Why Use Google AdSense Videos Format

The first benefit that videos offer is that they increase Google Adsense payments. In our tests, it increased earnings by more than 12%.  When you’re designing your site layout, consider dropping the text ads and insert one large video ad instead. Do some split testing and check the results. Video ads, or video units as Google likes to call them, lets you enrich your site with relevant video content, which can be embedded in a customizable player.

What is Google AdSense Video?

Google AdSense videos are user initiated ads that run on sites that are part of the Google content network. These ad formats provide users with a rich and engaging advertising experience.

How to get Adsense Videos

Sign in to your AdSense account and open the AdSense Setup tab. Click the video units link and setup up your video unit. Add it to you site and see if it compliments your content.

Risks of Using Video Ad Formats

• Risk #1 – the ads may not compliment your product offerings
• Risk #2 – the ads may be too slow when downloading (not everyone has broadband), which will leave the reader with nothing to see but a blank space, i.e. where the ad should be
• Risk #3 – your AdSense earnings will drop. In our tests, they don’t but your experience may be different.
• Risk #4 – while using video ads should lead to increased sales, especially in the short term, web users may try the video ads and then reject the regular text ads resulting in lower sales.
• Risk #5 – video ads may have a negative impact on your Adsense earnings if do not match your sites look and feel, i.e. the overall color scheme. You can’t control the appearance of video ads as you can with text ads.

Which Video Ad Formats are available?

Video ads are currently available in several ad formats:

• 336 x 280 (Large Rectangle)
• 300 x 250 (Medium Rectangle)
• 250 x 250 (Square)
• 200 x 200 (Small Square)
• 728 x 90 (Leaderboard)
• 120 x 600 (Skyscraper)
• 160 x 600 (Wide Skyscraper)

How to Get Started

To display video ads on your site, make sure you are using one of these supported formats and that you are opted in to image ads for that ad unit. If not, the video option will not be displayed.

How to Enable Image Ads

There are two ways to enable image ads. You can:

1. Enable image and text advertising for all of your pages or
2. Enable image ads for individual pages

Warning - Enabling image ads for individual pages overrides account-wide level selections.

To enable image ads across your account:

1. Sign in to your account at https://www.google.com/adsense
2. Click the My Account tab
3. Click the edit links next to the Ad Type Preference header
4. Select Display text and image ads in all ad units

If you’ve already generated the code, you can change the ad type of your AdSense unit using the ad management feature:

1. Log in to your account at https://www.google.com/adsense
2. Click the AdSense Setup tab.
3. Select the Manage Ads sub-tab.
4. Click Edit settings for the ad unit you’d like to update.
5. Under Format pick your desired ad type.
6. Click Save settings.

Adding YouTube Ads – How it works

If you’ve embedded video from YouTube into your site before, you’ll know what to do. Once you’ve configured the options in Adsense, embed the code as per usual, which display the relevant YouTube content to your site. When selecting content, you can:

1. Choose video categories to target to your site or blog
2. Select content from individual YouTube partners
3. Get video targeted to your site content

Configuration options allow you to blend the YouTube player into your site, customize the color scheme and layout, and choose different player sizes.

How to Test Video Ads on Your Blog

You can test the ad from inside AdSense as follows:

• Enter the URL of a page where this ad unit currently appears to see what the ad unit that you have designed will look like.
• Click Preview on this page
• The test add appears and you can see what it looks like. Pretty impressive!

Tip: If you enter a URL that does not display the code for this ad unit, you will not see any ads in the preview.

Why Can’t I See Video Ads on my Site?

You might not see video ads for a number of reasons.

1. Are you using one of the ad formats that support video ads?
2. Have you opted in to image ads for that ad format - otherwise, your ad unit will not display video ads.
3. Even if you are using supported ad formats, and you are opted in to image ads, video ads may not be targeted to your content for the time being.

Make sure that you are opted in to both text and image ads for these ad units to maximize competition for your ad space.

Split Testing & How Video Increases Your AdSense Earnings

This table shows the AdSense earnings before I added the videos units. Note that 210 clicks generated $77. This is an average for the site performance in March 2010.

Page Impressions – 99,219
Clicks Page 210
CTR – 0.23%
Page eCPM – €0.77
Estimated earnings – €77.14

This is $77 per day across all of March, which is approx $2,310 for the month.

Google AdSense – Search Earnings Without Video ads

This shows the AdSense Search results before I added the videos. Search always pay better. We had 80 clicks which generated $20. Again, this is the average return for the site in March 2010. The eCPM is $26.

Queries – 830
Clicks – 80
CTR – 9.64%
eCPM – €26.51
Estimated earnings – €20.20

This is $20 per day for each day in March, which is approx $600 for the month. Google AdSense earnings for both Page Impressions and Search was $2,900 approx. We also had some small payments from the RSS feeds, but not much.

Google AdSense – Page Impressions Earnings With Video ads

We added the video ads formats across three sites in April. So, these figures are for the first 15 days of the month. Earnings increased by 12%.

Page Impressions (15 days)- 46,986
Clicks Page 118
CTR – 0.24%
Page eCPM – €0.79
Estimated earnings – €43.01

Google AdSense – Search Earnings With Video ads

This shows the AdSense Search results after I added the videos. Its earnings increased by approx 10%.

Queries – 410
Clicks – 39
CTR – 9.84%
eCPM – €27.15
Estimated earnings – €11.88

Conclusions

There are a few things to note. Adding the video formats to Google AdSense made no difference to traffic or at least not yet. We didn’t expect it would. It did increase the earnings though, but about 12%.

1. Page Impression earnings increased by 15%~.
2. Two ads formats performed very well. The first was the Skyscraper video down the right side of the page. However, we also placed Google Ads (with video) embedded inside the article near the top-left. Looking at the heatmaps, it’s clear that visitors ‘enjoyed’ these ads as they clicked on more of them as the month progressed. More testing over the next 6 weeks should give us better feedback.
3. Search earnings increased by 7-10%~. This increase may be related to the close proximity of the video ads to the search box.
4. The Search box is placed in two places on the site. At the top right of the page and also in the Footer. Tests have shown that many users scroll to the end of the page (seeking more information, perhaps) and use this Search box to look for the information rather than scroll back up to the top or hit the Back button.
5. Total earnings for both page impressions and Search increased by 12% approx. Is this good enough? Well, our tests were for a 15-days period in April. As we use video more, our earnings should improve
6. 12% over twelve months should generate an extra $4,000 revenue, which isn’t a bad return for 30 minutes work!

Over to you.

Have you tried the AdSense video formats? If so, what results did you see? If you didn’t, what was the obstacle or issue that stopped you for using video? Let us know below.

PS – Remember to sign up for our free newsletter and give us a Tweet!

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Making money from niche blogs in an inexact science. What works in one blogs, fails on another. I’ve launched over 200 websites since 1998 (mostly ecommerce) and about 30 blogs (technical). If your blog has a technical slant, for example, its target audience is technical writers, analysts, architects, or others micro-niche areas, then use some of these search engine techniques will increase your traffic.

29 Ways to Increase Traffic to a Micro Niche Blog

1. Monthly Interview – do a profile every month or a day in the life of your target audience. Rule #1, people like to read about people.
2. Company Profile – same as above but focus on how the company developed, what it’s doing right AND mistakes it made. Rule #2, people like to read how others solved problems.
3. Product review – don’t do a short review. Aim for 1000 words. Look at this review of Camtasia Studio. This will live long in the Google index and generate more backlinks. Short reviews melt like dew in the morning sun.
4. Guest articles – do them and take them. I take guest articles all the time (send me text files, please not Word). Make sure these people have a brain, i.e. that they remember to share the buzz on their site, their twitter, their Facebook page, and maybe on other Social Media networks. I’m still amazed at people who take the effort to submit, write and publish an article but forget to promote it.
5. Be the Hub – make your site the hub for your niche. This means others in the field will flock here to see what’s happening, who’s been hired, rates, buzz, gossip – whatever rocks their boat. And it’s ok to throw in the odd joke to lighten things up. Don’t take yourself too serious.
6. Deep Link – instead of linking to the main page, link to a page within a site. This increases the number of trackbacks. You can also do a Google search for sites that offer back-links and add these to your ping requests.
7. BusinessWeek – has a professional network that that accepts links, i.e. yours!, which get indexed v quickly by Google. You can also connect your account here with LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanwalsh)
8. LinkedIn – you use this, right? If not, sign up and join groups that match your target audience. Get involved. Be active. Ask and answer questions. Check in once a week. Link your RSS/blog to your profile. More back-links for little effort.
9. Connect with Startup blogs – while everyone wants to get on C Brogan, you’ll get further if you connect with people starting out. They appreciate the value and will share the link love. If they don’t, well… PS: here’s the right way to add a comment to chris brogan’s blog.
10. Google Adsense – not very fashionable these days but it still pulls in $750 per month, which pays for the Frappuccino, Cable, and Brazilian waxes. Ok, one of those isn’t true. It’s cable, isn’t it?
11. Calendar – use Google Docs to get it up. Simple way to create high-traffic pages.
12. Add Photos – don’t be shy. Show us your mug! Take photos whenever you go to an event, conference or client. Let others into your world. Remember rule #1.
13. Use Creative Commons – share. Make it easy for others to get your message out there. Why don’t you share?
14. Setup a Newsletter – use Aweber, not Feedburner, if you are serious about making money & getting the news out. The money is in the list. Share useful information. No one cares about your cat’s dysentery.
15. Reach out to Other Bloggers – mention other bloggers, writers etc in your articles. Why? They might pop over and leave a comment or respond in their blog. Don’t write in a vacuum.
16. Add Short Video – use YouTube to increase traffic, cross-links, and to establish yourself as an authority.
17. Offer Incredible PDFs – create PDFs of your best work, upload it to Slideshare and index it in your Sitemap. Why? Google indexes PDFs. Include links back to your site + you’ll see the page rank increase.
18. Create Unique Twitter Lists – create unique and interesting twitter lists. As Twitter has become a wall of noise, people use lists to share, aggregate, and curate information. Make your list as specialized as possible. Then link to the list, not your twitter page. See the difference? Twitter followers will go thru the roof!
19. Twollow – use this to follow others by keyword, e.g. follow those interested in video marketing. AND use it to un-follow deadbeats that don’t follow back.
20. Ejunkie – use this to sell digital goods, information products, online training, or ebooks. 100 times better than Clickbank. $5 per month. How can you go wrong?
21. Optimize Money Pages – log into Google Analytics. Find your top 10 posts. Go into each of these pages and fine-tune them over more. Add 1 product to each page. These are your MONEY pages. Start making money here.
22. Google Analytics – learn how Google Analytics works. ‘I know how it works’. No, you don’t, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article! Spend 5 hours here. Do split testing, setup reports, check entrance paths, bounce rates and duplicate headers. All the heavy-weights do this.
23. Posterous – use this to publish your blog posts across all your Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, Flickr, YouTube with one click. Now you can add tags and use Google Analytics as well.
24. Contact Journalists – identify 5 journalists in your industry. Tell them what you write about and why they should read your blog, i.e. to give them material for their articles. See your PageRank shoot up if you connect with one high-profile journalist.
25. Create 2 Sitemaps – add an XML site for Google to read and a HTML one for the humanoids. Check this with Google Webmaster Tools.
26. Title tags – don’t do all the hard work and forget to add the correct title tags to each post. It takes 5 min to get this right but it’s worth the effort. Use SEO in a Box plugin to do this.
27. Google Webmaster Tools – like Google Analytics, spend 30 min in here every week and see how Google in indexing your blog. Look for duplicate headers (i.e. pages with the same title tags) as these lower your PageRank. Also check for crawl errors and others horrors.
28. Leverage Facebook – forget pigville and join groups, fan pages that compliment your business. Add useful comments, not just high fives. Say something that others have overlooked. Add videos, photos and RSS feeds to your pages.
29. Create a Publishing Process – saving the last til best. Develop a workflow for publishing your material. Don’t just write and hit publish. Stand back and see how you can gather information, identify your audience, focus on pain points (i.e. their problems), develop content that will be evergreen, source photos, respond to comments, and get busy promoting. No one knows about your site.

Now, get out there and tell them.

Ok, that’s how I do it. What did I miss?

Photo: invisiblekid

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How to Get Your Site Verified By Google

Blogs created in Blogger are automatically verified in Webmaster Tools. However, older blogs, WordPress and Typepad blogs are not automatically verified, and should be verified using the meta tag method.

To verify your Blogger / WordPress blog:

1.    On the Webmaster Tools home page, click Add a site.
2.    Enter your blog’s URL e.g. (http://ivanwalsh.blogspot.com) and click Continue.
3.    On the Verification page, select the Meta tag verification method and copy the meta tag provided into your text editor.
4.    Sign in to Blogger.com (or WordPress).

For Blogger, open the Dashboard, click the Layout link for the blog you are verifying.

5.    On the Layout tab, click Edit HTML.
6.    Paste the meta tag  after the <head> element in the template HTML and click Save template.
7.    On the Manage Verification page in Webmaster Tools, confirm that Meta tag is selected as the verification method, and then click the Verify

For WordPress and TypePad blogs:

8.    Save the Google code to a HTML file.
9.    FTP it to the root directory.
10.    On the Manage Verification page in Webmaster Tools, confirm that Meta tag is selected as the verification method, and then click the Verify.
11.    If successful, a message appears. Woohoo!

Where is Google Webmaster Tools

It’s here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

Did this work for you? Let me know if you have any problems.

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Why Your About Us Page is the Second Most Important Page on Your Blog?

Video made at The Temple of Heaven, China during soccer practice …

Your About Page should NOT be:

• An Afterthought – something to fill with text, just to get it done. Written after the site is launched when you’ve nothing else to do on a slow Friday afternoon.
• In the third person — it’s your blog! Talk to me. Introduce who you are. Don’t talk down. Talk about your team, mention their names, show their faces, add pic and videos. Why not?
• Flat — read the first paragraph. Does it excite you? Does it make ‘you’ (i.e. the prospect) want to contact you, download your brochure, make an effort to connect?
• Same As— as every other About Us page. C’mon, you can do better. Pics, videos and mp3s. it’s so easy, try it.
• Stale — update it every 3 months. Every month you do something worth sharing. Put it here.

Your About Page should be:

• Kinda Intimate – share something that cannot be found anywhere else on the site. Photos, videos, examples of your portfolio, places you’ve been, events, conferences — anything that paints a picture.
• But Warm – make me feel ‘warm and fuzzy’ inside. You don’t need to go over-board, but share a little. Show why you’re more interesting that the rest.
• With 7 Compelling Reasons — give them 7 reasons (if you can’t think of seven, at least five) to cross the threshold and connect. For example, what do you stand for? What are your values? Who have you helped? What charity do you support? What makes you different (really different!) than the rest.
• For them to Knock on the Door – remember, it’s this page where people decide ‘will I, won’t I?’ So, it better be good. You want them to come in, right?

How To Sharpen Your About Us page

Your About Us page must have the following:

• Story – not your CV, but the story of YOU.
• Why did you decide to do this?
• How did you get here?
• What mistakes did you make?
• What you hope to achieve?
• Why the reader is important to you?
• Share links to your Social Media sites
• Contact form & email & tel number —make it easy for them. Put your contact details on every page.

Videos and Personal Branding

I use videos to help bridge that gap. You see me at work, at soccer practice, with junior, my pet crickets, and even when I’m struggling. Each of these helps close the gap between you and me. Maybe you don’t care for everything on the site, but your impression of me (and your memories of this site) are that much stronger.

Here’s a question for you?

Think of all the sites you visited this week. How many do you remember? Now, look at the video above. In a year’s time, you will still remember this video (for better or worse!) but all the blogs you read this week will be forgotten.

Why do you think that is?

PS – Rewriting your About Us page could result in a higher Google page rank and higher conversion rates for those who find it.

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How to Get Added to Google News

To be included in Google News, your articles (and their URLs) must be:

1. Unique

Each web page/blog post that display an article’s full text must have a unique URL. Google doesn’t include sites in its News that display multiple articles under one URL or that do not have links to pages dedicated solely to each article.

2. Permanent

Google can’t/won’t crawl pages (e.g. www.yoursite.com/news.html) if it displays a different story every day.  Make each post unique and permanent.
‘To ensure its links to articles function properly, each article on a news site must be associated with one unique URL, and that URL must be permanent (i.e., it can’t be recycled).’

3. Three-digit number

The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits.

For example:

Google News can’t crawl this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article23.html

Google News can crawl this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article234.html

Add three unique numbers to each article.

Note: if the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as:

http://www.google.com/news/article2006.html

…Google won’t be able to crawl it.

Exception: this rule is waived with News sitemaps

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68323

Google News: How to Recommend a site for inclusion

If you’d like a site to be included in Google News, send them the URL here.

http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40249

Recap: Get Added to Google News

Be

1. Unique
2. Permanent
3. Three-digit numbers

That’s it. Over to you.

Have you managed to get your blog indexed by Google for its news section? Was Bing easier? Share any tips you have below.

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How To Turn Off Google Buzz

1. Scroll down to the bottom of your Gmail page.
2. Find the ‘turn off buzz‘ link
3. Click on it.

This turns off Google Buzz.

How to filter Buzz

You can also filter email alerts from Buzz.

1. In Gmail, click Settings.
2. Click Filters
3. Select ‘Create a new filter‘
4. Enter label:buzz in the Has the Words field

How to filter friends with Buzz

To restrict Google Buzz updates to your close friends, change their setting to ‘Private‘.

Know any other Google Buzz tips?

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Last week I showed you how to use Google’s Advanced search features. This lets you drill-down and laser focus your search. Today, we’ll look at Google’s Wonder Wheel. How does it work? It displays a visual wheel of results, with related search items on each spoke. It’s more than a fancy trick. Keep working with it and you’ll see how powerful it can be.

Tip – make Google’s advanced search page your default. It’s worth the small effort.

How to use Google’s Wonder Wheel

1. Enter your keyword into Google to start the search.

2. Click Show Options (top left of nav bar). This expands the nav bar down the left side of the screen.

3. Click Wonder Wheel under Standard View. This creates a starfish-shaped circle with spokes to the related searches.

4. Click on the spokes (i.e. associated searches) to find more relevant key words and phrases.

You can click on the spokes to research different topics or return to the wonder wheel.

How ProBlogger uses Google’s Wonder Wheel

Darren Rowse’s video, “How to Use Google’s Wonder Wheel to Find Topics to Write about” shows how he uses the Wonder Wheel for idea generation. For example, to see what queries people enter into Google that he may not have thought of or to catch up with new trends. This helps focus your writing so that your content is aligned with what people are searching for. Make sense? http://www.problogger.net

FYI – Darren Rowse’s blog is compulsive reading if you plan to make a living online.

Does Google’s Wonder Wheel Really Work?

Does this help you find the search item you were after or is the regular way better? I use it when I get writer’s block and want to look at things from a fresh perspective.

At first, I found it gimmicky. But, the more I use it, the more ideas it creates. The trick is see where it can help and avoid deviating into topics that are not on your radar.

How about you? What do you think?

PS – You can learn How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain’s Untapped Potential here. An excellent introduction to mind mapping techniques.

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One of my younger cousins has started her degree in university in Limerick, Ireland. Not the place most of us think of as the heart of technical writing. But, for Microsoft, Google and IBM this university has provides a conveyor belt, producing freshly minted technical writers every four years. It’s one of the few universities in Europe with a specialist degree in Technical Communications.

But, here’s the problem.

Ireland Plc is dead. So, is most of Europe.

Students taking a degree in technical writing / tech comms now read about layouts in the IT industry most every week. Actually, you don’t notice it any more.

The recession has become background noise.

Once they graduate, they’ll have to:

• Leave for the US to find work – is this smart?
• Up-skill and go for a Masters — makes sense but expensive and no guarantee of employment
• Move sideways into another field — possible but defeats the purpose of taking the degree in the first place
• Move to India or Asia — setup a technical writing firm there and/or work as a liaison between the US and Asian offices.
• Dropout?

This is what’s happening now. Why study for 4 years when there is no end goal?

I think this is a mistake, but it’s easy for me to say. Their careers are already at a premature crossroads.

Next week, I’m back in Ireland.

What advice would you suggest I give these students?

Stay the course or find something else?

PS - The University of Limerick courses are listed here.

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Put the Author’s name above a headline to get more clicks

Paul Berry, Chief Technology Officer at The Huffington Post, said Huffington Post editors have found that “placing the author’s name above a headline almost always leads to more clicks than omitting it.”

Also, The Huffington Post’s new social media editor, Josh Young, has also been soliciting better headlines from readers on Twitter. Interesting use of Crowd-sourcing?

Takeaway

The Huffington Post is considering separate East Coast and West Coast editions.

Why?

Take the Oscars, It’s old news to East Coast readers by noon, but fresh for the West Coasters logging on.

Read more here: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/10/how-the-huffington-post-uses-real-time-testing-to-write-better-headlines/

Will real-time rating lead to “better” headlines or more popular ones?

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Does writing a blog constitute work? Forbes reports that the New York State Department of Labor recently declared a laid-off attorney ineligible for unemployment benefits as she was bringing in $1.30 a day from blog ads.

In April, Karin started a blog, called STL Meal Deals, where she wrote about local restaurant promotions. Since she received no payments from the businesses she mentioned, Karin decided to try generating some income by signing up for Google AdSense.

Google sends bloggers checks when their earnings hit $100–a level that took Karin three months to achieve.

Here’s what happened when the first check arrived:

Lawyer’s Unemployment Benefits Yanked Over $1 a Day From Blog http://www.forbes.com

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Turn Google Docs into a Writing Tool

Follow these steps:

1: Create a new document in Google Docs and choose “Edit CSS” from the edit menu.

2: Paste the following code into the CSS Box and save.

body {

font: 16px “Courier New”;

color: #00ff00 !important;

background: #000 !important;

width: 800px;

margin: 10px auto;

}

3: Press Ctrl + Shift + F to remove the menu bar in Google Docs and then hit F11 to turn your browser into full-screen mode.

Read more at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-docs-for-distraction-free-writing/10538/

Free Google Docs writing template

You can get a nice writing template over here from the same team: http://docs.google.com/

Do you use Google Docs for writing your tech documents?

What’s the one thing that would make you give up using Microsoft Word?

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For example:

1. Apple enjoys an unfettered supply of leading edge technology because its software, design, marketing, and retail prowess give it ultimate control over customer spending.

2. Amazon, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, AT&T, and Qualcomm have used their investments in software, services, infrastructure, and intellectual property to do the same.

3. All use their market power to force upstream vendors to invest for them to make the inputs to downstream innovations and transformations cheaper and more plentiful.

4. As long as they innovate sufficiently to follow the flow of market value downstream, all are able to limit the eventual return and market power accruing to these upstream innovations.

However, he warns that this model breaks down “where U.S. companies and innovators do not naturally control downstream demand. Take batteries for electric vehicles. The U.S. has ceded both innovation in the critical building block (the battery) as well as leadership in the integration of these blocks into downstream value (competitive automobiles).”

Full article here: http://blogs.harvardbusiness.com

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My shared Google Reader is here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/ivanawalsh

I’ve also made an aim to share no more than 5 links, sites, blogs per day. This should help avoid info overload for those who subscribe and increase the quality of the material.

Why am I doing this?

Louis Gray explains it much better than I ever could.

When I hit “share” in Google Reader, a few things happen.

   1. The item is added to my shared link blog.

   2. The item is available for comments within Google Reader for approved contacts.

   3. The items are shared on my FriendFeed, Facebook and Social media.

Louis Gray: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LouisgraycomLive/~3/Sx0m6McdWY0/why-and-where-we-share-distributing.html

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