This week a number of Irish regional news websites have started charging for content. Chances are that you haven’t already spotted this. I say that this because if you are anything like me, you probably consume media a lot differently than the masses.

Before I start, I want you to know that I was previously in gainful employment with the Irish Independent and worked in the team and on the platform behind these regional web sites. Although its been over a year since I worked there, I have some understand of why they might have decided to charge for content. Before I start to explain the rationale, I want you to know that I think that this move will prove in time to be a huge mistake. Anyone who is in advertising might tell you that this move will more than likely obliterate most of the traffic and advertising revenue on these on-line publications.

Regional newspapers are hugely different to main stream media, in that the content and its target market is quite niche. This causes a whole array of issues when your business model is based on advertising. The fact that regional publishers have such a niche audience means that your advertising volumes / reach falls to a point where its almost counter intuitive for a main stream brand to advertise there.

The problem that regional publishers have is that, trying to get local regional advertisers to advertises on the web is almost impossible. Many regional publishers and the their advertisers don’t understand the whole on-line advertising thing. If they do understand online, they probably realise that the vast majority of people who read regional papers online aren’t in fact in their target market.

If you did some research on this you might find that a large percentage of people who read regional titles online are in fact from outside of the target market / region. Some might speculate that a large percentage of the readers of such a publication are ex pats overseas or people who have migrated to another part of the country. This is mainly because regional papers have quite limited distribution pattern. If you are outside of Fingal for example, chances are you have never seen a physical copy of the Fingal Independent.

With this in mind, the publishing group might have decided to start charging for content. After all, large websites costs money to run! The reason news papers provide free content online is to get eyeballs that can be converted to advertising revenue. If you can’t sell the adverting then its a bit of a no brainier. You have to make money somewhere right?

This is where the argument gets a bit fuzzy.. Traditional media at this point goes back to what it knows best. If you cant make money from advertising, you have to start charging for the content. If you cant charge for content and cant sell advertising you end up something like the herald AM, now known as the Metro Herald .

My view on this is that the above is all fundamentally flawed. Some might say that the reason they are charging for the content and making it as expensive if not more expensive than the offline equivalent is to drive you back to the traditional publication and boost readership. When you factor in that there is a very low distribution cost online, I cant fathom why else they would be charging in this way.

In my mind, charging more for content on-line only makes sense if you are adding some extra value or providing access to something that you cant obtain in the traditional paper. Where they went wrong was they started trying to charge for something that had previously been provided free of charge. That would be OK, if when you paid they stripped out all of the advertising or provided you with something a bit more substantial. Why not bundle a number if offerings together. IE: When you pay monthly, you should get access to all regional publications including access to all digital supplements, the digital edition and a free download of an improved version of their iPhone app. That seems like a better offer / value proposition to me.

I just wish that Irish traditional media would make up there mind. If it doesn’t work. you do have to fix it .. but I feel there was some old school media bods influencing this decision.

My main question to you is.. Would you pay for regional news content and what would inspire you to part with your hard earned cash? Please leave your comments below.

Also check out Independent introduces paywall for regional titles

Last week, I went to a really interesting session about hotels and bogging set up by Ciara Feely. Keith Bohanna was speaking to a group of hoteliers about promoting themselves via blogs / twitter.

I found it quite interesting that the first barrier for most of the hoteliers was the lack expertise to set up a branded hotel blog. With that in mind, I decided to come up with this offer.

For a limited time, I am offering a number of Irish hoteliers the chance to get a blog installed / customised* free of charge. To top that off.. If you are a small hotel / b&b , I will also give you a free one-to-one crash course on twitter.

If you are in the hotel space and looking for a blog I would love to hear from you. If you know anyone in the tourism space who might be interested please pass this ton to them.

*Customised, refers to making your new blog look and fit with your existing hotel branding / website.

On another note Geansai Gorm has been launched by Damien Mulley, its basically a S E O competition to see who can rank for the term Geansai Gorm also known as Geansaí Gorm and can be translated from Irish to blue jumper.

My Gorm entry had some issues because of DNS problems. The site is not showing up yet and was only verified yesterday evening after the DNS holding page expired from googles DNS cache. Take a look at Google for the upcoming pages.

Issues like this highlighted the risk surrounding niche bottom feeder sites. Brand feeders tend to latch onto popular online tends, many feeders leverage bigger brands and target unexplored brand niches. Large corporate brands face this problem on a daily basis.

Feeding your brand.

In the MySpace example, many of the Feeders where not trying to directly compete with MySpace. Smart brands are aware that keeping your brand space busy can sometime be a good thing. A busier brand market place means that the cost for competitors to leverage your brand will often be quite high. This brand cluttering concept will result in competitors costs being driven up.

The downside of brand cluttering is that when a brand becomes too cluttered it can be hard for your clients to see through all of the smoke. While your competitor’s costs will rise, so will the cost of maintaining your brand.

Allakhazam and the brand revolts!

Accountants and CFO’s are the kryptonite for any brand marketer. As soon as a good accountant sees that the maintenance of a brand is becoming too high, they will often look for a solution to the problem. The simplest option is always the first route that will be taken. Simple is not a word I would normally associate with the registering a trademark with Google. Anyone that has been faced with challenge of registering a trademark with Google will understand that the process is long and arduous.

You own the trademark but not the brand

Most companies are unaware that their customers control their brand. This was covered in a book entitled Brand Hijack by Alex Wipperfurth. Alex suggests that the role of a brand marketer is to guide a brand not control it.

The interesting thing about a “simple” solution to a problem is that it will often backfire on the brand marketer. After Dave highlighted this issue, I decided I would keep an eye on void that the Myspace trademark saga left behind.

As brand feeders could no longer buy some of the pie, they were forced to invade the organic space. Using the Mark Alert tool from Domain Tools, I tracked the rate of new domain names being registered with the term “myspace” somewhere in the domain. In total over 2421 domains where identified with matching criteria. The Graph below tracks the rate of growth over a 40 day period. The graph peaks at 229 and dips to 14 at its higest and lowest point.

“Sometimes it is better to guide a brand rather than control it.” – Jason Roe

This could be a big blow for some of the social bookmarking services. Form a data mining point of view, this might be another key tool that could be used to identify the value of a page link or service.

From The Google notebook homepage

Clip and collect information as you browse the web.

- Clip useful information.You can add clippings of text, images and links from web pages to your Google Notebook without ever leaving your browser window.

- Organize your notes. You can create multiple notebooks, divide them into sections, and drag-and-drop your notes to stay organized.

- Get access from anywhere.You can access your Google Notebooks from any computer by using your Google Accounts login.

- Publish your notebook. You can share your Google Notebook with the world by making it public.

With a €2.5 fee to get money back, you might actually lose out ..

I have been toying with the idea of coworking for some time. For anyone that hasn’t heard of coworking yet, the concept is fairly simple:

“Coworking is a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents”

The concept itself is nothing new. Freelancers and small business have always teamed up for office shares. What makes coworking any different to typical office share? In my mind the definition of an office share would be simple “A closed group of people spreading the cost of an office”. Whereas coworking is the next evolution of this model.

Think of it this way, what if you could not only spread the cost of your business, but quickly and easily pool resources with a larger community of likeminded individuals? Your office share is limited to a stagnant pool of talent that will rarely change. What if your community was more fluidic? How would that affect your business model?

This is the next revolution of business. Coworking allows seamless collaboration between companies and individuals who may never have met under other more static environments. Our new economy will be built on ideas and ideas need the right environment to grow. When creative minds are provided with an ideal environment and are supported by peer’s ideas with turn from good to ingenious.

Maybe this all sounds a bit too good to be true but every business stated off with one Individual who took a chance. Every company is only made up of the sum of the individuals who work for them. A fluidic structure means that individuals can join forces and all work for individual goals. At the same time they can also leverage the power of the many to help make those goals happen. This is my definition of the future of coworking.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, we need a way to make this all happen. This is where I came up with the idea for Coworking.IE. The goal of the site is to promote coworking in ireland, to provide a community space for coworkers to team up and to serve as a guide to people who are looking to go out on their own. The project is community driven and completely non profit. Everyone is encouraged to contribute to the project in whatever way they can.

To make coworking in Ireland a reality we need to make people aware of the benefits of coworking as a whole. Coworking.ie will provide space for people to team up and contribute to this process. If you are interested in this topic and would like to contribute please contact me on Jason@jason-roe.com .. If you are feeling a bit more passive, you can help by spreading the word.

Also a big thanks to James Corbett from EirePreneur.com to help start the ball rolling.

Enough about the venue how was the event? I had really high expectations with the line up of speakers. At the end of the conference I came out a bit let down. The event as a whole seemed to be directed heavily at marketing agencies and potential clients. I understand that this is normally the case in a lot of event of this nature, but at the price of the tickets (€300-500) I really expected something more informative.

The highlight for me was meeting up with some of the guys that are in the real SEO scene in Ireland. Most of them are mainly fresh and up-coming companies, not limited by the boundaries of traditional mediums or practices. I met up with Dave Davis from Redfly, Richard Hearne from Red Cardinal, Alastair McDermot from amdsoft and some of the guys from Infacta. Some truly great banter was going on during and after the event. Dave Davis had what I can only describe as a novel idea.. A drink for a link! So there ye go Dave.

So a quick review of each seminar that I attended..

Search Engine Marketing: An Introduction

I only caught the tail end of this a due to me picking one of the longest routes to the venue in the world. Danny was basically describing the fundamentals of why SEO is required and basically why we have a demand for SEO.

Search Marketing Successes & Case Studies

This was a bit of a sales fest in my opinion. The one actual case study (the large hotel group) seemed to know more than the two “Professional” SEO speakers. On the other hand, the hotel group was somewhat anal regarding the treatment of affiliates. They described how they went through 3 months of hard work with Google to protect the hotel group’s trademarks and brands from their own affiliates. They also encouraged other companies to invest time in doing this “as soon as possible”.

Maybe I missed something here, isn’t the idea of an affiliate scheme to help encourage sales via indirect methods. The group would have saved on advertising, on management fees and on overheads as a whole. Maybe someone was trying to keep themselves in a job? If your affiliates are outbidding you, so what! They are also outbidding your competitors and making the market more crowded in your space. This can only be beneficial as a whole. I know Dave had a very strong opinion about this because he dose a lot of affiliate sales, so I will let him do a follow up on this topic.

Search Engines Forum: – The Future of Search

We had some interesting tidbits from Yahoo regarding an image mash up service. This could possibly integrated with flicker to create a 3 dimensional landscape (not literally), where images can be uploaded and used as a tool to search for a particular information related to that photo. To dumb it down a bit.. I guess this would be like some kind of digital photo fingerprint! But I guess in this case it’s hooked into one massive database. PS: Note for the FBI , this may be the ultimate system for identifying faces, fingerprints and buildings! I would hate to think of the privacy implications of this.

Microsoft Adcenter let us know that they would be finally servicing the Irish / Euro market. Well done lads! .. I sent this request in 20 seconds after the live beta was launched! Nice to see you finally received the memo.

It seems that the future of search will revolve heavily around mobile devices. I think we have all been hearing this for the last 7 years so nothing new there. The solution was laid out fairly clearly. We need an ultimate mobile service to create a demand for the service. Think of it as the bebo, myspace or youtube of the mobile revolution. I mentioned all this before in previous comments on one of my posts. We all know the limiting factors of cost. What happens when demand overcomes the boundaries of cost.. Mobile providers are forced to change their business model to accommodate the consumer. This has been seen in the telco market with broadband and related services. I will follow up on this with another post.

Google AdWords Academy – Advanced Session

No comment, nothing really advanced here. Two prepped adword sales reps with a bag of we don’t knows and no comments throw in. Dave asked some interesting questions in relation to the campaign optimiser that is in beta. I will let Dave follow up on his opinion about this.

Click Fraud

In my opinion this was by far the most interesting seminar of the day. Shuman Ghosemajumder from Google described the fundamentals of how fraudulent clicks are detected. The worrying thing that I noted was that after the basic automated metrics where applied, fraud detection was a very manual process. Anything that is classed as “advanced” is outside the jurisdiction of the algorithm.

I hogged the Q&A time with a question about how a multi domain, multi account scraper site could drive low quality clicks through the adsense content networks. In my opinion this could be done not to make money but to drive up costs for competitors in your space. The guys basically noted that this is where advanced manual methods would have to be used. The answer I was looking for was “well don’t use the content network”. This was avoided by answering “you need secondary means to prevent fraud”.

So in summary the event was good but could have been better.. I took home some nice tidbits of information as a whole. As I said before, the best part of the event was the attendees. I think this is always the case, Faces to names and all of that.

Would anyone be interested? Drop me a comment with suggestions for venues etc..

Ok so the plain is .. Anyone who wants to meet up, be in the center courtyard beside big red arty farty fork (that’s sticking up out of the yellow head) at 1pm sharp! Yes I have done some recon!

If for any reason you can’t find the red fork, please meet at the office on the left hand side (when you walk in) of the courtyard. This will be on the opposite side of the courtyard from the conference hall.

The time is 1pm, The place see above .. PS: You will miss the end of (Google AdWords Academy Beginners)

Anyone know if the pub/grub in the train station is any good?

To quote the hackers wordpress blog:

Anyways, I just started the first hacking cruzade… The easy targets (WordPress blogs with register_globals=on) using a custom PHP script based on this code

Quick fix is to disable trackback & rename the wp-trackback.php file until the patch is patch has been issued by wordpress (More info on how to upgrade). This is kinda similar to my other post about wordpress security. You can find a graphic design service in dublin, it turs out that they use Corporate Chauffeur Services!
See pick below:

Improve Online sales with a sharper call to action

“There are two important components that can most impact a sales oriented business Web site. Obviously we spend a fair bit of time teaching students how to get the benefit of enormously improved visibility through search engine marketing.”

Personal Development – Do It Now (Not Dev – Biz Related!)

“When going to college many years ago, I decided to challenge myself by setting a goal to see if I could graduate in only three semesters, taking the same classes that people would normally take over a four-year period.”

The experiment itself was simple, take the keywords that I was receiving from the first post and apply it to a second post to get maximum exposure. The first post that was made on Saturday was ranking well on the SERPS by Monday. When I say ranking well, the post wasn’t #1 in any way shape or form but it did show up in the top #10.

The second post was made on Monday and included some (but not all) of the keywords that I had seen. If I had to do it all over again the title would have been more like “Funda Ireland launch, Wasaki Dublin Coastal Development“?. I noticed redcardinal targeting the term “Funda Ireland“? so it probably wouldn’t have been as much fun to target that second term.

On Tuesday the first post had dropped from the SERPS and was replaced by lots of traffic from irishblogs.ie. I can only guess that this was a mixture of me adding other posts “New Template!“?, “RateMyGoat Gets Smutty!“? and the second experimental post getting added. This was the first Yo-Yo that I had seen. The second post was ranking well on Wednesday / Thursday (I was ranking #1 for the targeted term). Domain age & linkbacks helped me achieve this speedy result. The influx of searches also got me some direct link-backs from forums and the like.

Today (Friday) I had noticed something strange. The second post had completely dropped from the SERPS. The weird thing is the post had been #2 for the targeted term this morning (8 am) and then suddenly vanished. This was the second Yo-Yo that I had seen. The only thing that had changed in the post was the comments made by my readers (this may have changed the keyword density slightly). I’m sure there where many other factors in play however these where the most noteworthy. The page seems to be fighting to get back in, dropping and appearing at what seems to be random intervals. I’m sure that after this post gets indexed the second post will completely drop from the SERPS.

Before you ask the targeted term was “dublin coastal development“?.

I would be interested to find out if anyone else has seen this kind of yo-yo with their blog within the last week?

Some information via Spoilt:

Chemistry conceived the idea. They commissioned The Farm for the video piece, and Spline Design was contracted for the website.

I would be interested to find out what you think of the whole “viral” campaign. Please leave your comments below.

The site got multiple mentions on air from a couple of the shows and was a running joke for a few weeks. During this time I dropped a bit of adsense on the site to recoup the cost of the domain. Today I went over to the site to have a look at around and to my surprise one of the adsense ads have gone smutty!

It seems Expert-Expert.com used the old tactic of “lets just use the whole keywords list as is�. I’m guessing they just targeted the term “RATEMY� and hoped for the best. Just to quote the ad “Quality Pre-Reviewed Resources For Rate My Clit�. I can picture the guy who has to pre-review this quality content, What a job that would be!

Now this extravagant film goes into detail about how the islands will be lit with a series of green lights at night and how they will contain Dublin’s first giraffe only zoo! My guess is that the choice of only giraffe’s was for space saving efficiency! I’m not aware of any giraffe related mauling incidences so maybe they are being safety conscious.

Update: They even have kitchen designs on the site!

Another interesting “development” from “WASAKI Corp” an exact replica of Howth on the south side! Ok, its a PR stunt for a new property website but its worth a look. At least they used their heads and went viral!

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/v/aaSLNBOphpE"][/gv]

Many thanks to Alex Gibson and the Trim Castle Hotel for their generous prize.

I would advise everyone to pop over and subscribe (RSS) (iTunes) to Alex’s marketing podcast, The Persuaders. The show is packed full of juicy marketing information, interviews and more.

http://www.irishsites.com/

http://www.kilcooledirectory.ie/

http://www.purplepages.ie/site/content/default.asp
http://www.itdirectory.ie/
http://www.irishabroad.com/Directory/
http://www.tipperarydirectory.ie/htmlsite/directory.asp
http://www.fashion.ie/directory/
http://www.gaire.com/dir/
http://www.queer.ie/directory/

http://www.gaycork.com/directory/

http://www.irishbuildingindustry.ie/
http://kildare.ie/business/
http://www.mayodirectory.com/
http://www.letterkennyonline.com/

http://musicdirectory.dfloor.net/directory/

http://www.galwayec.ie/schoolsdirectory.html
http://www.sustainable.ie/directory/index.php
http://www.hotspots.ie/

http://www.progressivetrance.net/directory/

http://www.isearch.ie/

http://www.longford.ie/business/directory.asp
http://www.furniture.ie/directory/
http://www.adlib.ie/directory.asp
http://www.ballyfermot.ie/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=43
http://www.youth.ie/arts/directory/
http://www.dun-laoghaire.com/directory.html
http://www.longford.ie/community/directory.asp http://www.carrickonshannon.ie/carrick_local_business_directory/index.php
http://www.braydirectory.ie/

http://www.weddingsireland.com/directory/

So what’s a link on my site worth? Text link ads produced a cool ill calculator. The tool works out how much you could get depending on what kind of site you have. To be honest if my site was gambling related my links would be worth $69, that’s over twice the price of my current links. So go over to text link ads sign up and start making money!

Also a big hello to iWorld one of our text link advertisers, it seems that you can Buy iPod and iPod Accessories at their site. Some of them look fairly cool too. Please note the nofollow link.. Have to keep them keen after all.

At the moment search engines seem to be ranking sites fairly well that have pages with relevant inbound links. This is not the only factor involved to rank well, however it seem to have a lot of weight behind it. The search engines have also got smatter about identifying people who are playing the system to their advantage.

Link exchanges are no longer as effective as the where in the past and many people have got banned or caught up in a bad neighbourhood by using them. In an ideal world, if everyone followed the rules link exchanges would work perfectly, but this is the real world! Quality is more important than anything else. I found a chart that approximately shows how many links are needed to achieve a certain PR from pages with a particular PR.

“…the meaning of a link has been transformed from a reference to a vote.�
Bill Slawski, from his interview with Aaron.

Link building takes time. I would compare link building to building the foundations of a home. The foundations have to be strong and must withstand the test of time. Everyone has there own theories about the best ways to build links, you need to take time and work out your own linking strategies. I found a great article over on search engine watch regarding linking strategies. “101 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies�

How long does it take? I found an interesting post over at Link Building Blog that mentioned a “time line� of sorts:

Established Domains (domains that are over 1+ year old or are already ranking for many terms)
*build links -> 10-12 weeks later see results.

New Domains (domains under 1 year old and are showing no strong ranking results) *build links -> 12 weeks to 16 months later see results.

Feed the monster

Start adding news content to your site and make sure to set up an RSS feed immediately. This can be done via a blog, content management systems or custom script. The advantage of a feed over a standard news section is that feed will be picked up and aggregated by many sites. A standard news section will only be read and indexed by major search engines. News is produced to be read, not just to fill up a page on your website.

Bloggers have realised for a long time that Feeds are they way to go. Your news will be out and all over the web in less than 24 – 48 hours. RSS is being picked up and read and indexed by most of the search engines. Most aggregators will also give you link backs thus boosting your rankings.

Make sure that you ping every aggregator site that you can. Many blog tools already have pinging tools build in as standard, make sure to add in all the aggregators that you can find to your list.

Don’t get lost!

Black hats have many ways to help you get removed from search engine indexes. Be careful to watch out for malicious server side includes, comments sections or reviews with direct links without nofollows and link spammers (with irrelevant keywords). There are many more ways to get removed, banned and penalised they just break the rules!
Most of the time there isn’t much you can do regarding external attacks. Try contact the major search engines, describe what is happening and plead that they won’t remove you from the index.

Lee Dodd, owner of Sprint Users and other large forums has agreed to be on the show this week. Lee has mastered the art of making money online and is currently working on a book about it scheduled to be released later this year.

Pop over to Shoemoney’s blog for more info.

The one major problem that I have seen with a lot of Irish companies and websites is that they are hosting their website outside of Ireland. Why would this be a problem? Most of the modern search engines over the last few years have implemented geo targeted results. Geo targeted means that the search engine find pages that a most relevant to you by showing you local results first.

The long and the short of this is, If you’re an Irish based company looking for Irish traffic it is better to host in Ireland. In the same respect if you are a UK based company looking to target UK customers then host in the UK or on UK IP space within Ireland (Ask your hosting providers!). Hosting in Ireland won’t guarantee that you will shoot up the SERP’s on the major search engines, however it can help you along the way.

Avoid Duplicate Content

It is well known that the best way to help your rankings is to always have a fresh supply of content. This is why blogs and the like have sky rocketed in the last few years, the search engines love them. However with the adoption of RSS by webmaster has come a plague of duplicate content issues. Duplicate content is an exact copy or a close copy of content from other websites. Search engines frown upon too much duplicate content on a page.

A prime example of duplicate content is news feeds on pages, if your “news section� is made up entirely of this kind of duplicated or aggregated content it won’t help you one bit on your rankings. Most of the major search engines can easily identify duplicated content and if your page is found to have too much it, the page just won’t rank at all or get dropped into the supplemental results. Many webmasters now re-write content feeds by replacing words, terms and by using LSI (latent semantic indexing) theories.

There are some rare cases where this may not be the case. We have all heard stories of 100% duplicated content ranking well, however in many cases these sites have used other methods to help their cause.

Help Spiders do their job

Spiders are automated bots design by search engines to crawl your website. Over time a spider will index your pages many times. The bots are designed to help identify and classify sites so that the search engine can return these results in the SERP’S. There are many theories about how to help these bots along the way.

1. I always suggest that a site should always have text based navigation somewhere on the page. This text based navigation can be placed anywhere on the page, the header, the footer or in the body. A text based navigation is beneficial because the search engines can obtain extra information from the link text. Image based navigation can also use this theory by using image descriptions, however many seem to believe that this kind of navigation is not as effective as a traditional text based link. In many cases a text based navigation can also be used in conjunction with a image based Nav.
2. Don’t use the same title on every page, your title shout be customised to the content on a specific page and should relate to your keyword density. In many cases your page titles should look something like this“Page Name, Company Name – Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword3, Keyword4, Keyword5�
3. Place your content as high as possible within your pages. Try to place your content above your navigation, the spiders will read this information first and will not get cluttered up with other possibly irrelevant information. In many cases this can be achieved by using a right hand side navigation or by positioning the navigation with CSS.
4. NoFollow all un-trusted links or external links that you are not in control of. You can’t control what a webmaster on an external site may or may not do with their site. If they happen to “Break the rulesâ€? in a search engines eyes you may be left in a situation where you are now unknowingly linking to a “Bad Neighbourhood â€?. So why risk it? Give the link love to sites that you think deserve it. A NoFollow link is a standard link with the attribute rel=”nofollow” added to it . This attribute signifies to search engines that you would not like to take the responsibility of being associated with a site.

The interface is really easy to use, however it only accessible via Internet Explorer. There is also a requirement for a €5 euro credit card verification fee to verify your credit card.

I found some of the tools quite interesting, the site allows you to Import or export ads via csv. This allows you to quickly update your campaigns. The Keyword research tools allow you to see Traffic Trends, Age and Gender, Wealth Index, Lifestyle, Geography. The only problems I can see about this feature is that it’s not location specific so you get a lot of US generic information.

As far as I can see the adverts themselves are only available on msn.com and not yet available on the localised search engines such as msn.ie. If you want to check adCenter out yourself surf over to http://adcenter.msn.com/

The guys over at SeoRockstars gave a prime example where over 50,000 pages got dumped into the supplemental results. They also stated that this has been confirmed by a source within Google. On the plus side this also means Adsense publishers might have an advantage over normal website as new content might be picked up and indexed sooner.

Listen to the SeoRockstars podcast:

So with all these new fandangle mediums banging about how do you know what one is for you? After working on a re-development of an Irish site called Irish ISP Test I realised how powerful google adsense was for a publisher. Without going into specifics of the project, I realised quite quickly that google adsense advertisements could have paid for the entire re-development costs within less than one month. This could be down to the colossal amount of traffic received every month, or the fact that it was also a useful tool who knows?

The adsense experiences made me think in great depth about this whole advertising situation. From a publisher point of view the “adsense way� seems to be the ideal way to make money, however I feel that the advertiser are getting the raw end of the stick in some respects. Sure the advertisers are getting buckets of traffic that’s targeted, segmented, poked and prodded and then finally delivered but they are also missing out on other opportunities.

Lets go back to basics for a second to an old tradition called link swapping, this was a phenomenon that went on for years and still does to this date, blogs being a prime example of this. Not only does it advertise your site it also boosts your rankings and increases your PR, in some cases its not as targeted but never the less it works. So where am I going with this? I stumbled upon a service called TextLinkAds, I’m sure it’s not completely unique however it uses this kind of link swapping ideology.

TextLinkAds seems to be an interesting alternative to adsense, in some respects it resembles the “Advertise on this site� feature offered by adsense. What makes it different is the fact that TextLinkAds provides you with a full directory of publisher sites. This directory gives you relevant information that can help you choose where you would like to advertise. The advantage of this system is that you pay a flat fee per month (no pay per click) for each site you advertise on, for this fee you get a direct link on the website meaning that not only are you advertising you are also boosting your organic search engine rankings.

So to conclude there are many options for advertiser and publishers alike its best to shop around and get the best all round deal. Try new things explore new services and pick the ones that suit you. Id welcome peoples comments on online marketing and advertising services.

This is what I came up with:

This has allowed the operators to offer reduced rates for bulk messaging, some recent quotes for 100k + of messages range from €4000 to €7000. Best estimates being that an average text would cost as little as 4c. This opens up huge marketing opportunities for many SME’s.