I told myself I wouldn’t share this secret with anyone until I tried it out myself. Well, over 2 years since conception I have a full time job – which is good news – however, it means that I haven’t optimized my own content. Oh well.

This my seem formulaic, but with social media optimization, formulaic is what we want, despite how much that might piss off your traditional social media enthusiast who thinks there should be no rules.

Here goes:

• First.  let’s say you want to optimize your website to get more StumbleUpon stumbles. You would make sure that you have content geared toward the StumbleUpon demographic: something interesting, different, intelligent, creative, etc.

• Second, place the “Stumble” badge somewhere prominent in your content. This can be done by manually pasting the code to the widget, or by using something called a “referrer,” which enables you to track where your visitors came from, and deliver content tailored specifically based upon the referring website, ie the StumbleUpon widget would be prominent over, lets say, the Digg This widget if your visitor came from StumbleUpon… or from THIS: the broadcast channel of your own construction! What do I mean?

• Where, besides StumbleUpon, are you going to find SU users? Why not Facebook? Why not Twitter? Why not a separate RSS feed or eMail newsletter whose subscribers are all SU users? Recall what I said about delivering different content, or links, based on the referring website channel?

• So next, build your sphere of influence on those social networks. Twitter enables you to view everyone following the StumbleUpon account. Follow those people. They will follow you back. Facebook has a SU fan page, and an SU group. Befriend those people.

• After that, selectively broadcast your stumble-worthy content to those followers on Facebook, Twitter, RSS, email. This can be done manually or automatically. Don’t ask how. Figure it out, simply because if just anyone knew how to do this… there would be no way to sort out the “cesspool” – Erik Schmidt.

This concept can be applied toward ANY social bookmarking site: Digg, Delicious, Tweetmeme, Reddit… you name it. It’s all about maximizing the redistribution of your content by ensuring that your visitors are served the proper sharing option, and ensuring that your syndication network is comprised of people who like to share things on the specific social network you’re optimizing for.

I’m going to do some crude math so you have some idea as to how much this method encourages sharing, over the non method of placing some social bookmarking buttons in your content.

Lets say that currently 1% of your readers use StumbleUpon. Because you don’t have a prominent StumbleUpon button, among those, 1% decide to submit your content to SU … on average (probably a high estimate).

This means, your total conversion ratio for stumbles is .01%, or 1 in 10,000… weak sauce.

So if we tweak the numbers some. You go out into cyberspace, do some push marketing on social networks, or even with paid advertising, and increase your StumbleUpon reader percentage to 10%. Pretty darn good.

Next, you make certain that every time one of your Stumble readers views your content (by referral tracking, browser cookies, etc), the “Stumble This” button is impossible to miss. Now, among your StumbleUpon readers, a hefty 5% decide to stumble your content.

Simple multiplication. 10% x 5% = .5%, or 1 out of 200. Very, very good. In fact, 50 times better. And that’s just one social bookmarking site… Why not go after them all?

Why aren’t more people doing this? I have no idea. And why isn’t this listed among the “rules” of social media optimization? If you are a rule-maker or term coiner, I would encourage you to quote me.

Facebook aims to learn as much about it’s individual users as possible in order to display contextually relevant, paid advertising to them. What does your profile say about you, personally? And, which of that information is Facebook “mining” to pin down precisely who you are, and what products and services you might be interested in?

Let’s look at the user inputs on Facebook.

First, it’s a social network, so they’ve got your connections mapped out. They know who you know, and they know who they know, and how they’re connected. They know how often you talk to certain members, and can make assumptions as to how close you are, or would like to be. They know who’s pictures you look at. But what does Facebook do with these insights? Other than suggesting “virtual gifts” on your pal’s birthday, I don’t think Facebook does much with the data that establishes “connectedness”, other than to provide that data to 3rd parties for a fee; background check services, I would imagine.

On to the profile: what information have you “willfully” or “intentionally” submitted to Facebook about yourself?

Name, gender, age, college, profession, place of work, interests, relationship status, location, religious views, contact info, websites…

Sounds like market research and demographic sampling data to me, only to a highly personalized degree. One could argue that the personalized demographic data acquired by Facebook rivals that which the iGoogle account attempts to capture (but I’d still have to give a significant edge to Google).

With this data set alone, your profile surrenders enough information so that Facebook can display local advertisements, online dating ads, career specific ads, birthday destination ads… Facebook will serve ads to whomever they can, and advertisers demand demographics information. Let’s take it a step further though.

Every day, or every other day, most people update their Facebook status, and the status update itself is another marketing signal to be mined. With a technology called “latent semantics analysis,” Facebook engineers can actually dig into the meaning of your casual post and try to make a determination as to your current state of mind… not as valuable marketing data as a keyword search, with which you communicate to a search engine like Google exactly what you want to know, but valuable nonetheless. Your FB status could read “I need … I want … I wish… fill in the blank… XYZ” and Facebook might magically display ads matching your needs, wishes and wants.

How about this? Every time you give something a “Facebook Like”, be it a Fan Page or a status update, the Facebook machine has greater insight into what you’re really about. If you’re a die-hard Metallica fan, chances are that you’ve become their Facebook Fan as well. If Facebook were intelligent, it would not only display ads for Metallica and music similar to it on Metallica’s Facebook Page, but they would keep that little tidbit about you stored somewhere, so that any time you so much as allude to music, the Metallica Ad receives additional algorithmic weight that tells it when to pop up.

Location, location, location. Now Facebook knows where exactly you are with Facebook Places, and you can bet that they will exploit the heck out of your location stream. If you own a smart phone, like an iPhone, BlackBerry or Andoid, and you have the Facebook Places feature enabled, your GPS coordinates are seamlessly streamed to a Facebook server that not only updates your status with your current location, but the data is stored and mined for later use. Yes, they know where you are, and where you’ve been. You have now left a virtual trail in your real world. All of your favorite shopping spots, restaurants, frequencies of visit, distances traveled, and even your recent visit to a strip club, have been logged to perfect your personalized ad display. “Trust us. You’ll appreciate more useful and relevant ads,” – Facebook might retort.

OK, so Facebook isn’t exactly an autonomous i-robot; however, their potential to accurately profile your… profile is tremendous. If and when Facebook enhances their display ad algorithms and offers advertisers predictable results, look for their profits to soar. And be afraid. Be very afraid. The cyber profile is not limited to Facebook, but Google, Yahoo, Bing, MySpace, Linkedin, your power meter via Google power meters, Pandora, Netflix, Hulu… they’re all gathering data about you. They know who you are. They know where you live. It would be their ultimate wet dream to know exactly what you’re thinking. And they all want to sell you something.

But, we are in marketing, and we know these things. Erie, isn’t it?

Social media enthusiasts still haven’t agreed on a definition for “social media optimization,” but if we are to call it “optimization,” there must be some basic science behind social website design.

The vast majority websites are designed as billboards out in cyberspace with which the user has almost no interaction, other than to view, comprehend the site, and possibly buy something or to be directed to buy something somewhere else. The most common entrance to these websites is through a search engine like Google.

Social media optimization is concerned with getting the most out of your visitors by harnessing their influence. Rather than simply reading your content, alternative options for your visitor could be to:

1. Subscribe to your content via email newsletter or RSS
2. Link out to your website from one of their websites (provided that your visitor happens to be a webmaster or blogger)
3. Share your content, or better, a link to your content, with their social network (Facebook, Twitter, and E Mail are considered social networks)
4. Similar to 3, vote on your content by submitting your stuff to Digg or other social bookmarking sites.
5. Embed your content on other websites

If you happen to run a social network, or a forum, your main concern should be getting quality members. Running a social network doesn’t mean that you’re automatically socially optimized though. The same concepts apply; a socially optimized site is all about getting your content to travel through sharing and subscription.

If you run some sort of social network, why not have your members assist in the growth process. Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Linkedin each have a tool called a contact importer. A contact importer enables users to literally import their entire email contact list into your website’s invite tool. That means, rather than your visitors having to manually type in their friends’ email addresses, which can be discouraging, the contact importer automatically brings up your visitors’ entire email network of contacts. There are two that I’m aware of: Gigya and Plaxo. Google them. Even major email providers have jumped on the contact importer bandwagon, in order to facilitate transition to their email service. Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Hotmail, and Yahoo’s email services all have the capability. Social media optimization 101: make it easy.

Another trick of the trade is to leverage user-generated content, such as comments or posts, to your advantage. Visitors who have something to say want to be heard. Comment systems such as Disqus (Bing it – ha), enable users to broadcast their comments and a link to your website to their social network. You could apply the same concept to a forum. Forum posters are almost notorious for wanting to be heard. Top posting, bumping, spamming, or whatever you want to call it. Give them the option to share their posts with their social network, or social bookmarking buddies, and much of the time, they will.

“Sharing” and “inviting” are two essential social mechanisms for social network growth. But you should also try to retain your users; how can you leverage your visitors online actions to keep them coming back for more, and to encourage their friends to come back to the party? Facebook was clever with all kinds of email notifications of friend’s activities. What the heck is a “poke?” I don’t know, but in Facebook’s early days, it meant that I would go back on Facebook after receiving an email that I had been poked. Very inventive, I suppose. A more recent trick Facebook pulled was encouraging you to connect with inactive users within your network with an almost obligatory, “Help make Facebook better for So-and-so, and write on his wall”. The gimmick worked and brought inactive users back on Facebook. By default, you also receive an email update any time someone comments on your wall post, or even after your comment in a series of comments, and so on.

Basically, you can design a social site so users receive an email update any time a friend or a friend’s friend does XYZ. It doesn’t matter what it is, so long as the email is well received as being from a friend rather than your website. User-generated spam isn’t necessarily received as spam.

Syndication… how could I forget. Do with your content what you hope your users will and share it with your friends. If you yourself are a member of several social networks, make certain to post your content to those networks. There are many quality plug-ins for WordPress than enable you to almost seamlessly post a link to your latest article as a status update on the social networks of your choice. Check out Ping.fm and the WordPress plugin.

It has been observed among the SEO community that content farms such as eHow, HowStuffWorks, Mahalo and Wikipedia receive a disproportionate and undeserved share of top rankings for competitive search terms. But, being the conspiracy theorist that I am, Google must be ranking these sites well for a good reason.

Here is the conspiracy:

Certain words or phrases imply a corresponding search intent, beyond relevance and quality. If I were to search “buy a car,” I wouldn’t expect Google to return news, how-to guides, images, videos, or maps – these do not match the consumer-oriented intent of my search. I want to buy a fricking car!

Take this search for example: “Banner Ads”

Included in the top 4 results are Wikipedia, HowStuffWorks, and Google Images. I’m only guessing, but I do not suppose most people searching for “banner ads” are interested in their definition, how they work according to HowStuffWorks or random images of banner ads. However, I would strongly suppose that Google’s primary reason for “information stuffing” is to push consumers away from information-stuffed organic results to their paid results above and on the right, one of which happens to be a Google Adwords ad.

I don’t necessarily blame them, because it is their search engine, as they will tell you, and they can display what they want with it. And I suppose they aren’t a true monopoly in the sense that consumers are free to switch to Yahoo or Bing at the click of a button, unless you consider their host of iGoogle services and Adsense network as unfair retention mechanisms – I don’t.

Agree with it or not, Google does bias search results towards information farms and Google products. Content farms like eHow, HowStuffWorks, HowTo-Anything-I-Google, Mahalo, and Wikipedia will receive a bias because algorithm engineers know the consumer-minded searcher will not be satisfied with those organic results, opting instead to click on paid listings.

Now I might be able to duplicate Google’s rankings using a Google Custom Search box containing nothing but Wikipedia, How-To sites, article sites and news blogs. Insert relevant contextual advertising, exploit verticals, and I would have my own Google, minus genius and servers.

A disclaimer to the conspiracy theory:

“I recognize that information-rich content of any quality tends to receive a good amount of naturally-occurring inbound links. It’s link bait. I also recognize that Google is capable of distinguishing between natural link acquisition history and forced by their vast data-mining resources and extremely busy Google Bot. Natural linking profiles occur geometrically over time at a somewhat expected conversion rate over inbound traffic from Google. Bought links stand out as unnatural in that they may all be acquired over a short period of time, disproportionate to their actual inbound traffic, which Google can measure fairly accurately.”

Aaron Wall, of SeoBook.com, made an interesting post about Google’s policy on paid links, paid content and content farms. Since I don’t have any back-links, as I have not paid anyone for them yet, I linked to Aaron, because there is a small chance he will link back to my site to make fun of me, if anything.

Matt Cutts, the head of “web spam” at Google, says that you should focus on creating great content, and that people will naturally link to your website over time, which will eventually help your search engine rankings. That’s nice, and I would like to believe him, but there is a mountain of data compiled by SEO experts that suggest otherwise. Off-page SEO – the solicited acquisition of links pointing back to your website – still works and is big business. There are ways to not only increase your link-ability, but to increase your online influence by leveraging major social networks.

Acquiring links can be the most time-consuming part of a search engine optimization campaign. Have you ever performed a whois to obtain email addresses and telephone numbers of webmasters within your niche? People use this service to ask for links and to offer to buy and sell links all the time. But there are more creative and less intrusive ways to connect with webmasters in your niche than emailing and cold-calling. Why not ask the same individuals to befriend you on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or even Myspace? It is a much more casual approach, and your conversion rate for making a virtual friend is fairly high – somewhere around 50%.

Please, do not take this as an instruction to spam social networks. Nobody likes spam or spammers, especially webmasters. We are capable of sniffing out spam faster than anyone. Rather, feel welcome to use these free social networking services to get your foot in the door and establish real dialog way before talking about links. You might get one without even asking. Treat the social network profile the same way you would treat a person, because every profile portal has a person behind it.

You may not be able to convince online A-listers to make friends with you on Facebook (Facebook is for “real” friends); for that, I recommend Twitter and Linkedin. But you may be able to hit the 5,000 friend limit on Facebook with middle and minor online players. That’s  great.

There are a couple approaches to targeting friends. You can target niche-oriented group members on Facebook, Myspace and Linkedin. On Twitter you can target followers of something or someone similar to yourself or search the “tweet stream.” Conversely, you can simply invite your email contact list gathered from the whois service using the social network email contact importer – each major social network makes sending email invitations easy, and without raising spam flags. Don’t spam! Make friends!

Once you’ve made a connection, the first communication is important. You might compliment their website – make it specific. Don’t say “I like your website.” Don’t sell anything. Don’t push anything. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not. Is that how you would treat your friends? In fact, if you really can’t say something genuine, don’t say anything at all. You might try letting your friends get to know you by being yourself (making status updates, posting links, etc – this is how we actively “be ourselves” online – ha). And over the course of your virtual friendship, you might eventually suggest a page or ask for a link or link exchange.

Matt Cutts, as idealistic as he can be about natural linking, is right in that you should produce quality, presentable, relevant content if you hope to convert visitor or friend to a backlink. Here’s a tangential thought on natural linking though. Of those who search for content online, how many are webmasters? Let’s say 1/100 – that sounds reasonable. And let’s guestimate that 1/100 of those have a website complimentary to yours. OK, 1/10,000 of your inbound traffic from search engines has the potential to provide a backlink. In a nice world, of those 1/100 are going to provide you with a backlink. Huh? So that means 1/1,000,000 visits will result in a backlink if you take the Cutts approach. Let’s apply a correction factor though. Let’s assume that a keyword search negates the idea that 1/100 webmasters have a site in your niche. So that boosts your linking probability to 1 link per 10,000 visits. Mr. Cutts, no thank you. I’d rather rank.

Fortunately, as outlined above, social networks provide a way to connect with other webmasters in your niche. Convert them at a 1% rate and you’ll end up with quite a few backlinks.

Consider a random, non-specific piece of content. It could be a blog post, an article, a picture, video, song or any other piece of digital information you can fathom. The content of the content is not important for what I am about to discuss. This post is concerned with why people share links more on a social network like Twitter than they do on a network like Facebook.

“Facebook is for friends,” is what you’re probably thinking. Good. Facebook is for friends, and you are interested in social media optimization. Your friends aren’t. They are your friends, probably in spite of your interest in things like social media optimization, and since they aren’t interested in this very specific topic, you may not feel compelled to share something so arbitrary to them.

Twitter is a public identity. Tweets are made public and search-able, friends are casual and sharing is a common cultural custom known as “tweeting.” Friends on the Twitter network are not only casual, they are usually also like-minded. Most super-users of the Twitter service have thousands of friends who follow the same topics. A niche-oriented piece of content is likely to get passed around more on Twitter than Facebook because Twitter users feel comfortable sharing what they might consider useful, informative or interesting to THEIR CONNECTIONS.

I’ve cited Mashable as a primary example of this phenomenon, a blog that gets thousands of ReTweets for tens of Facebook shares. It just goes to show how powerful an element mutual interest is in social media optimization. You should not only optimize your own social network around common interest, but you should target friends whose friends’ friends’ friends share the same interests. Food for thought.

Would you expect to see a lot of content sharing on a social network like Linkedin? Feel free to comment.

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has made some bold predictions that the internet will undergo radical transformation over the next five years. He was right about the marketing value search engines would have and as the dominant online player, Google’s decisions directly affect the future of the internet, but Google’s success may have given Schmidt slightly less than prophetic delusions.

His prediction that mobile web usage – internet use via web-capable cell phones – will surpass internet use via desktop is based upon some misplaced presumptions:

1. Cell phones are fully capable of displaying the internet.
2. Proper cell phone design can provide robust navigation and adequately sized keyboards.
3. Increase in cell phone quality equates to increase in utility.

I recently purchased a Samsung Moment (with Google!). Next to the iPhone and Verizon’s Droid, I found the Moment to be the most web-capable phone available for the money. It features a full-length touch screen and sliding keypad; this is near the pinnacle of mobile web capability, and while very useful, it fails to offer a full web experience and remains an enhanced communication tool with “local” accessories.

First, it is not as though too few mobile-optimized websites exist; there are plenty of vertically-oriented, column-style sites to browse through and I eventually plan to offer a mobile version of Smobot. But honestly, how much time can anyone be expected to spend myopically squinting into a cell phone? For most (sane) people, the answer is, unless they have to, not much when there is a bigger and better option available.

Secondly, I am a man and my stupid big fingers are not compatible with even the largest cell phone keypads. My text entries via cell phone are necessarily going to be abbreviated to… oh I don’t know… even less than “140 characters or less” (see Twitter), if that’s possible. Which brings me to my next point.

Cell phones and the mobile web, no matter how great the quality, are size-limited. That means punctuated communication spaces, narrow web portals and little room for clutter like ad space, large images and viewable video. So I do see the mobile web dominating, but somewhat restricted to social media, live photo/video sharing, local search and audio media. By that I’m mean no disrespect to the mobile web; rather, I would not want to see webmasters getting carried away with the mobile web paradigm shift. Again, the mobile web is about immediate communication and location in time and space – news updates and local search.

Furthermore, the observed uptrend in mobile web usage has not been observed to cannibalize desktop internet usage; both are growing. And the growth of the mobile web is tied to the infiltration of web technology into the already existing huge cell phone market, meaning that almost everyone has a cell phone, and that as an increasing share of cell phones offer the web, people are naturally going to pay a little extra for it.

Identifying the future of the internet may have more to do with time-management and paleontology than technology. You can look at cell phones and consider that they’re  always with us, “here and now,” and therefore must be the future of the internet. But if a cell phone is a somewhat awkward and clumsy way to experience the internet and bigger, better, faster solution exists, which one would you prefer? And if you examine our culture, we have become increasingly compartmentalized over the ages, spending more time in one place than in transition between places. So where do I see the future of the internet? Why not television? What if the internet and TV got married? What would their offspring look like? People spend hours in front of their televisions for entertainment, programmed by television programming. But with the advent of video services like YouTube and Hulu, individuals are now able to guide their own programming high specificity thanks to keyword search. Why not take the whole internet to the TV? HDTV and a global fiber-optic network has made this entirely possible. The only missing pieces are a cable-box / PC hybrid and a remote control / keyboard hybrid. That’s right, a cable box that functions as a fully functional web browser and a television remote that doubles as a folding keyboard. Of course, this revelation calls for another blog post entitled “The Future of Television – 2010 and Beyond Your Regularly Scheduled Programming” or something.

Technorati, the second most popular blog search engine next to Google Blog Search and 5th largest social media space, recently underwent a “web 2.0″ face-lift. Some changes were for the better, some for better business and some are a work in progress. A few cool new additions are Twittorati – a Twitter API, the Technorati Blog, and a few more Technorati properties.  However, it seems that for the time being, Technorati is a bit anti-social.

The Technorati profile, once a way for bloggers to connect with fellow bloggers and subscribe to blogs, has been crippled for a couple months. Currently, members cannot subscribe to blogs and blog reactions have been reserved for “authoritative” sources. Meanwhile, Blog Catalog offers a few features Technorati does not – it is not only a blog directory and blog search engine, but a social network, community, blog activity stream and blog subscription service.

I certainly hope that Technorati finishes their updates soon, because as better subscription and blog community options remain available, Technorati may lose the user-loyalty that their “Faves” feature afforded them. I trust there is a larger vision at stake with these massive changes, and look forward to a socially optimized Technorati in the near future.

Twitter and Facebook are about to go head to head in a grueling evaluation of their effectiveness as blog syndication channels. At the end of three standard paragraphs there will be only one declared winner, one declared loser and ultimately two options that aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but for comparison sake: the following is brought to you by Smobot – “the social media optimization guide.”

First, we have to assume a level playing field. Let’s examine a situation where you’ve got an equal number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, and both options will each only receive one status update per blog post, the content of which shall be, again, assumed equal. Facebook enables users to comment, “like this” or something, share content, and invite friends to “fan” that Facebook page (fan: v. – the act of becoming a fan of a person, place or thing’s Facebook page). Twitter enables users to @reply and retweet content. Overall, retweeting occurs more frequently than Facebook sharing (refer to Mashable’s home page), but Facebook enables users to easily suggest the Facebook Page to their entire network of friends. Round one is a draw.

Second, we must reexamine the first assumption we made about a level playing field. The fact is that it is easier to gain a ridiculous amount of Twitter followers though the (sometimes spammy) follow/unfollow tactic, than it is to drive the same amount of Facebook users to a Facebook Page. So for that reason, Twitter wins round 2 decisively.

But the very thing that caught Facebook on the chin during the last round woke it up in the final round. Consider the amount of noise on Twitter. I have one Twitter account with over FOUR THOUSAND casual follow-back followers and one Facebook Page with a few hundred fanatical fans. Most of my follow-back Twitter follows are almost pure broadcasters, by the very nature of Twitter, which fosters an “all about me” attitude. They each follow thousands of other tweeters hoping they’ll be followed in return. Are they going to see my status updates in the noisy birdcage that is Twitter? My loyal Facebook Fans are more likely to actually view my status updates in their news feeds than my Twitter followers are to get lucky enough to have seen my momentarily available updates. You can’t follow what you can’t see. And with the knock-out puch, Facebook is the victor.

That said, as an aid to your success using Twitter, I recommend this Twitter Tool. I use it myself to manage my Twitter account, gain followers, send mass communications, etc.  I bought it as an investment, and it has already paid for itself. It’s almost necessary to use such a tool to remain competitive in the Twitter cage.

What are your visitors thinking? Ideally, they are thinking what you tell them to, and if you’re in the online game to make money, it is in your best interest to encourage them to buy something. Regardless of the type of site you run, converting visitors to do the thing that you want them to do – the thing that you’ve been working so hard to get them to do – is what makes your website successful.

Many websites are designed for the user first, and profitability second, which is perfectly acceptable if you aren’t in it for profit. Twitter remains unmonetized, Bing still isn’t turning a profit, and Digg just recently took serious action to levy their regular losses. Facebook… poor Facebook… isn’t monetized very well, in my opinion, despite their millions of users. I, a small time blogger, certainly have no place telling these well-funded, well-managed organizations how to model their businesses, but if it were me, I’d pay more attention to my typical user’s mindset.

As a Digg user, I’m there to submit, read and comment on trendy, strange, funny and outrageous news. Converting me to a buyer of something is going to be difficult by the very nature of why I’m on Digg. Unless you’re trying to convince me to buy something related to news, you will be hard pressed to make anything off my visit.

As a Twitter user, I’m there to … market my own content (ha)… I mean, communicate with other Twitter users. The content of my communications could be used to gage my interest in various consumables, but to me, the value of Twitter lies in communication. I might buy an iPhone through a link I clicked through on Twitter, not just because iPhones are cool, but because I can use it to Tweet. As a marketer (which the plurality of Twitter users are), I might pay a little extra for some Twitter analytics tools, or more Twitter exposure.

I could go on about Facebook, and how they’ve failed to capitalize on targeting their own Groups and Pages as relevance factors for placing contextual advertisements, but I won’t. Oh wait, I just did. Sorry, it won’t happen again.

Realizing that the vast majority of you are concerned with monetizing your blogs, I would like appeal you to throw in some e-commerce. Why not sell related products from your blog as a way to monetize efficiently, even without a huge reader-base? Running an e-commerce section on your website can also serve to drive traffic to your blog from external comparison shopping engines like Google Product Search, Shopzilla, Price Runner and others. Just a thought. Instead of relying on your users to click on ads or convert on affiliate landing pages, monetize directly and sell your own products. There are many options: books, ebooks (hopefully not crap), CDs, DVDs, hats & T-shirts related to your content, electronics, software or any other product of mutual interest. Bloggers, try not to get so functionally fixed into thinking that traffic and readers are the end-all, be-all. Go for the jugular and monetize directly with some of your own products. Remember, inbound traffic from Google Adwords campaigns or comparison shopping engines means that those visitors are already in a “buy something” mindset, more likely to convert than casual blog readers.