At the Romance Writers of America conference on web publishing for authors I spoke at last week, a running theme on blog marketing kept popping up: how to reach beyond your current market.
In other words, how to reach new readers who wouldn’t normally read your blog.
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TechCrunch reports that Google is soft-launching Google Ad Manager (invite only), which is, well, an ad manager hosted by Google. The idea is to handle all your ads on one central place, not having to go into website templates and such to change them. You just nab the generated code once, put it in there, and serve your ads from the Google Ad Manager interface.
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It seems this year the technology blogosphere is latching onto “lifestreaming” or “social network aggregation” as a new web service to explore. In plain English, this means pulling in your activity on selected social sites into one website or feed. So instead of checking in on ten different websites to see what people are up to, you can visit just one.
Bloggers who have recently checked their referring traffic might notice Alltop as a source. The site, which aggregates content from leading blogs, is picking up in popularity.
Currently, approximately 40 categories are represented; everything from education to sports. You’ll find the five most recent stories from at least 30 leading Websites in a given niche.
Feeds are updated every 10 minutes.
For bloggers, it’s a win-win situation. Not only will they receive increased exposure if they are included, but they can discover potential allies (while monitoring the competition).
If you don’t see one of your favorite Websites listed (or your own), you can send Alltop an e-mail requesting inclusion.
There could be plans to customize pages in the future, but for now you’re at the mercy of a pre-determined order. If the Alltop servers can’t read a feed, it will be dropped down on the page.
How do you fellow bloggers feel about these single-page aggregators?
The early release of WordPress 2.5 has been delayed until March 17. Administration WordPress Plugins may break with WordPress 2.5. Lots of Plugins updated to be ready for WordPress 2.5. Did you know you will be able to change the colors of the Administration Panels? Want Plugins to add more buttons to the Rich Text Editor button toolbar? WordCamp Dallas is two weeks away. WordCamp Milan is announced. Can you spot a WordPress blog when you see one?
WordPress 2.5 Back on Track: The WordPress Trac has been updated for March 17 release of WordPress 2.5 and reports that it is 59% completed with 566 closed tickets and 396 active tickets, though some may be pushed to the next release. Originally the release date for WordPress 2.5 was the end of March. Determined to beat that, Ryan Boren and his team announced an earlier date of March 10. Unfortunately, illness stepped in the way, so WordPress 2.5 has a new release date of March 17, though it could be later since it hasn’t gone into beta testing yet.
The news from the WordPress Development Updates includes mention that Matt T cleaned up the color scheme picker which allows you to change the colors of the new Administration Panels interface, direct editing of media attachments from within the new Media Library, and news that part of the slowdown in development was due to Ryan Boren’s recent illness. Hope you are recovered and back on track, Ryan!
For more information on WordPress 2.5, read:
