Twitter API to Get Ads Inserted, Revenue to be Shared With Developers
By Marshall Kirkpatrick
Twitter has taken the first steps to begin inserting sponsored Tweets and Trending Topics into the Application Programming Interface (API) that 3rd party developers use to display search results to users. Additions to the technical code are being made now but no ads will actually apear until a later, undetermined date.
Developer advocate Matt Harris explained in an email to the Twitter developers email list this afternoon that the insertion of ads will be beta tested with a select group of developers before becoming generally available. Perhaps the biggest news: Twitter will share its revenues with the applications that show the ads. "We're still working out the exact value," Harris said today
tweetdewittWill showing ads be required? There's no information available about that yet. (Update: Twitter contacted us and said no, it will be opt-in.) Putting ads in search and trending topics is an unobtrusive way to serve them though. It's much better than the nightmarish scenario some people feared: ads being placed directly into the streams shown to users in Tweetdeck, Seesmic or other apps. Twitter banned clients from inserting their own ads in the stream this Spring. This announcement does not mean that ads will be in the stream, quite the opposite in all likelihood.
Will These Ads Move the Needle?
A revenue share could have a disproportionate impact on the handful of popular Twitter clients, which might see meaningful monetization, and small apps - where the user experience is likely to be impacted more than anyone's pocketbook. As the 17 year old developer of a Mac Twitter client called xiTweet said this afternoon, "This will either make the people of TweetDeck etc *very* rich, or it won't get the smaller developers (like myself) a thing."
Twitter's new ad units have seen some early success and little to no backlash so far. Might a revenue split move the needle for developers? I'd be surprised if users do as many casual searches for hot topics in 3rd party clients as they do on the site, or if general trending topics are as closely watched by the kinds of advanced users who use that kind of software.
Time will tell - but this is an important move that the Twitter developer and user ecosystem has been waiting for.
Showing posts with label gasta's long tail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gasta's long tail. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Gasta to Utilise Twitter in Search Results
While many still struggle to find a purpose for using Twitter, and Twitter ceases to generate revenue for itself (though it's coming sooner or later), the social network continues to take the world by storm. Naturally there are plenty of opportunities there or businesses to capitalize on.
There are a variety of ways business owners and marketing professionals can use Twitter to benefit their businesses. Twitters' search feature alone has some potential for attracting new customers. The first article in this newsletter discusses this. The second article looks at how Twitter can be used for building natural, organic links, despite Twitter links being nofollowed and shortened. If you have some ideas about how Twitter can benefit businesses, we'd love to hear them. Share them here. If you have tips or comments specifically about link building with Twitter, please share those here.
Before we get into that though, let's look at some research and statistics regarding Twitter. Let's get a feeling for just what we're dealing with this popular communication tool.
The Twitter Explosion
New data from comScore indicates that Twitter approached 10 million users in February. That's a growth of over 700% from February 2008. On top of that, worldwide visitors climbed over 5 million more. Just in the US, visitors climbed over 1000% in a year's time.
The Twitter Audience
The two largest age demographics on Twitter are the 45-54 crowd, and the 25-34 crowd. Interestingly, the youngsters (12-17) are the smallest demographic as comScore notes, referencing info from Alexei Oreskovic of Reuters.
What are Twitterers Searching for Though?
Well, it's mostly the usual kind of queries you would expect to find on other search engines. Entertainment searches dominate. No surprise there. Hitwise looks at top searches for the week ending March 21.
A nice convenient way to see what people are interested in right now, however, is to simply look at the right column of your Twitter home page and look at the "Trending Topics" section. That will pretty much lay it out there for you.
You can take that list for what it's worth and do with it what you will. The big draw to using Twitter search and trends is that it is real-time, and you can get involved with what people are talking about at the moment. This makes engaging with potential customers on topics that are interesting to them that much easier.
There are a variety of ways business owners and marketing professionals can use Twitter to benefit their businesses. Twitters' search feature alone has some potential for attracting new customers. The first article in this newsletter discusses this. The second article looks at how Twitter can be used for building natural, organic links, despite Twitter links being nofollowed and shortened. If you have some ideas about how Twitter can benefit businesses, we'd love to hear them. Share them here. If you have tips or comments specifically about link building with Twitter, please share those here.
Before we get into that though, let's look at some research and statistics regarding Twitter. Let's get a feeling for just what we're dealing with this popular communication tool.
The Twitter Explosion
New data from comScore indicates that Twitter approached 10 million users in February. That's a growth of over 700% from February 2008. On top of that, worldwide visitors climbed over 5 million more. Just in the US, visitors climbed over 1000% in a year's time.
The Twitter Audience
The two largest age demographics on Twitter are the 45-54 crowd, and the 25-34 crowd. Interestingly, the youngsters (12-17) are the smallest demographic as comScore notes, referencing info from Alexei Oreskovic of Reuters.
What are Twitterers Searching for Though?
Well, it's mostly the usual kind of queries you would expect to find on other search engines. Entertainment searches dominate. No surprise there. Hitwise looks at top searches for the week ending March 21.
A nice convenient way to see what people are interested in right now, however, is to simply look at the right column of your Twitter home page and look at the "Trending Topics" section. That will pretty much lay it out there for you.
You can take that list for what it's worth and do with it what you will. The big draw to using Twitter search and trends is that it is real-time, and you can get involved with what people are talking about at the moment. This makes engaging with potential customers on topics that are interesting to them that much easier.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Gasta.com: Using Long Tail Keywords to Your Advantage
A keyword is a simple word or phrase that is typed into the search engine by a user looking for information. For example if a searcher was looking for information on family photography tips, they might use some of the following common search terms.
"family photography photography tips taking photos"
If you used a keyword research tool like Wordtracker, you would discover that these phrases are very popular search terms. In fact, if you built a web page that focused on any of the keywords above, you would have a very difficult time ranking in the top 10 on Google's search results page?
Why? Because the competition for general keywords can be fierce. Keyword competition is defined using the term Supply. If a keyword phrase as a high supply, it means that there are many web pages out there that are using this keyword. The higher the supply, the more the competition.
Long Tail Keywords are simply the longer and more targeted phrases that people type into the search engines. In our photography keyword example above, we looked at a few very general competitive keywords. Here are some long tail keywords relating to photography.
"night time photography tips eliminate blinking from photos removing red eye from photos"
Do you see the difference? Long tail keywords are much more targeted to a specific sub topic. The nice thing about discovering long tail keywords in your particular niche is that they typically have a much lower level of competition, so it is easier to rank in the top ten in the search engine results.
Another advantage is that long tail keywords bring in much more targeted traffic. While the keyword 'family photography' may be a very competitive keyword for photography sites, the traffic brought in by such a keyword will be pretty broad.
By comparison, someone finding your site through the long tail keyword 'eliminate blinking from photos' is looking for specific information. If you can provide that information, you stand a much better chance of building trust and confidence with this visitor and converting them to a newsletter signup, registration or purchase.
Someone that gets to your site via a long tail keyword is typically ready to pull the trigger on some type of purchase or action. We say that they are "late" in their buying cycle. In addition, you'll find it easier to achieve a top ten ranking at the search engines for long tail keywords.
By sprinkling them into your page copy, you are more likely to pull in traffic that converts at a higher rate. The downside is that long tail phrases will typically not generate the high traffic numbers of more general keywords. But remember, the more general keywords are much more competitive.
If you use an analytics package like Google Analytics, you'll actually be able to see the types of long tail keywords that people typed in to get to your site. While long tail keywords can make up 50% or more of your traffic, many of them will only be one-time traffic generators.
So then, is it possible to research and target long tail keywords when writing your web pages? The answer is 'yes' and 'no.'
First off, if you write good original content that is genuinely helpful to your target market, you'll automatically weave in long tail keywords without even trying. As your page content grows, visitors will get to your site through more and more of these long tail phrases. In other words, the tail will grow longer and longer. In fact, you'll find visitors getting to your site using search phrases that you would have never thought of yourself. This is the value of focusing each of your content pages on a specific topic that provides valuable information to a narrow target audience.
Read Long Tail Keywords for additional tips on using the long tail to rank higher in the search engines and generate targeted traffic.
All hail the long tail!
"family photography photography tips taking photos"
If you used a keyword research tool like Wordtracker, you would discover that these phrases are very popular search terms. In fact, if you built a web page that focused on any of the keywords above, you would have a very difficult time ranking in the top 10 on Google's search results page?
Why? Because the competition for general keywords can be fierce. Keyword competition is defined using the term Supply. If a keyword phrase as a high supply, it means that there are many web pages out there that are using this keyword. The higher the supply, the more the competition.
Long Tail Keywords are simply the longer and more targeted phrases that people type into the search engines. In our photography keyword example above, we looked at a few very general competitive keywords. Here are some long tail keywords relating to photography.
"night time photography tips eliminate blinking from photos removing red eye from photos"
Do you see the difference? Long tail keywords are much more targeted to a specific sub topic. The nice thing about discovering long tail keywords in your particular niche is that they typically have a much lower level of competition, so it is easier to rank in the top ten in the search engine results.
Another advantage is that long tail keywords bring in much more targeted traffic. While the keyword 'family photography' may be a very competitive keyword for photography sites, the traffic brought in by such a keyword will be pretty broad.
By comparison, someone finding your site through the long tail keyword 'eliminate blinking from photos' is looking for specific information. If you can provide that information, you stand a much better chance of building trust and confidence with this visitor and converting them to a newsletter signup, registration or purchase.
Someone that gets to your site via a long tail keyword is typically ready to pull the trigger on some type of purchase or action. We say that they are "late" in their buying cycle. In addition, you'll find it easier to achieve a top ten ranking at the search engines for long tail keywords.
By sprinkling them into your page copy, you are more likely to pull in traffic that converts at a higher rate. The downside is that long tail phrases will typically not generate the high traffic numbers of more general keywords. But remember, the more general keywords are much more competitive.
If you use an analytics package like Google Analytics, you'll actually be able to see the types of long tail keywords that people typed in to get to your site. While long tail keywords can make up 50% or more of your traffic, many of them will only be one-time traffic generators.
So then, is it possible to research and target long tail keywords when writing your web pages? The answer is 'yes' and 'no.'
First off, if you write good original content that is genuinely helpful to your target market, you'll automatically weave in long tail keywords without even trying. As your page content grows, visitors will get to your site through more and more of these long tail phrases. In other words, the tail will grow longer and longer. In fact, you'll find visitors getting to your site using search phrases that you would have never thought of yourself. This is the value of focusing each of your content pages on a specific topic that provides valuable information to a narrow target audience.
Read Long Tail Keywords for additional tips on using the long tail to rank higher in the search engines and generate targeted traffic.
All hail the long tail!
Friday, November 14, 2008
Gasta Long tail keywords
Keywords can be split into two main groups, short tail keywords and long tail keywords, or broad keywords and narrow keywords. The term ‘long tail’ was coined by Chris Anderson and is used to describe the strategy of targeting less-competitive niche markets rather than the hugely competitive broad keywords. A long tail keyword is something like ‘Small Business Web Design’ while a short wail keyword is something like ‘Web Design’.
When you compare the two keywords, ‘Web Design’ has about 30 times as many competitors as ‘Small Business Web Design’ but ‘Web Design’ also gets far more searches each month. A small number of broad terms such as ‘Web Design’ and ‘Marketing’ account for a large proportion of searches but an equally large proportion of the searches are made up of millions of more specific search queries such as ‘Small Business Web Design’. This search distribution can be understood through the following graph.
Long Tail
A real life example
I speak about www.NarutoWallpaper.biz a lot and I will speak about it again in this article, each day NarutoWallpaper gets over 1000 visitors from search engines from roughly 200 unique keywords but the best keyword brings almost 50% of those visitors, following is a list of the top 12 keywords. Notice that the first keyword brings 45%, the second keyword brings 20% and the remaining 198 keywords account for the remaining 35% of the searches.
Keywords List
This distribution seems very similar to the graph I displayed earlier, the top few keywords account for a lot of the searches but there is many, many more specific searches which cumulatively total a significant figure. Let me display the keywords in graph form.
NarutoWallpaper Long Tail
You can see that the top two keywords bring in lots of traffic and the remaining keywords each bring minute amounts of traffic that cumulatively totals a significant amount, but separately are not significant.
Benefiting from the long tail
You may be wondering why anybody would want to target hundreds or thousands of keywords which bring only small traffic. Well the answer is simply that there is less competition so you can rank on the first page of Google for long tail keywords far easier than ranking for short tail keywords. Yes, they don’t bring a lot of traffic separately but if you target lots of long tail keywords you can get lots of easy traffic. Not everybody is capable of ranking highly for highly competitive keywords but anybody(!) can rank for long tail keywords.
Another benefit of long tail keywords is that the visitors convert amazingly well to sales and ad clicks. The visitors searching for long tail keywords know exactly what they want, be it ‘Small Business Web Design’ or ‘Half Price Armani Suits’, they know exactly what they want and hopefully you can provide it to them.
To put this into numbers, in general my websites might make $5 per 1000 impressions but from long tail visitors I can earn $100 per 1000 impressions, that’s 20 times the revenue if the traffic is equal. Although admittedly the traffic is not equal, my best keywords bring in more visitors than the long tail keywords combined, but the long tail keywords still bring in nice revenue.
On this website I have two pages providing free business resources: Free Business Card Templates and Sample Marketing Plan and Marketing Plan Template. Both are targeting long tail keywords such as ‘DJ Business Cards’ and ‘Massage Business Cards’. Those two pages make a lot of revenue per 1000 impressions but currently have low traffic. The keywords I am targeting are very specific and the visitors are getting what they came for so they convert well.
Conclusion
Whether you can achieve high rankings for competitive keywords or not, long tail keywords could be highly beneficial for you. If you have a website selling ‘Armani Suits’ but can’t pull any search engine traffic, rather than targeting the keyword ‘Armani’ or ‘Armani Suits’ try targeting more specific keywords such as ‘Armani Mens Suits’. Hopefully you will see an increase in conversions and sales.
Popularity: 43% [?]
When you compare the two keywords, ‘Web Design’ has about 30 times as many competitors as ‘Small Business Web Design’ but ‘Web Design’ also gets far more searches each month. A small number of broad terms such as ‘Web Design’ and ‘Marketing’ account for a large proportion of searches but an equally large proportion of the searches are made up of millions of more specific search queries such as ‘Small Business Web Design’. This search distribution can be understood through the following graph.
Long Tail
A real life example
I speak about www.NarutoWallpaper.biz a lot and I will speak about it again in this article, each day NarutoWallpaper gets over 1000 visitors from search engines from roughly 200 unique keywords but the best keyword brings almost 50% of those visitors, following is a list of the top 12 keywords. Notice that the first keyword brings 45%, the second keyword brings 20% and the remaining 198 keywords account for the remaining 35% of the searches.
Keywords List
This distribution seems very similar to the graph I displayed earlier, the top few keywords account for a lot of the searches but there is many, many more specific searches which cumulatively total a significant figure. Let me display the keywords in graph form.
NarutoWallpaper Long Tail
You can see that the top two keywords bring in lots of traffic and the remaining keywords each bring minute amounts of traffic that cumulatively totals a significant amount, but separately are not significant.
Benefiting from the long tail
You may be wondering why anybody would want to target hundreds or thousands of keywords which bring only small traffic. Well the answer is simply that there is less competition so you can rank on the first page of Google for long tail keywords far easier than ranking for short tail keywords. Yes, they don’t bring a lot of traffic separately but if you target lots of long tail keywords you can get lots of easy traffic. Not everybody is capable of ranking highly for highly competitive keywords but anybody(!) can rank for long tail keywords.
Another benefit of long tail keywords is that the visitors convert amazingly well to sales and ad clicks. The visitors searching for long tail keywords know exactly what they want, be it ‘Small Business Web Design’ or ‘Half Price Armani Suits’, they know exactly what they want and hopefully you can provide it to them.
To put this into numbers, in general my websites might make $5 per 1000 impressions but from long tail visitors I can earn $100 per 1000 impressions, that’s 20 times the revenue if the traffic is equal. Although admittedly the traffic is not equal, my best keywords bring in more visitors than the long tail keywords combined, but the long tail keywords still bring in nice revenue.
On this website I have two pages providing free business resources: Free Business Card Templates and Sample Marketing Plan and Marketing Plan Template. Both are targeting long tail keywords such as ‘DJ Business Cards’ and ‘Massage Business Cards’. Those two pages make a lot of revenue per 1000 impressions but currently have low traffic. The keywords I am targeting are very specific and the visitors are getting what they came for so they convert well.
Conclusion
Whether you can achieve high rankings for competitive keywords or not, long tail keywords could be highly beneficial for you. If you have a website selling ‘Armani Suits’ but can’t pull any search engine traffic, rather than targeting the keyword ‘Armani’ or ‘Armani Suits’ try targeting more specific keywords such as ‘Armani Mens Suits’. Hopefully you will see an increase in conversions and sales.
Popularity: 43% [?]
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