Thursday, May 04, 2006

Microsoft adds Adcenter to compete with Adsense

Microsoft is making it official today as they begin to roll out their advertising Pay Per Click model called Adcenter to compete with Google's Adsense program. It will not achieve Google's levels, breadth or depth immediately. Microsoft will initiate the program by running advertising on their own websites, instead of relying on Google or Yahoo for ads. Then as they grow the program and add more advertisers it is expected that they will offer the services to other publishers as Google does today.

Advertisers had been sought by Microsoft in early March to test the program in an early pilot. Through this Pilot, Microsoft even provided instructions for advertisers that were interested in importing data from Adsense or Yahoo's Search Marketing.

There has been little effort made so far by Microsoft to court publishers of content on a mass scale.

"The launch of adCenter in the United States is an important milestone for Microsoft, which says it is shifting from being a software company into a provider of online media through sites like MSN and Windows Live.
AdCenter works in a similar way to Google AdWords and Yahoo's advertising platform, where advertisers set the amount they want to pay each time someone clicks on their ad. Pledging a higher fee than other advertisers delivers a higher placement of the ad on the page. The ads are displayed on pages where users search for certain words that are chosen by the advertiser.
AdCenter uses a slightly more intelligent targeting system than the others, targeting ads based on user demographics in addition to the words they type into the search field, Elliott said. If it works better, advertisers will be drawn to it, he said. "

Microsoft Chases Online Ad Revenue With AdCenter - Microsoft Informer - Blog - CIO

Monday, May 01, 2006

Auto Submit Your Blogs RSS Feeds to top 58 Directories

RSS FeedSubmit will automatically submit your blog(s) to the top 58 RSS search engines and directories for you.

Get indexed by the search engines faster.

How it works - Search Engines regularly re-index the major RSS Feeds. If your blogs are automatically submitted within their RSS Feed Directories, the Search Engines will follow the links back to your blog or website. Increasing your own Search Engine Performance!

RSS FeedSubmit offers a trial version for download that is free. The trial version allows you to submit your feed to 3 directories at a time. So you can submit 3 at a time over and over until you get to all 58. Or once your hooked like I was, :) , The full version is available for purchase. Its a one time fee (no monthly subscriptions.) of $29.

Considering the time you would have to submit every article you publish to 58 different directories(even 3 at a time), with this tool, you get one stop service. If your site is funded by Adsense or other advertising incentives, the additional traffic should cover this one time fee in short order.