1. More compact, faster, ads (file size for all our ads has been reduced noticeably, which should make them display faster on publisher sites)
2. Language specific targeting. Previously, users have seen ads based purely on their location. Now, ads may be targeted based on the user’s preferred language. For example, a French language ad may now be targeted at French speakers in Canada, in addition to users located in France.
3. Extra precision for targeting options – from now, certain ads may only target individual Operating Systems and devices, while this feature is in test, this may include users across 20 different operating systems.

Here at VAN, we take LinkedIn very seriously (our “connections leader board” is testament to that!) However, despite being a very powerful social networking tool, it is often overlooked and under-utilised.

This interesting article on ProBlogger offers some useful tips that could be used by our publishers to help drive traffic to their blog from LinkedIn.

So if you haven’t already, check out LinkedIn, follow a few of the tips, and hopefully your blog traffic will increase!

PS – feel free to add me once you’ve signed up – I need to climb the VAN leaderboard!

You can now view your statistics for the past 7 days, for the past 14 days (the default), the past 30 days, or since your last payment.

No matter how successful your blog, gaining more readers, comments and general interaction with your content is an important aim for most publishers. However, this is often more difficult than it sounds, whether you’re just starting out and trying to gain momentum, or are well established but your growth has ground to a halt.

Chris HELP!, the co-founder of HELP! Copy and Design, offers 5 reasons why your blog isn’t growing (guest article from bloggodown.com). These are applicable to publishers taking their first steps into the world of blogging, as well as those who are well established but their growth has plateaued.

1. You publish irregularly. I’m not saying that you have to publish new content every day. What I’m saying is that you need to pick a posting frequency and stick with it. Your readers need to know when to expect content from you, whether that’s 3 times a day or once a week. Haphazard posting just doesn’t work. It makes it impossible for your blog to gain any momentum, and it makes it difficult for readers to stick with you on a long-term basis.
2. You make it difficult to share your content. Your readers can be your most valuable tool for promoting your blog. If you make it easy for them to share your content through their favorite social media websites, they can tell all their friends and followers about your blog with just the click of a mouse. You need to have social media buttons on your blog that include instant sharing capabilities with Facebook, Twitter, Digg, ReddIt, and other popular sites. This can be very helpful in making your posts go viral.
3. You post “me too” content. There are hundreds of millions of blogs online. And no matter what niche you’re blogging in, you can bet you have some competition. Why should someone read your blog? What do you offer that can’t be found on the other blogs in your niche? These are the questions you need to ask yourself with every post you write. Don’t just rehash what everyone else is saying. “Me too” blogs have very limited growth potential. Be different. Be yourself.
4. You don’t write like you talk. Speaking of being yourself, your personality needs to shine through in your writing. Readers want to feel like they’re connecting with someone when they read your blog…like they know you. The best way to forge a connection with them is to write like you talk. Your blog posts will feel more conversational, and your blog will have a voice that’s completely different from all others in your niche.
5. Your blog isn’t optimized for the search engines. Every post you write should be optimized for maximum search engine visibility. This means using keyword-rich titles, tagging and categorizing your posts appropriately, and using keyword-rich anchor text to link to other content throughout your posts. This can help drive search engine traffic to your blog, allowing you to grow over time.

Hopefully these simple pointers can help some of our publishers improve their blogging behaviour, gain more readers, and therefore increase the traffic to their sites (and in turn, earn more revenue!)

The original article can be found at Blog Godown.

In the interest of transparency I’ll explain how our stats systems work from a high-level, and why your payments aren’t affected by system maintenance.

When designing our ad-serving and tracking systems, our top priorities are generally:

1. Accurately recording the number of actions
2. Serving ads onto your page quickly
3. Ensuring fraudulent publishers can’t abuse our systems to take money they don’t deserve from our advertisers.

Detecting invalid actions (of which fraud is only a small minority) is not a simple task – and it can take a significant amount of computing power to analyse the volume of actions we receive.

If we attempted to categorise and analyse all actions as soon as they occurred[*] then we would struggle to serve ads (and record actions) on your websites during traffic spikes.

To avoid this (and to ensure the ad network can carry on serving during maintenance and updates), we separate our systems into (constantly running) high performance ad serving and action tracking systems (which simply record preliminary data) and systems which perform analysis of this data.

The analysis systems periodically analyse the preliminary data and use as much computing power as they have available to update our main databases. If there is not enough computing power available (or if we are in the middle of scheduled maintenance) then the analysis will wait until a later time before updating the databases.

I hope this high-level description has helped explain the delay between actions occurring and being displayed in your dashboards – and why our dashboard updates don’t affect your monthly payments.

Tim Wintle

[*] – it’s worth noting it would technically be impossible to fully analyse actions immediately – some analysis can only be done in bulk, after your actions are recorded.

Click here to view the embedded video.

COME ON ENGLAND!

http://dudecorp.com

1. The Best Software Writing I by Joel Spolsky
2. The Smashing Book by Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman
3. Designing The Moment – web interface design concepts in action by Robert Hoekman, Jr.
4. Ogilvy On Advertising by David Ogilvy
5. Attention And Interest Factors In Advertising by Harold J Rudolph
6. Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan

Let us know if you have any reading recommendations – leave a reply below, or send us a tweet.

You can find out more on interesting reading at the Rubber Republic Book Club or even sign up for the Rubber Library.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“But where is this young panda cub now?” I hear you ask. Why, residing in our office driving Andy’s Lego trucks of course.

This week’s charts have been dominated by the upcoming football world cup in South Africa and Britain’s Got Talent on ITV1. At the top of the brand chart is Nike’s World Cup 2010 campaign including a bearded Wayne Rooney! Also making the cut, but not the final Brazil 23 man squad, is Ronaldinho. Watch the ad below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sitting at the top of the UGC chart is a remix of Eastender Phil Mitchell’s infamous punch. The scene where Phil Mitchell punches Ben is beautifully crafted to the backdrop of Lethal Bizzle’s “Pow! (Forward)”. Watch the video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check out the NMA Viral Brand Chart here

Check out the NMA Viral UGC Chart here

Summary:

How much would you enjoy reporting to your client to tell them their average cost per view was £20? (even if you don’t phrase it like that, they will be calculating it).

Including a bought spend reduces their (and your) risk – in very worst case above you’d be entering that meeting reporting an average cost per view of around 1/40th of that price – that’s 40 times more ROI for them, and a more economically viable campaign.

What’s missing from the above?

Quite a bit – for a start, the more that your content is seen, the more likely it is to get organic views – so a bought media buy makes it far less likely that you’ll be hitting anywhere close to the worst case. For simplicity I’ve left this at the most basic calculation I could.

(Disclaimer: these numbers are estimated and may not necessarily reflect real-life results, which will depend on individual campaigns)