Martinibuster started a great thread titled Anatomy of an EPC Collapse. One of the points mentioned in it was too much inventory.

Social Sites as Budget Eaters:

AdSense ads have been appearing on many MySpace pages, even on pages when there is not much content to target against. Google also recently signed up Friendster as an AdSense publishing partner.

These social networks are hard to monetize. Valleywag recently highlighted Facebook as one of the worst sites to advertise on.

If you bid on anything remotely related to the various large social networks with a dime a click max CPC you are going to get a lot of exposure. Here are some of my logs from my affiliate software. Out of a 20 minute period I likely got at least 9 clicks from MySpace.

Save Your Ad Budget:

If being one of the default backfill advertisers costs you only $12 a day that is going to cost you about $4,000 a year in worthless advertising costs.

If you are an advertiser and bid on keywords that trigger ads on these sites, and that leads to many impressions and ad clicks without any conversions it is best to filter those sites at the campaign level using site exclusion. Use facebook.com and mspace.com to ensure you filter out all subdomains.

Publishers: Earn More:

If you are a publisher, and people filter out these low value networks by name (ie: facebook, myspace, etc.) rather than URL, then you are filtering out a lot of advertisers if you mention those sites sitewide. You need to make sure you do not place sitewide links to profile pages on these sites using their official names in the anchor text if you do not want -myspace to filter out your ads.

Other terms that kill your ad targeting are worth avoiding. If a word has a glut of low value advertisers and is associated with low value content may also make sense to filter it out, like blog.

Think of words associated with large untargeted traffic streams as being the new poison words, especially if you use contextual advertising.

If you are growing a site organically it might be worth it to sacrifice the short term earnings for long-term growth, but what happens when it comes time to sell a site? If you site has a strong brand or other intangible brand type assets worth far more than current earnings consider those before making any changes, and do not tarnish the site's image. If you site does not have those, and will likely sell at an auction it will probably sell for some multiple of current earnings, based on a number of factors including

• how much work it is to keep the site earning what it is (fixed costs, in time and money)

• general category growth (upside potential)
• site position in the category (upside potential)
• how aggressively it is monetized (upside potential)

Almost everything that has the word potential in it is going to be heavily discounted. Some people will not see the potential, while others will feel that they don't want to bid based on potential (because they feel that is their value add after they buy the site). Before you sell a site, make sure you spend a few months tweaking the monetization to max out your current revenue numbers. That is the base which most buy offers will be built from.

I just ordered a cup of tea from Starbucks, which is running a series called "The Way I See It", which is a bunch of idealistic quotes from various sources.
The Way I See It #193 was from a musician named Dan Zanes. The quote was

Let's imagine a 21st century America where families, friends and neighbors gather together at the end of each day in parks and town squares and on street corners and porches, to tell stories and jokes, to sing and dance with wild abandon! I can see and hear it now...

Then the cup has
- Dan Zanes
written under that.

At the bottom of the cup it has printed in small text

This is the author's opinion, not necessarily that of Starbucks. To read more or respond, go to www.starbucks.com/wayiseeit.

If they don't believe in a message, why waste my time showing it to me? Using words without meaning or disclaiming the value of your marketing undervalues consumer trust.

Similarly, when you lack an about page and don't have a human feel to your website it is far easier to appear as a slimy corporation that cares about nothing more than short term profit. Not mentioning much about us makes a site nameless and faceless. Some companies can pull it off because their marketing is so strong on other fronts, but if you are small then acting small may be one of your biggest advantages.

I just used Parallels to install Windows Vista on my MacBook Pro, and I noticed that by default the Windows software had gadgets on the desktop. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! are all pushing gadgets.

In order to to make it easy to navigate the sea of gadgets, and with the hope of becoming the default provider, many of these companies are showing popularity or distribution statistics of gadgets and videos, while also making it easy to syndicate them and easy to consume them (via personalized home pages, desktop widgets, site inclusion, and sidebar widgets).

This means 2 things for publishers: a cheap way to get huge distribution and brand loyalty, and easy access to human filtered interesting content.

Today Freebase launched, which is attempting to create a useful semantic web of human knowledge, similar to Google Base. As upstarts and established companies fight for distribution and trust more information will be publicly available from third party sites. Marketers can use toolbars, statistics, APIs, custom topical search engines, Yahoo! Pipes, widgets, and other mashups to create and package useful niche content and tools by aggregating data from these sources.

Some people are using the APIs to provide a more useful version of the original, like Alexaholic, while others are focused on creating profitable ad networks such as Auction Ads. One of my affiliates recently created this mashup. You can keep up with mashups and widgets at Mashable and Sexy Widget.

ebay
amazon

I recently got feedback from an SEO Book buyer who stated that their site was not accepted by some directories I recommend. If someone does not accept your site realize that due to their editorial stringency a link from that location is probably worth more than a link from the sites that did accept your site.

• Buy Relevant Ads: If they didn't accept you because you were way off topic then move on.

• Look Relevant: If they did not accept you because you were not 100% on target with their niche rewrite your description to make it fit their business better. Perception is reality.
• Be Credible: If they did not accept you because your site was lacking then invest in change and limit the amount of advertising you show on your content that you are activley marketing (at least while you are actively marketing it).

If you can't buy exposure it is going to be hard to compete with competitors who are already established, leveraging viral marketing, and/or getting free exposure.

What people you don't know think of your site is a quick and cheap source of feedback on how to make it better. If something is important to you do not accept no. If you do accept no, learn why they said no and make something that is easier to say yes to. The same goes for requesting being featured on a site, buying reviews, sending out link requests, asking to be published, etc etc etc.