, I’m breaking it down for you over there. Check it out and if you have questions, be sure to leave a comment on Barb’s blog!

We like to share companies and services with you that provide value. Partnerpedia is just such a company. They first came to our attention at Chicks Who Click-San Jose, but we really got the chance to talk when Partnerpedia showed up on the expo floor of Blog World this year. Launched in June 2008, Partnerpedia was designed as a way to help channel partners more easily find, recruit and collaborate with one another. Consider it similar to a business social media site like LinkedIn. Basically, being part of Partnerpedia allows companies to increase their business through building a partner network.

According to Vanessa Ho, Partnerpedia’s online community manager, Partnerpedia is specially geared towards small and medium-sized companies that want to create a partner portal but don’t have the resources or capabilities to develop such a thing on their own. In addition to their free service, Partnerpedia also offers enterprise-level companies a paid solution that includes private label branding, metrics, reporting and customer integration with social media channels.

Ho also mentioned that the company has recently launched the beta of their Partnerpedia for Salesforce CRM application that will allow Salesforce CRM users to distribute leads to a partner and track the opportunity throughout its sales cycle. Additional features include automatic notifications to keep users up-to-date and a partner finder to easily locate solution providers.

It’s easy to sign up for Partnerpedia (you can see that we managed to do it) and once you do, companies can create their partner profile, upload documents and publish articles, collaborate on documents and work on specific projects with other Partnerpedia members. If you’re looking for interesting new ways of growing your business, Partnerpedia might be just the answer to find different and strategic partners with which to market your company.

There used to be only two ways to display your search results–an overlay that popped up on top of your blog when a reader did a search or with the results hosted on our site. For those that haven’t seen it, this is what the overlay looks like…

With a recent release, however, all that has changed. We’ve had many users asking for the ability to embed search results within a specified page on their blog and now, you can do just that.

To see an example of how the embedded search results look, take a stroll over to Celebridiot. While getting your updates on celeb gossip, do a search using Lijit in the upper left of their site*. This is how you’ll see the search results…

Pretty cool, huh? The only thing with this display option is that it’s not meant for the weak of heart or the less tech-savvy. By this, I don’t mean to offend but do want to convey that in order to embed search results on your site, you need to be able to create your own page within your blog where the results will live. This is not always an easy task and there are some blog platforms that may not allow you to do this. But, if you know what you’re doing, here are the steps for embedding Lijit search results on your blog.

Start by creating a page within your blog for the search results. If you’re using WordPress, you can do this by creating a new page and calling it www.yoururl.com/search. Publish the page and once you have this set up, log in to your Lijit account.

Go to your Wijit configuration page within Lijit. When you’re logged in, choose the ‘Wijits’ tab at the top of the page. If you scroll down towards the bottom, you’ll see an area with a drop-down box to choose where you want to display your search results. Choose the ‘on my blog (embedded)’ option and you’ll see this appear.

You can enter the URL of the page you created for your search results in the empty box and then copy the code below to put on that page.

Save your widget settings at the bottom when you’re done. You’re going to paste the code we provided you on that special search results page that you set up and then, you should be good to go.

We’re excited about this functionality because it allows our users to have even more control over how their search looks and feels. And? This is something you wanted. So if you have any questions about how to embed search results on your blog, feel free to send them our way.

*This site is also a great example of our WordPress plugin overridng the default search of a site and making it way more Lijit.

Here at Lijit, we love finding out about new blog tools that make it easier to discover great content. (Hey, it’s a big part of what we do!) We first met the folks from outbrain at SXSW in 2008, when both of our companies were helping with the b5 Blog Network Camp. Since then, we’ve both grown up a bit. It’s not unusual now to hear both Lijit and outbrain discussed as must-have tools for any blogger.

In the interest of research, I wanted to give outbrain a try on my work blog, I quit for Lijit. It really is a simple one-click install and only took me a couple of minutes to get it up on my blog. I love that I can now get instant feedback and, underneath my posts, I’m recommending other quality content for my visitors to read. For a free service, outbrain rocks. I’m looking forward to checking out the reports that outbrain provides and to find out even more about the people coming to my blog. Who doesn’t love stats?

If you’re interested in an easy blog enhancement, be sure to give outbrain a try. Their widget inherits the look and feel of your blog, making for a seamless integration that can only help your readers. We really like what outbrain is doing and think you will too!

You can read more about outbrain on their blog and follow them on Twitter.

You might remember, back in January, that we announced comment integration if you were using a third-party commenting system like Disqus, Intense Debate, or JS-Kit. Then, in early March, we looped Wordpress comments into the mix. But, if you were a blogger using Typepad, you might have felt a little left out.

No more, ye Typepad users! With last night’s release, you too can now experience the magic of having comments show up in your search results.

(Let’s take a moment to fully celebrate this…)

With that out of the way, there is one thing you have to do if you want to see those comments displayed within your search results. But it’s not hard, it’s totally worth it, and we have the utmost faith that you can do this.

You have to enable your comment feeds within your Typepad dashboard, which is easily done by following the four steps outlined above. After logging in to your Typepad account:

Step #1–> Click on the ‘Weblogs’ tab along the top.

Step #2–> Choose the ‘Configure’ tab.

Step #3–> From there, go to ‘Feeds’.

Step #4–> And finally, check the box to enable comment feeds on indivual posts and pages.

When you’re done with that, be sure to save your changes at the bottom of the page, sit back and enjoy the enhanced functionality of Lijit that we keep striving to bring you! If you have questions or need help with doing this, please leave us a comment and we’re happy to help.

This blog post comes to you courtesy of our amazing Director of Ad Serving, Dave. He loves writing these posts almost as much as he loves me bugging him to write these posts. But not as much as he loves fly-fishing.

This week, Lijit has released the latest version of our ad platform. The two key features for this release are the introduction of commissions that will be paid to publishers for advertiser referrals, and the launch of our closed beta program for ad placement on the content pages of our publishers.

Publisher Commissions

Publishers will earn commissions in two ways for referring advertisers who create keyword search ad campaigns. Direct referrals are made by publishers who send the link found on the “Sell Your Ad Inventory” tab to an advertiser who builds a campaign. Indirect referrals are made when an advertiser clicks on the “Advertise Here” link found on the Lijit Search Results and creates a campaign. In each case, Lijit will pay the referring publisher a commission for each valid click. The amount that publishers earn for clicks on their search results page is unaffected by the commission structure.

Content Page Ad Placement

To provide publishers with additional ways to monetize their sites, we are building upon our existing ad platform to offer publishers the ability to place ads on the content pages of their sites. Publishers will have the ability to choose between placing text ads or image ads on their sites, and what size they want their ads to be.

Publishers will be compensated on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis, meaning that the publisher’s account will be credited based on page views, rather than clicks. Before opening this up to everyone, Lijit is going to run a closed beta program, so that we can gather real feedback from real publishers that we will use to optimize the publisher experience. If you would like to participate in the beta program, please click here.

Please keep an eye out for more information about Lijit’s program for content page ad placement and how you can participate.

This post is courtesy of today’s birthday girl, Grace Boyle. Besides being an under-appreciated Gen Y blogger, she’s now 23 and most definitely appreciated around the Lijit office.

You never know what kind of shenanigans or *surprises* are going to come your way here at Lijit. One such surprise I received recently was from a loyal Lijit user, Andy Nulman. He is a fantastic, blogging entrepreneur from Montreal, but he is also an author and released his book Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Profiting From the Power of Surprise not long ago.

This is how Andy describes his book:

“Pow! is three things in one: the name of the world’s most entertaining business book, the sound your brain makes while reading it (akin to 1,000 lightbulbs over your head going off at the same time) and the difference between Holy Jeez! and Who cares? when it comes to your projects.”

Since he has many tricks up his sleeve, in January he offered 200 free copies (pre-release) of his book to anyone who requested via blog that they wanted it. Of course, I had to indulge, so on my personal blog, I sent a shout-out and a month later, I received his book.

Great idea for a book promotion, right? But wait…there’s more. I opened up the book and inside was a certificate to be the next literary giant, entitling me to the services of book agent Bill Gladstone, of Waterside Productions. Just a small sampling of Andy Nulman’s POW! Surprise tactic.

So, thank you Andy. Congratulations on your book release this month. All of us here at Lijit wish you the best of luck. You can follow Andy’s book release excitement on his blog and to check the book out yourself, it’s available at Barnes & Noble, Borders, 800 CEO Read, Books-A-Million, and Amazon.com.

With last night’s release, we’re making it easier than ever to manage more than one Lijit account. (Because doesn’t everyone have more than one blog these days?)  Having just one sign-in for many Lijit widgets is a feature that our users have been asking about for a long time and NOW…we’ve made the dream come alive.

When you log in to your Lijit account, you’ll now see an arrow next to your name along the top of your profile page. When you click on that arrow, you’ll see a drop-down that asks if you want to create another widget. Clicking on that will take you to the account creation sign-up flow, which looks like this…

With this enhanced functionality, you can now sign-in with only one username and have access to the stats across all your blogs. BUT (and it’s a big one) this new feature does not change how our search widget works. What that means is that you still need a different account for each of your blogs, but now, you only have to sign in once in order to maintain all of them.

If you already have a couple of different accounts within Lijit, there is no automatic import process to bring all of your accounts together. But if you choose to set up different profiles under the same account, let us know and we’ll be happy to help delete old accounts or walk you through the process. Send us your feedback. As usual, we’re here working for you.

With our WordPress plugin and Micah’s speaking at WordCamps (Las Vegas, Denver, Chicago and DC) one might think that at Lijit, we dont love other blogging platforms, such as TypePad or Blogger, as much. Even some of the newer blog platforms, such as Tumblr and Posterous, sometimes have told us that they feel a bit left out.

But, you see, this is just not the case. At Lijit, we love all blogging platforms equally. Whether you are using Expression Engine, or Moveable Type, or even Drupal, Lijit happily installs (some times with an added love tap from our ability support staff) on them all.

And, you might be surprised to hear, we do it without having our love reciporcated. (Yes, I am speaking to you Wordpress.com!) So when one of the blogging platforms reaches out to their users and tells them about how great we are at Lijit, well, we get just a bit excited.

“Professor” Andy Wibbels on the Everything TypePad blog does a great job of explaining how TypePad users can get the most out of Lijit.

We love you too TypePad! We are excited to hear from other blogging platforms about how their users are getting the most out of Lijit.

How about publishers on other blogging platforms? How are you getting the most out of Lijit?