First impression - Rubicon Project

I've signed up for the beta of the Rubicon project.
If you haven't heard of it by now, the Rubicon is a self-optimizing platform for websites offering ads from multiple ad networks such as Google Adsense, CPX, Azoogle and Shopzilla.
I have implemented their ad solution in my blog on the top header 468x60 and the left 160x600 banners. They currently support only a small number of placements, but I'm sure their list will expand in the near future.
My current feedback on their service is that so far, only a small number of networks show ads on my blog and the interface while well designed still lacks a number of important features.
Having said all this, I have a good feeling that once mature, this product will enable site owners to maximize their sites' income in a significant manner.

Other products claiming to offer a similar service (I haven't tried them out yet) are:
RightMedia direct
Pubmatic

Have you tried any of these or Rubicon?

Parking my domains at SEDO

I just parked 7 of my domains at SEDO. if you are not familiar with it, then SEDO is a domain parking service that allows you to generate revenue from your inactive domains. I checked several domain parking services and narrowed my choice to 2 companies. The first was parked.com which seemed very impressive but insisted that I park at least 10 domains there. The second one was SEDO. They allowed me to setup my account very quickly and even generated a few cents on the first day of activity.

The domains I've parked there are:
babyguideonline.org
banner4me.org
giftphones.org
h2visa.net
newlcdtv.com
rigntone.net
rigntone.org


What do you think of these domains?

dj2.org - my new domain

I just bought a new domain from GoDaddy. Their buying process is simply amazing from a marketing point of view. In every step, a new promotion or relevant special offer is displayed.
After going through all the required steps, I was asked to enter my payment details. One of the fields in the payment page is a promo code. I quickly searched Google for a "godaddy promo code" and found several sites offering valid codes, one of which entitled me to a 30% discount for any purchase over 25$.
So, next time you see a promo code or coupon field in the payment page, just run a search to see if you can find one.

You are invited to visit the new domain @ http://www.dj2.org

Google hot trends

Take a look at Google's hot trends and find out the hottest 100 searches in the US right now.
All that's left now is to find a way to monetize it.

I started adding these words to my generic adwords campaigns to see if these keywords will convert. Can you figure out another way?

RSS shortlist: Internet marketing

A friend of mine just quit his job @ Google and has some vacation time until he starts his new job.
In an email he sent to me, he asked me to share with him my RSS list for internet marketing news and resources.

The moment I sent him my list (grabbed from my Netvibes account), I figured out that this list I've compiled over 3 years could be valuable to my blog readers (Are you really out there?).

Here's the list. Let me know if there is any related feed you think I should include here.
The site list is to the actual URL and not the RSS feed so you can view these sites before subscribing to their feeds.

http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/
http://www.shoemoney.com/
http://www.jenniferslegg.com/
http://www.jensense.com/
http://www.cpa-affiliates.com/
http://www.problogger.net/
http://blog.seoptimise.com/
http://www.seroundtable.com/
http://sleepyblogger.com/
http://www.conversionrater.com/
http://www.conversationmarketing.com/
http://directory.sootle.com/directory-weblog/
http://www.cre8d-design.com/
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/
http://blog.mindvalleylabs.com/
http://www.internet-marketing-blog.com/
http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/
http://www.techcrunch.com/
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/
http://www.pronetadvertising.com/
http://www.marketingbabylon.com/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Adwords Editor 4.0 released

My Adwords Editor just offered to download a new version titled 4.0
After downloading and installing it I found some new features.
The new features I've noticed (there may be some more) are:
1. Custom date range for performance stats.
2. Ability to upload a single campaign changes and not a full post
3. Much faster campaign downloading. I downloaded a 20K keywords campaign in under 2 minutes.

This new version is so far not being advertised by Google anywhere I could find.
Even the Release Notes still refer to version 3.5

Have you tried the new upgrade? Did you like it as I did?

RSS for SEO

A little known secret that SEO experts use, is that adding RSS support to sites contributes to their inclusion in the major search engines (SERPS). As RSS has become a standard for updating users of new posts and changes of a site, it can be used to notify search engines of new content that needs to be crawled.

Even if your site is not part of a CMS (content management system), you can still enjoy this technique. The following steps elaborate how even static websites can communicate with the Google Bot and the other crawlers more effectively.

Step 1: Create a static RSS file in your root directory containing your latest pages. the format of this file should be like the one mentioned in wikipedia

Step 2: Register this feed in a feed publisher. My personal favorite is FeedBurner which has been acquired by Google recently. Feed publishers notify of your feed changes to the search engines.

Step 3: Update your feed whenever your content changes and the search engines will get notified by Feed Burner.