Inius Trivia

Free content websites like Squidoo are a great source of getting backlinks and, why not, visitors. I definitely recommend for any business to build a Squidoo profile.

Squidoo pages are called “lens”, but in fact Squidoo is nothing more than a wikipedia. Anyone can write anything. But unlike Wikipedia, the posting process is very easy and the content can be corrected or changed only by the original poster, the “lensmaster”.  This is why we can find on Squidoo several pages covering the same topic:

• Iron Maiden
• UFOs
• Barack Obama

Squidoo also lets you insert videos, RSS feeds and many more, so the final product will truly be very informative, nice to read, easy to understand. Then you can promote the page either on Squidoo itself or through external links and websites.

For example, this is the page that I’ve write for PinBud: http://www.squidoo.com/pinbud . As anyone can see I was able to insert a lot of content and the page looks so well now, that we’ll use it as an online flyer.

Squidoo links are do-follow, so they are adding some link juice to your website. Other free webpage builders are Hubpages and Wetpaint. However, avoid to duplicate your content over and over.

Wondering what this means? Well, it’s a verification code from an online social game that seems so interesting that I will share it with you: www.empireavenue.com.

It reminds me from Dreamshares.com, but Dreamshares was (“was”, because now is dead) about sports, while Empire Avenue it’s about social networking. You must buy and sell stocks in persons and become an influential person.

EAVB_HAJLUXHDCE

Following this post: Google Adsense Interest based advertising: what’s the problem? I made an experiment with two websites, let’s name them “website A” and “website B” . I de-actived the interest based ads for one week (so the ads have been displayed only on a “contextual” base), than activated again for another week.

Website A: highly targeted one. All the pages have one single theme. People come to this website because they want to find information related to the theme. They are coming from search engines only through a very limited set of targeted keywords.

Website B: a website with no clear theme. Basically, each page has its own theme. People come mostly from search engines, through specific searches.

Here are my findings:

Click through rate (CTR):

• for website A: the click rate was 2,39% in the “contextual week” and 2,23% in the “interest based week”
• for website B: the click rate was 2,77% in the “contextual week” and 3,05% in the “interest based week”

Page eCPM:

• for website A: “Avalue” during the “contextual week”, -7% during the “interest based week”
• for website B:  ”Bvalue” during the “contextual week”, +2% during the “interest based week”

So, the conclusions are crystal clear. Use “interest based advertising” when your website doesn’t have a general theme (for example if you run a local search directory, a free classifieds website, a news website etc.) and use only  “contextual” advertising when you run a highly targeted website.