Posts Tagged ‘features’
Today Lijit announced that it has been acquired by Federated Media Publishing, the powerhouse conversational marketing and media business that John Battelle started in 2005. I could not be more excited about the transaction, and more importantly, the future that the combined company has before it.
About the same time John was starting FM, I was starting Lijit. Not in a friend’s garage, like John, but rather in my basement.
From the onset, Lijit has been keenly interested in helping publishers who create and curate great content that attracts engaged audiences in thoughtful conversations. In the early days we borrowed heavily from the FeedBurner playbook: provide services that are useful and intuitive and create long lasting publisher relationships. Dick Costolo, the former FeedBurner CEO and now CEO of Twitter, was an early mentor and board member who helped me keep the Lijit mission true to course in an industry where data is hard to come by and experience is everything. Over the last few years we expanded that charter to focus on helping publishers monetize their website(s) and bring them technologies and information that would otherwise be out of reach due to their size.
For all this hard work, publishers have rewarded us by trusting more of their ad inventory to us and allowing us to help monetize more of their properties. September was the first month since inception that we paid out more than $1M in revenue to publishers in our network. Even more exciting is that this number has grown over 50% month-over-month for the last year or so. While revenue is the key metric of success for any business, it is still amazing to see the number of positive tweets, inbound emails, and phone calls we get every week from publishers who are too small or too niche to be considered viable by the larger ad channels in our industry. We love publishers and they are our people.
So in May, when we were first approached by Federated Media, it was a case of mixed emotion. Lijit wasn’t for sale, we were fully funded and coming off our 6th straight month of 50% month-over-month revenue growth. Profitability was within sight and occurring on and off on a daily basis. In short, we were having FUN, AND A LOT OF IT. But, at the same time, if there was bigger play to make – an industry changing and industry leading play to make – it was with FM. It all made complete sense from that first instant of thought.
Lijit has one of the best management teams I have ever worked with. Without fail they embody the charter of “hire people that are smarter than you.” This motto has served me well as Lijit CEO, and I am super excited to see what they can accomplish with greater resources and the association with an A+ brand in our industry.
Over the months as I got to know John Battelle, Deanna Brown and the entire FM management team it become even more clear that the combination of both companies was going to create the first major media company designed from the ground up to help the millions of publishers ignored by all the other companies. This company was designed to harness the amazing power of focused conversations in the engaged part of the web – what FM refers to as the “Independent Web.”
FM and Lijit are going to combine efforts to create a company of scale and substance only indicative of industry leading companies. I could not be more excited for the ride.
Tags: features | View Comments
Lijit Product Updates: Reader Demographics
May 9th
by Daniel in Company, features, release announcements
We just completed another round of updates and improvements to our publisher products. We’re putting a lot of energy behind building out our ad services and publisher analytics and we’re expanding our offerings with every software release. So what’s new?
Reader Demographics:
The most important part of being an online publisher, is understanding your audience. On top of all of the other great audience analytics we provide to help you understand your readers, we now offer reader demographic data right inside your Lijit dashboard. This new statistic allows you to see the overall makeup of your online audience, and further understand who you are creating content for, and the demographic distribution of people frequenting your site.
Why are demographics important?
- Understanding your readers
The best way to effectively create relevant content for your readers, and to attract new readers, is to know who they are. Understanding the makeup of your audience is key to ensuring you are producing content that will engage and resonate withyour audience.
- Monetizing your site
Advertisers looking to reach the right audience for their online display advertising campaigns always consider demographics when making targeting decisions. You will be better equipped to attract and sell advertising for your site if you understand the demographic makeup of your audience
Check out your dashboard to see the demographic makeup of your site and start down the path of better understanding your readers. Just goto www.lijit.com, login and check it out at the bottom of your Lijit dashboard.
Other News:
- Removed MyBlogLog support
We removed support for MyBlogLog and disabled it’s use as a content and network source for publishers who use our search engine services. MyBlogLog had a great run and was a key integration partner in the early days of Lijit. Yahoo is shutting down all MyBlogLog services at the end of May, so we decided to deactivate it on our side before that happened.
- Welcome Widget support
We made the difficult decision to “end-of-life” our Welcome Widget product. Publishers who previously used this feature will no longer see a UI to manage settings for the Welcome Widget, and we automatically disabled the functionality it provided. We’re always looking for ways to enable our publishers to better engage their readers, so keep an eye out for more site tools and functionality in the future.
Tags: features, Lijit Advertising Services, lijit stats, new features, publishers | View Comments
Lijit Supports Cookie Week – A Roundup of Cookie Recipes
Dec 3rd
by Grace Boyle in Community, Lijit publishers
It is CookieWeek!
Did you know that?
In an effort to celebrate delicious, sweet morsels we’ve done a roundup of some delicious cookie recipes from some foodie, Lijit publishers. Enjoy!
The Cupcake Project: Oreo Cookies Made From Scratch
Brown Eyed Baker: Lemon Burst Cookies
The Perfect Pantry: Sugar, Cookies (Recipe: the world’s best sugar cookie)
Heavenly Homemakers: Snickerdoodles
Andrea’s Recipes: Peanut Butter Kiss Cookies
Lynn’s Kitchen Adventures: Fudgy Coconut Cookies
Whisk: Buttery Jam Cookies
80 Breakfasts: Fig and Honey Cookies
A Few Short Cuts: Cinnamon Bun Cookies
What are your favorite cookie recipes?
Tags: features, Lijit publishers | View Comments
This is our first software release of the summer and we definitely consider it a “blockbuster”. We work hard every month to bring you valuable tools to make you a better publisher and to help you monetize your content. We think this software release does both!
More Ad Stats-
We greatly expanded the range of ad stats available to you in your stats dashboard. Prior to this release we limited the ad stats data you could report on to the previous month, and current month. You can now run reports for any date range you wish, as well as have quick access to your current day stats, yesterday, week to date, and month to date. This should give you even more visibility into how Lijit is helping you monetize your site, and allow you to see the “big picture” when it comes to ad performance on your site.
Tags: features, release announcements | View Comments
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.
Tags: FAQ, features, search results, tutorial, wijit | View Comments
We are super excited to announce a new update to our Wordpress Plugin. The same plugin that brought sweet search functionality and stats information to your wordpress blog is now even better. You might not notice much, as the core of this update revolves around backend functionality. So what does that mean to you???
- Our search form override functionality is now compatible with just about any wordpress theme out there. (if you find one that doesn’t work, let us know, and we’ll try to add it)
- The plugin enables new widget functionality which results in faster widget loading for your readers.
If you are using Wordpress 2.7 or higher, you should see auto upgrade notices for version 1.1 showing up in your admin console within the next 24 hours. You can just auto upgrade from your plugins screen. Or, you can always manually install/upgrade the plugin from the Lijit Wordpress Plugin page. For handy install tips and instructions, you can always reference our Lijit Help pages for guidance.
As always, if you have any suggestions or feedback, don’t hesitate to drop us a line at support@lijit.com.
Tags: features, release announcements, wijit, wordpress | View Comments
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.
Tags: comment integration, features, publisher help, release announcements, typepad | View Comments
Yesterday, we released the ability for people to have more than one account under a single profile. Yet, we decided that just wasn’t good enough. “No,” we said, “there must be more!”
We huddled together (we often huddle) and thought about options.
Many of the options were just untenable. We thought about having all of our search results in Comic Sans.
Quickly, we realized that wasn’t a great idea.
After a little while, it dawned on us.
“We should integrate Wordpress comments!” (After all, “wordpress” is our #1 search result internally, and we have a kick-ass wordpress plugin.)
A cry rose from our huddle…
(I think one of the developers might have actually cried, but I am certainly not one to to mention any names)
…and away we went. Now along with our integrations of Disqus, JS-Kit, Intense Debate, if you are using the default Wordpress comments, you will find a nice link in the lower left that will expose a few of the comments on the post, and a link to view more comments.
With the inclusion of Wordpress comments (even Wordpress.com comments, which is ironic since *cough* Automattic wont allow us to be installed on their Wordpress.com platform *cough*) our publishers can see the direction we are going with our feature set.
Our mission is to expose the expertise and influence of our publishers to their audience by surfacing more of the blogger’s content to their readers. It is clear that OnceUponAWin.com has great 80’s nostalgia content, and a passionate user base making them experts on, well, Shrinky Dinks.
As a user, there is nothing you need to do to have your Wordpress comments surfaced. They will automagically appear within results as of today on bloggers who are using our backend search.
More integrated content; more understanding of bloggers by their audience; more surfaced expertise and influence.
Seems like a win for everyone.
Tags: features, search results, wordpress | View Comments
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.
Tags: account management, features, release announcements, wijit | View Comments
You’ve Got Comments in My Search Results!
Jun 23rd
by micah in features
Yeah, that’s kinda old news. By now, if you are a Lijit user, you have seen that we have integrated all the major comment systems (Disqus, JS-Kit and Intense Debate) as well as blog platform comments (Wordpress and Typepad) into the search results.
But, what we may not have done is explain why it’s such a important feature.
Of all the components of a blog post (the title, the body and the comments), only comments describe the engagement level of the readership of a particular post.
Think about it. The title gives you a hint as to what the content is, and the content gives you, well, the content. But its the comments where real interaction occurs.
Lijit, focusing on trust based results, wants to provide the searcher all the possible clues available as to which result is most trust-worthy as well as most relevant. It’s one of the reasons why searchers use less words in their searches to discover content.
In this result from my blog, you will see that the first result, which has the most comments is expanded to show the first few comments. I highlighted an interesting line in the comment about the importance of community interaction:
Features such as comment integration are important for us to continue to roll out as we continue to provide search results that provide real value to the blogger and the searcher.
The added benefit of comment systems, such as Disqus, is their network and how people comment on blogs both within and outside the Lijit network. Beyond the simple comment integration, we hope to continue to explore ways to use the comment data in our results.
You will see that we have added Disqus to this blog. We are excited to test it first hand and see what behaviors it drives. Over time, we will continue to use this blog as a place to test other technologies and their potential integration or partnership with Lijit.
If you are interested in us trying out specific plugins or technologies, please leave a comment.
Tags: comments, disqus, features, intense debate, jskit, partnerships, technology | View Comments