Posts Tagged ‘wijit’
With spring right around the corner, who isn’t itching to get outside and enjoy some nice weather? (Okay, maybe not allergy-sufferers.) But if you are the type to take to the golf course as soon as it’s green out, then you should be excited for this Lijit publisher. Golf Tip Reviews is designed for the OG…meaning the Occasional Golfer…and if you can’t get a lower score from reading this site, you might want to start saving for some private lessons.
Fortunately, Golf Tip Reviews isn’t charging by the hour for the vast amount of golfing knowledge they provide–in fact, they’re just giving it away over on the blog! Also lucky for us, the Editor at GTR agreed to answer a few questions about how he got started creating one of the best golf blogs around. Tee up!
Tags: Lijit publishers, publisher spotlight, wijit | View Comments
It’s something that I do for my job and something that I enjoy talking about with others. And apparently, after three years of doing it, it seems I am now in a position to share a little of what I’ve learned.
A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed on this topic by Vanessa, the community manager at Partnerpedia. You can find the podcast here, if you’re interested in hearing me spout off about blogging and what everyone should consider before jumping into the blogosphere waters.
Then, if that wasn’t enough, I wrote a guest post for the BlogWorld blog about…you guessed it…the importance of small businesses blogging. I respond to the most frequently asked questions and objections that I hear when it comes to the topic of getting a business blog started.
(Also? If you’re on the fence about attending the BlogWorld conference, our company has been there the past three years and consider it one of the most important things we do.)
So, if you’re still wondering why your business needs a blog, between these two pieces, I have plenty of reasons. And only one of them rhymes with ‘boogle’.
Tags: blogging, events, wijit | View Comments
We love supporting our local community.
BlogFrog is a Boulder startup doing something different for bloggers – allowing them to create instant community on their blogs by letting readers connect, interact and share content. BlogFrog is like attaching a social network to your blog.
If you’re wondering where you’ve seen BlogFrog before, the answer be found in the sidebar of your favorite mommyblogger. BlogFrog widgets are all over the place – by initially serving women and mom bloggers, BlogFrog has become the largest network of mom blogs on the Internet. (You do know about these mom blogs, yes?)
With BlogFrog, it’s easy to create a forum where readers can ask questions, post links and extend the conversation beyond a specific blog post. And that’s not all. BlogFrog communities can help drive traffic, generate more revenue and increase loyalty among visitors.
Signing up is super quick and painless. Over on the right there, you can see that we’re rocking our widget in the sidebar and we’d love for you to check out our BlogFrog community. We’re just starting out, so if you have any questions or discussions you’d like to start, we encourage you to help get the party started.
For more about BlogFrog, you can read their blog, check out their community, follow them on Twitter or shoot Holly an email. See what BlogFrog can do for you and your blog readers.
And stay tuned…we’re excited to share one more Boulder company with you before the year is out.
Tags: Boulder, Lijit publishers, local, wijit | View Comments
Lijit contributes analysis to Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2009
Oct 21st
by toddvernon in Company
Every year, since 2004, Technorati has published the State of the Blogosphere report. The State of the Blogosphere report is considered the best up to date source of information about size, motivations, and practices of long tail publishers.
This year, Lijit helped Technorati by supplying some information from within the blogs that make up the Lijit Network. Lijit performed the analysis on the raw data and only supplied the aggregate insights documented in this post.
Analysis was centered on four distinct areas of interest including Search Engine Referrals, Blogroll Promotion, the Impact of Twitter, Advertising and Analytics.
Methodology
Data for this post was collected from two primary sources both directly collected by Lijit.
The first source of data was the ~11K active Lijit publishers that have the Lijit Search Widget installed on their publications. Lijit builds a unique search corpus for each publisher. This search corpus includes the publisher’s publication, his user-generated content, and the network of the publishers who influence the publisher (i.e., his Blogroll). This network of influencers results in a crawl footprint of over 2.5M publications that we actively index in order to maintain the search functionality on the 11K publisher sites. The second source of data used in this post comes from information gathered on those 2.5M sites in the extended network.
Data was reduced to something we refer to as the ‘typical publisher’. For some measurements, some publishers were omitted from the sample when in our opinion the specific publisher or publishers represented a singularity in the data that masked the typical publisher substantially. In addition, for some of the analysis points, we removed publications with less than 100 page views a day. Where lower page view publishers were removed we point it out. As page views drop into lower numbers some of the data begins to skew and it begins to get difficult to distinguish active and inactive publishers.
Search Engine Referrals
A typical site within the Lijit publisher network receives 27% of its page views from clicks on results in horizontal search engine result pages. As expected, the highest single source of referrals to the typical publisher site is Google at 23.5%. Yahoo and Bing were next, accounting for about 3.2% of referrals. Twitter and Facebook were nearly identical and total about 1.6% of traffic.
| 23.52% | |
| Yahoo | 2.15% |
| Bing | 1.07% |
| 0.83% | |
| 0.80% | |
| MSN | 0.02% |
| Direct to Site | 21.50% |
| Site Self-References + Other Sites | 50.02% |
Lijit categorizes publications into 23 topical/vertical subject areas. The Tech vertical saw the highest percent of page views from search engine referrals at 41%. The remaining topical areas were fairly consistent with regards to percent referrals.
The percent of page views that come from search engine referrals is fairly constant with the audience size of the publication. The exception to this are publications of less than 100 page views a day that receive a slightly larger percent of page views from search engine referrals at around 30%.
It’s unclear why smaller publications get a larger percent of page views from search engine referrals, but may be linked to the ever growing length of horizontal search engine queries. According to a Hitwise January 2009 Search report, over 50% of queries are now 3 terms or more on the major horizontal search engines. This suggests that as the length of the average query string gets longer, more referrals get passed to smaller publications due to the specificity of the queries. This is a positive trend for smaller publishers.
Blogroll Promotion
Based on the 2.5M publications crawled by Lijit, the number of blogs in the average blogroll is 47, a surprisingly high number. Although not always a prominent feature on a publisher’s site, cross promotion of bloggers by other bloggers is clearly a significant factor in publication readership growth.
The typical publication within the Lijit network of 2.5M sites appears in 6.4 other Blogrolls. In other words, the typical blog is pointed to by 6.4 other blogs. The difference between a blog appearing in 6.4 other Blogrolls and pointing to an average of 47 other blogs is largely due to blogs pointing outside of the Lijit crawl footprint. The Blogosphere is a very large place.
The Impact of Twitter
Publications with greater than 100 page views a day received on average 0.83% of their page views from Twitter referrals. This percent tracked very closely to Facebook referrals at 0.80%. Publications below 100 page views a day saw a higher percent of page views from Twitter referrals than Facebook referrals.
Besides horizontal search engines, Twitter is the largest driver of referrals to the typical publication.
Lijit Search aggregates user-generated content that a publisher generates, into search results that display on the publisher’s site. Aggregating this content around a publisher’s site creates a stronger brand association for the reader with that publisher and site.
The most common user-generated content source included within a Lijit Search profile is Twitter. About 50% of Lijit publishers include Twitter in their Lijit Search results. This is a change from prior years. In 2007, 26.6% of publishers included Twitter as a content source in their Lijit Search results. In 2008, 42% of Lijit accounts included Twitter as a content source within their Lijit Search results. In 2009, 50% of publishers included Twitter as a content source within their Lijit Search results.
Twitter was by far the fastest growing content source to be included by Lijit publishers. Clearly, publishers embrace the micro-blog format. Going forward, Lijit intends to track the percent of publishers that use Twitter for blog post promotion as we suspect this number is quite high.
Advertising and Analytics
As Lijit crawls the extended network of publications, we track the widgets and tags we find on those publications. For the first time, Quantcast overtook Google Analytics as the most frequent analytics tag found on publications. This is likely due to Quantcast tags being included in some publishing platform templates.
Comparing 2008 to 2009, there has been a 68% increase in the number of sites with Ad tags installed. This indicates to us that monetizing sites is high on the priority list of most publishers.
Last year, when we ran the analysis, Google Ad tags made up 67% of the Ad tags found. This year that percentage has dropped to 47%, indicating publishers are experimenting with other Ad networks. This is probably not an indication of publishers leaving Google but rather publishers trying other Ad networks and using Google at the end of the Ad rotation.
More Data to Come…
With Lijit’s install footprint of 11K active installed base and a crawl footprint of 2.5M publications, Lijit is becoming the defacto source of information from within publications. Starting in 2010 Lijit will publish a more comprehensive study of what’s happening inside the Blogosphere.
Tags: events, lijit stats, publisher data, State of the Blogosphere, wijit | View Comments
Last month, we launched a contest to find a great Lijit story. We did so to hear what our publishers had to say about us. And it turns out…they have lots to say and many different ways of saying it. (Also? Some only entered to get a free shirt–which tells you a lot about our shirts!) From the humorous to the ethereal to the very concise, the contest entries really spanned the spectrum. After wading through all the posts and getting most of the company to weigh in, we are proud to announce that we have chosen a winner.
Before I announce that winner, some comments about the entry that was deemed most Lijit…
“Everyone loves a video…”
“How can you beat screencast explanations?”
“She rocked that shit.”
“With a name like Keller, how can it not be good?” (contributed by a certain someone named Keller in our office)
With much excitement and an imaginary drumroll, I present the winner of our Lijit storytelling contest…
Keller has put together a fantastic summary of our service, covering everything from the value she gets from using Lijit on her blog (and how we help her blog readers) to how you go about installing Lijit on your blog. She even went so far as to add video screencasts to her post.
You can read her Kindle-worthy post here and be sure to leave a congratulatory comment.
So, to Keller, we say thank you. You are the winner and your Kindle will be in the mail to you on Monday. Enjoy, thanks for using Lijit and know that you have our undying love. (As promised in the fine print of the contest specifics…)
Many thanks, also, to everyone that took the time to enter our contest. It’s publishers like y’all that make it fun to come to work. Your Lijit t-shirts will look great on you.
Tags: contest, Lijit publishers, wijit | View Comments
We’ve decided it’s time for a mid-summer contest. Nothing complicated–we just want to hear your Lijit story. To reward your efforts, the best storyteller will win a Kindle and ALL submissions will get a super-comfy Lijit t-shirt.
What should you write about? Absolutely anything having to do with Lijit.
Your contest entry could be about how you found out about Lijit…
“I landed in Nashville for the BlissDom09 conference. It had been a REALLY long flight day for me. The last leg of my trip was out of Denver, and I picked up my luggage and searched for the hotel’s shuttle van…
We talked a bit and I learned that she was representing Lijit, one of the sponsors for the event! (Sorry, I didn’t have the sponsors memorized.) Her name was Tara and I was feeling lucky to have met her like that, one on one, ridin’ in the van…”
–From Carissa at GoodNCrazy
Or simply what you like best about our service…
“This isn’t even the coolest part of Lijit, though, IMHO. Instead, in my mind, the most interesting feature is the “Research” feature. After you’ve searched for a specific term or after you reach TOCWOC through a search engine, the Lijit widget shows a Research area which gives you other possible posts or pages from TOCWOC and from the entire Civil War blogosphere!”
–From Brett at TOCWOC
Of course, you could be like Louis Gray and write a post that explains our service better than we do…
“Google’s goal in life is to find the one right answer that is true for everyone. Search for iPhone, and you should get the same answer I do at the top of the results, blanketed by potentially relevant ads from the company’s partners. Lijit’s goal in life is to find the one answer that is most accurate, depending on where you are searching. Search for iPhone on my blog, and you will find the most relevant responses that come from my blog and my content from around the Web, including Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube and other social sites. Search for iPhone on Steven Hodson’s blog (also using Lijit), and you should get a different set of responses based on his activity.”
–From the blog of Louis Gray
Then, like Louis, you can turn your babies into little Lijit evangelists as well…
(But that’s not necessary to win the contest.)
To enter the contest:
- Simply post your Lijit story on your blog.
- Link back to us here.
- Leave a comment on this post with a link to your entry to insure we don’t miss your post.
You have thirty days and we will pick the winner with the help of everyone around our office. To answer potential questions, Lijit employees and their families are not eligible to win. (Lenora and Walter, I’m talking to you two!) Also, if you have posted something about Lijit in the past, feel free to republish your older post and we’ll consider it a valid entry.
In addition to the Kindle, you’ll also be featured on our blog, our homepage and receive our undying love & devotion.
Seems easy enough, right? Have fun and we look forward to seeing what you come up with!
Tags: contest, Lijit publishers, wijit | 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
I just checked my TripIt account and so far I have been traveling for 25% of 2009. That means, having just started June, that I have been gone from Boulder for more than a solid month. (Well, not a solid month, more like a total of a month worth of days, but I bet you get it.)
Which also means I get a lot of time to read. Lately, I have been reading a book called The Know-It-All by AJ Jacobs. In the book, which is non-fiction, AJ reads the entire encyclopedia to become the smartest person in his family.
In many ways, I view Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (I mean BING!) similarly. They are out there attempting to catalog the worlds information so that when asked a question, they can provide you with THE one right answer.
Often, they do. But as time as passed and the information store has grown, context has been lost. When you do the search for “seal” what is returned? The animal? The singer?
Google hedges its bets by displaying images of both, but guesses the singer in the results…
There was a recent article in DM News that search queries of three words or less were down 3%, 5% and 1% respectively, but that searches of four to eight words had grown from 3% to 20%.
In short, searchers have learned that to get relevant results, you have to use more than three words.
My friend Kevin Lee of Did-It was quoted as saying:
“Longer queries are a sign of the searchers becoming more educated and savvy and essentially being trained by the fact that results for shorter queries tend to return less relevant results than longer searches.” (emphasis mine)
Frankly, while not surprising, that boggles my mind. Searchers have learned that the major search engines are inherently inefficient and ineffective at applying context to a search query. How is this progress?
That major search engines are relying on the searcher to provide the context via additional keywords in the query. How does that create a better search experience?
Which, of course, brings us to Lijit.
Across our network approximately 75% of the searches are three words or less. Why is that?
Because we allow the publisher to provide the context. Their readers, by going to a trusted source first, already believe that the results that are returned will be contextual to the query. Therefore, they don’t need to use multiple word queries to return relevant results.
How do we know that this is the case?
1) On average, we get a higher click through rate on organic results than people using Google Custom Search.
2) On average, we get a higher click through rate on ads than the industry standard for text ads.
So what is better for publishers?
The “one right answer” approach that the major search engines take, or the “every publisher has a right answer” approach that we take?
I suppose that is up to the searcher.
But, I can guarantee it will take less keywords in the query to find the answer on a Lijit publisher.
Tags: Lijit publishers, lijit stats, wijit | 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