ZillionBits-Its about number$ and te<h^0!0gy

If you haven’t heard, eBay is developing an advertising system called eBay AdContext that is being touted as a possible competitor to Google’s AdSense program. Like AdSense, AdContext will analyze page content in order to serve contextually-sensitive ads. Two important points:

• Since it’s contextual, it and AdSense cannot coexist on the same page due to the restrictions in the AdSense terms and conditions. (They could be used as alternate ads, though.)
• Unlike AdSense, AdContext ads link back to eBay, not to random sites.

I’m curious to see how this will play out. Truth be told, I think eBay auction pages are sucky landing pages, so direct links back to eBay surely won’t be as effective as linking to a dedicated page for the products being sold. But if the point is to get traffic to eBay that may not matter.

Speculation abounds that eBay will eventually expand the program to be a full-fledged AdSense competitor. I see problems with this:

With so many blogs being created every day, it’s a mystery to many bloggers how to make their blog stand out. There are many types of blogs or purposes for blogs and a certain number of tactics are applicable to just about all of them, so here is a “short” list of tips for marketing and optimizing a blog:

1. Decide on a stand alone domain name www.myblog.com or directory of existing site www.mysite.com/blog. Sub domain is also an option blog.mysite.com. Avoid hosted services that do not allow you to use your own domain name!
2. Obtain and install customizable blog software - WordPress and Moveable Type are my favorites.
3. Customize blog look and feel templates - aka design.
4. Research keywords and develop a glossary - Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, SitePoint, SEOBook Keyword Research.
5. Optimize the blog:

* Template optimization - RSS subscription options, social bookmark links, HTML code, Unique title tags, URLs, Sitemap
* Add helper plugins specific to WordPress or MT
* Create keyword rich categories (reference your keyword glossary)

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