Search-Powered Web Apps

Because of publishers like you, Lijit continues to grow in new and exciting directions.  We’d like to tell you about our newest one right now:  During 2008, Lijit has been developing features that allow advertisers to present your readers with highly targeted ad placements in search results.  But that’s not all – we’ve also developed features that allow YOU to share in the revenue from these ad placements!

The beta release of the Lijit Ad Network will be open to advertisers and publishers like you starting October 8^th, 2008.  In this release, publishers will be able to opt-in to the search-based ad network and begin receiving a share of the revenue for ad units displayed in your search results.  As a thank you for your patience while we’ve been developing and testing these features, your account will be pre-loaded with a credit for estimated revenues based on your search history during this period (a minimum of $5).

We’re not done yet!  In the near future those publishers who have opted in to Lijit’s Ad Network will be able to sell their search based ads directly to advertisers with whom they may already have relationships, targeting just their own publication and making even more money for themselves.  This is going to be big!

To start capturing your share of revenue from the Lijit Ad Network, log in to your Lijit account and at the top right of your profile page, click the “Start Now” button.  (If you don’t want to participate in revenue sharing, you certainly don’t have to and can continue using Lijit as you do today.  We promise to use your share of the ad revenues wisely.)

Our new publisher FAQ answers all the questions we could think of during development and alpha testing of this cool feature, but if you can think of one we haven’t covered, please email us at support@lijit.com.

We look forward to working together with you to help you monetize your search results. It’s an exciting time to be Lijit and we welcome any feedback you may have. Thanks again!

We released some new features last night and in order to take advantage of the improved functionality, you need to know about it. Away we go!

Invitations. You don’t have to make them by hand, fortunately, but you now have the ability to invite friends to join your searchable network within Lijit. From your Lijit ‘account’ page, you’ll see a new section underneath your account information. Click on the link under the header ‘Invite your Friends’ and you’ll get to the page that allows you to manually enter email addresses or import them from the contacts in your address book. (Don’t worry…we’re tied in with many email services!)

If your friends already have Lijit accounts, they will be automatically added into your network upon accepting the invite. (And if they don’t have Lijit accounts, they will be added in once they set up their account!)

New Re-Search options. In the past, if you wanted to utilize Re-Search on your blog, you only had the option of displaying results on top of your widget or at the top of your blog. We are proud to announce that you can now show that Re-Search goodness either above or BELOW your content. So, if someone comes to your blog through a Google or Yahoo search, they will get even more of your related content with the blog post. Using Re-Search allows random searchers to stay on your blog longer and to allow them to discover even more of your knowledge!

For example, if you do a Google search for ‘winamp itunes plugin’, the first result you get is a blog post from Daniel, one of Lijit’s finest. If you click on that result, you’ll be taken to his blog where you’re met with even more of his content, easily found underneath his blog post…

To change your Re-Search settings, simply log into your Lijit account and click on the ’search wijit’ tab. Scroll down to where you see Re-Search listed and pick your option out of the drop-down menu. Remember to save your new wijit settings!

Better integration with Vimeo and Viddler. We’re now serving up thumbnails from your Vimeo and Viddler content, meaning that searchers can now watch videos from within your search results. What could be cooler than a more multimedia approach to search results?

For example, if you search for Boulder on my blog, you’ll now see this doozy in the results from my content…

More robust search results. With the release last night, you’ll begin to see better search results from content sources like Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube, Tumblr, and MyBlogLog.

Please let us know what you think of the new additions and send your feedback our way. We love hearing from our publishers and it’s important to know what YOU think about what we’re doing.

[Photo credit: zakwitnij via CC license]

Rewind six months.  Lijit just moved into its downtown Boulder offices.   It’s December 31st, 2007 and I was sitting at home in my subterranean office thinking, wow – how are we going to make our 2008 numbers… Hmmm.

Then, almost like magic, an incredible publisher signed up – that, at the time, was HUGE.  I remember thinking, what a blue bird.  But how are we going to make the February numbers!  Well, we did make the February numbers and every month between then and now.

As a result of our success we decided to pour more gasoline on the fire.  Now we have a genuine Burning Man going on here.

Thanks to Foundry Group, who led our investment round.  If you’re going to do something in the online publisher space, get these guys onboard.  Nuff said.  In fact, all our investors are amazingly supportive and at one time or another have been instrumental in building what we are doing.

Lookout, there is no stopping us now.

If you can’t get enough of your Lijit stats (and from the feedback I’ve been receiving, that’s just about everybody!), we now offer you a way to bring that stat geekiness to the sidebar of your blog. Whether it be for reasons of pride or curiosity, we make it possible for you to share what’s happening on your blog in a more public way. With the release we pushed last night, there are two new and shiny wijits available for you to use on your blog.

Like our map showing where your readers are coming from?

You can now install that map on your blog. See the pretty purple arrow pointing to the link that makes it happen.

Perhaps you fancy the list of recent page views, complete with country flags?

If that’s the case, it’s now available for display on your blog.

Once again, follow the pretty purple arrow.

How do you go about making this magic happen for yourself? Like everything else we do, we tried to make it super-easy to install these cool facts on your own blog.

1. Log into your Lijit account and click on “My Stats” along the top.
2. Click on the “Readers” tab of your stats display.
3. Choose to show off either (or both!) of the graphics in your sidebar by clicking on the “Install this on my blog” link.
4. There is an easy install for Blogger and Typepad publishers. Everyone else just needs to copy and paste code into your sidebar.

To see what it looks like on the sidebar of a blog, check it out on the left side of  I Quit for Lijit or The Wizard of Osborne. You need to scroll a bit, but then you too can bask in the glory of our recent visitors and the wonderful countries from which they hail.

We are trying to offer more (valuable) bling for your blog, so if you have other suggestions for things you’d like to see from Lijit, make sure to send those ideas our way. Have fun showing off!

One of our goals here at Lijit is to offer our users more value-filled features with each release. We pushed a new release on Tuesday night and with it, have made our stats even more robust. There is so much analytical information that we had to change the entire layout of our stats display and we now offer tabs. That’s right…tabs and tabs of detailed information…

These tabs open the door to a whole world of interesting information about your blog. If you click on the Readers tab, you’ll see your page views and the list of search terms that brought people to your blog. The fancy new stuff on this page is a map that shows you where in the world your page views are coming from and in a partnership with AideRSS, the most popular posts.

Look at that….even more information to help you better understand the people that are reading what you are producing. Todd Vernon, Lijit’s CEO and owner of the stats pictured, wrote a great post recently about the importance of Lijit stats and the picture they paint of your blog’s audience. Take some time to check out what we’ve done and let us know what you think.

In other release news, there are two other little additions that you should know about. We’ve added a cool link on our home page that takes you to the magic that is our Live Search Map. Now it’s even easier to enjoy the fun…

And the last thing that we changed is a feature request that we had been hearing from users for a while. You now have the ability to pick the default search tab that your searchers will be sent to. Let me explain. In the past, if someone did a search from your blog, they landed on your blog’s search tab for the results. But if they were doing a search from the your Lijit profile page, then they landed on your network’s result page. This sometimes caused confusion. As of Tuesday night, you can choose where your readers will end up first. Click on “my search wijit” and scroll to where you see the drop-down menus to change your default search tab and where to display your search results. (The default will always be set to your blog.)

We hope that you enjoy the new updates and wish everyone a happy, healthy end of the year! Just wait to see what we have up our sleeves for 2008….

In our quest to continually enhance the stats that we provide to Lijit users, we’ve recently introduced a way to see where your searchers are coming from. Literally.

On your stats page, you’ll see a few new things. This map graphic shows you the location of the person doing the searching and what topic they were searching about. So if you wanted to know how much of your audience is made up of Romanians curious about your topic of expertise, you now have the tools to find that information out. Along with the map, we’ve also added some colorful flags to the 25 most recent searches list…

So where in the world is Lijit? That depends on you and your blog’s audience. But thanks to our recent release, you now have the power to see your readers and get to know them even better.

Sometimes we release new features that are big, glitzy, flashy, and scream, “Hello! I am a new feature! LOOK AT ME!” Other times, the features we release are more subtle. Things you have to look for. Things that quietly beckon you to try them. “Come here, gentle user,” they say. “Click me.” I love those kinds of features and we released a couple last night.

If you haven’t visited your stats page of late, drop everything you’re doing, and go check it out right now. Seriously. I’m not kidding. We’re embarking on a stats page overhaul and the first of many updates came out last night. Most noticeably, we combined the two “Source of clicked results…” pie charts into one (new name: “Type of Results Readers Clicked”). In the space left over we added a new pie chart, “Where Readers Came From”. This new chart shows you a breakdown of how readers reached you — via Google, other search engines, a direct visit, etc.

We further added a new stats detail page, which you can reach by clicking on any of the terms in the “Last 25 Searches” (new!) or “Top 25 Searches” lists. The detail page shows you exactly when, over the last 30 days, you were searched using these terms, as well as the number of times you’ve been searched about them. Again, these changes are just the first in a long line of enhancements we have planned for the stats we provide you. We hope you enjoy them and hope they help you better understand and serve your readers.

The other subtle feature we released last night involves little green bubbles. (And no, thank you for asking, we weren’t drinking too many Lijit cocktails when we came up with this feature.) You’ll see them too. On the home page. On your profile page. Give ‘em a click and let them guide you through the Lijit-o-sphere…

Color customization of the wijit was the number one thing that users kept requesting. We pushed an exciting release on Wednesday night and now, that question becomes easier to answer. Feeling a little blue?

Or maybe you are one of those people that cannot think without pink?

What if you don’t view the world in black and white, but in shades of grey?

Whatever your style, you can now pick a wijit to match. Not to mention, the newfound ability to match your wijit to the color theme of your blog. And, if you are one of those people who wants even more control, we’ve added something special in the drop-down menu of the wijit style options. You can now choose to “style your own wijit”. By choosing this option, you can use CSS on your blog to make the wijit of your dreams.

To access all the color goodness, simply log into your Lijit account and click on “my search wijit” along the top. You will see the wijit configuration page with lots of new options. Besides changing colors, you can also change the size of your “popular searches” cloud by choosing how many terms you want displayed.

There was one other big addition to our latest release. I’m only going to touch on it lightly because I know that Stan has a BIG post about it in the works. If you look at the shots of the wijits above, you might notice a little something different about them. Do you see the Explore button located under the wijit? Feel like exploring the world within a blog and seeing a visual representation of that blog’s relationships with others? Well then, what are you waiting for? Click the Explore button on any blog’s Lijit wijit and watch in amazement….

Do you look like this?

Well, you may look like that in Lijit, but we’re pretty certain you don’t look like that in real life. (…but if you do, please send us a picture, because that would really be something.) In a release we launched last night, you can now easily update your Lijit user picture to look like the real you. You can select from pictures we automatically discover from the other services you use, or upload a brand new one to use specifically within Lijit.

So c’mon, show us the real you…visit your Profile page in Lijit and click on the “Edit picture” link underneath your user picture. You know you want to.

You might also notice with this release, along with the last couple of releases we’ve done, that everything seems to keep getting faster. The pages within Lijit display faster, the Wijit loads on your blog faster, and so on. We’re doing an awful lot of work behind the scenes to make sure Lijit is not only fun and interesting to use, but works well and fast, all the time. So if Lijit seems faster — no, it’s not just you — it really is faster. Enjoy!

We had a release yesterday in which we changed the look of Lijit a bit. Our home page has been redesigned to help give readers a better sense of what we do. Plus, we’d received feedback from people that they weren’t sure where to sign up for a new account. We just can’t have that. Ta-da…new, improved and still featuring our favorite Lijit green…

Another feature that we had a lot of users asking for was integration with Facebook. Okay, okay, we hear you. Now you can add your Facebook profile under the “my content” section of your Lijit account and we will magically place a wijit on your facebook profile page as well.

And finally, we had many user requests for the “retro” design of our original wijit. What our users want, they get. So we’re proud to offer two different wijit designs to choose from. When you go to configure your search wijit, you’ll see a drop-down menu near the top. From there you can choose the “big rounded” wijit or the “slim rectangular” wijit, which looks like this…

If you’re in the mood for a sleeker, old school wijit, it’s all yours. Another successful release comes to a close with more features, upgrades, bells and whistles that you asked for. We have lots more that we can’t wait to share and welcome your comments to help us shape the future of our service.