If you have been in this business for a while you probably already know this. Google has posted a special section on their Adwords Page — “Adwords for Content” (to us thats Adsense.)

“AdWords multiplies Quality Score (QS) and the maximum CPC (Max CPC) to reach an Ad Rank for each ad”

In English that means the highest bidder could actually show up at the bottom — not the top.

Recently I added an Adsense unit to the footers of one of my sites. I gave them a special channel so I could track them. Guess what, it turned out they paid exceptionally more per click than the ads on the top did. This may not always be the case, but I recommend you try it out if you haven’t already.

What you write online, be it a blog, forum, or website, can be used as legal evidence against you. One teen blogger found this out the hard way and is now facing 5 years in prison.

Although Ranking later retracted his words — deleting them from the blog and penning an explanation — they came back to haunt him, forcing him Monday to plead guilty to DUI manslaughter.

This is a good reason why corporations should be aproaching employee blogging cautiously. There are countless cases of employee e-mail being used in lawsuits and criminal cases; I except we will start seeing more of blogs in the courtroom too.

I’ve been skeptical about premium domain names for years. I’m going to keep this post short and simple. Here are two reasons your website (content or e-commerce) should be run from a premium, generic domain:

1. Guaranteed stream of visitors from type in traffic, which, I might add, are known to convert very well.
2. Guaranteed no one is going to forget your name — while its guaranteed people are forgetting your competition’s name. If you sell grills and you are grill.com, visitors are coming back (worth noting, grill.com is currently a parked domain right now.)

There are a lot of great success stories of non-keyword domains.. Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay.. but that doesn’t mean millions aren’t being made from generics. Think about it this way — everyone remembers their search engine that they visit daily, but how are they going to remember the name of an e-commerce site they shop from once a year — that doesn’t have a billion dollar marketing budget?

Your domain is your website’s foundation. If you don’t choose a generic domain, at least make sure its not easily forgettable.

Judging from my stats there are a perhaps 10 to 20 regular readers to this blog. If you read this, please post a comment about what you do (domains, publishing, blogging, etc.) along with why you read this blog. If you have any suggestions, such as what content you’d like to see more of, please include it!

This afternoon I as reading a white paper on the MVNO market (thanks MocoNews.net.) MNVO means Mobile Virtual Network Operators. What does this have to do with websites? Directly, just about nothing.

I like to expand my skills and knowledge by learning about other industries. Often this means I can bring new ideas into my web publishing operations. In order to be the best at what you do its critical that you focus on your goals. However, if you are not careful, you can get tunnel vision and miss everything else thats going on around you.

The point of the white paper is that MVNOs has the oppurtunity to increase profitability by giving niche markets what they want.

Oddly enough, this white paper then made reference to another industry — Consumer Goods.

P&G has a strategy involving frequently renewing brands, e.g. of detergent, and at any given time have multiple brands of what is basically the same core product on the shelves in supermarkets. This might mean some cross-cannibalization among their own products, but has proven superior as a way of reaching all types of customers with different brands, or packaging of the basic detergent, and in avoiding customer choosing the competitors brand when searching for something different.

Think of the SERPs as “shelf space.” Why go after a single spot when you could get half of it? What if you owned five websites in your market, each targetted toward a different niche. Perhaps a forum for the active users, a blog for readers who want to hear about every single trend, an article site for people looking for comprehensive information, and an information product for those who want everything in one package.

The domain market nearly hit the magic seven-figures again this year, with Bills.com selling for $964,500 in a private transaction. DNJournal’s reported sales for the week ending December 11th also included A1.com for $260,250 and Actionsports.com selling for $50,750. Oddities included PlayDoctor.com for $4,311 and BarbaraBush.com for $4,600.

From the NYTimes:

If a user searches on Google for a topic for which AOL has content - like information about Madonna - there will be a special section on the bottom right corner of the search results page with links to AOL.com. Technically, AOL will pay for those links, which will be identified as advertising, but Google will give AOL credits to pay for them as part of the deal. They will also carry AOL’s logo, the first time Google has agreed to place graphic ads on its search result pages.

Doesn’t graphic ads fall under Google’s deefinition of “evil?”

Too bad for Microsoft, it looks like Google will be buying a 5% share of AOL for $1 billion. Big suprise? No. AOL is reponsible for 10% of Google’s revenues. For me this is good news because I recieve a sizable share of traffic from AOL, which is fed by Google’s results. However, there is something in this NYTimes article that sounded a little disturbing to me.

Richard D. Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner told Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, that he would accept Google’s recently sweetened offer. Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before.

So what exactly does this mean?

Very interesting stuff from over at JupiterResearch (as a side note they seriously need to allow commenting and linkbacks on their blog.) Some of their research is pointing to changing usage patterns online. Most notable — kids and teens are spending less time instant messaging (thanks to cell phone text messaging), everyone is spending less time using e-mail, and search use is staying the same. Other online activities, like online banking, are growing in usage. I’d like to know more but $750 for a research report is a little out of my “research report” budget.

I’m sure you’ve noticed Golden Palace’s crazy antics that range from buying dumb stuff on ebay to paying streakers to display their name. Have you ever noticed the ads for PartyPoker on TV that say PartyPoker.net and not PartyPoker.com?

Tonight I read a very interesting case study from MarketingSherpa. It turns out that this multi-billion dollar industry has more than a few tricks and gimmicks up its sleave to rake in the cash.

“We have BoSpoker.net, for example,” he explains. The concept is that the average consumer won’t type dot-net. Rather, they type dot-com, landing on the pay gambling site rather than the free site. With that in mind, Griffiths is spending millions of dollars on radio, newspaper, and internet ads for BoSpoker.net. Interestingly, even on the dot-net site, he can’t advertise for the dot-com, because other sites — ESPN for example — won’t take the dot-net advertising if the dot-net links to the dot-com.

Oh, and advertising gambling websites in the United States isn’t exactly illegal, but there are some people who would like you to think it is.