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Even before we introduced Google Earth back in 2005, the team had long dreamed of being able to carry the Earth around in your pocket. Well, today that dream becomes a reality as we introduce Google Earth for iPhone and iPod touch. With just a swipe of your finger you can fly from Peoria to Paris to Papua New Guinea, or anywhere in between. It may be small, but it brings all the power of Google Earth to the palm of your hand, including all of the same global imagery and 3D terrain. You can even browse any of our 8 million Panoramio photos or read Wikipedia articles.

With Google Earth for iPhone, you can:
• Tilt your iPhone to adjust your view to see mountainous terrain
• View the Panoramio layer and browse the millions of geo-located photos from around the world
• View geo-located Wikipedia articles
• Use the 'Location' feature to fly to your current location
• Search for cities, places and business around the globe with Google Local Search

It's available today in 18 languages and 22 countries in the iTunes App Store. To learn more, check out this video tour and read the blog post on the Lat Long Blog.



Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager

Election Year Scandals for Traffic

I have recently been interested in the way smaller sites with which I was not previously familiar hit my radar as I observe traffic surging to them for one particular article relating to some scandal or other in the presidential election. Whether it's a confession, a funny image, or a fake interview, one well placed election-related item can put a site on the map.

Such was the case, for example, when Christopher Buckley, the son of the late uber-conservative William F. Buckley, posted a column on The Daily Beast announcing his intention to vote for Barack Obama, the Democrat. As he explained, he chose The Daily Beast because he thought it would be safer than his regular gig at the National Review Online--he was certain he'd receive tons of hate mail if he posted it there. Well, it did result in the National Review dropping his column. But it also resulted in many people visiting, for the first time, The Daily Beast. Scoop!

Another recent site that came to my attention while I was chasing traffic spikes was Street Prophets, a relatively small blog (and part of the Daily Kos community) on politics and faith. What appeared to drive the increase in traffic to the site was an image that alleged of Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin, "Finally, a beauty queen who doesn't want world peace."

Similarly, I had not personally been aware of the news blog African Press International, which saw a jump in traffic after publishing an allegedly fake interview with Michelle Obama.


I suppose my all-time favorite spike in traffic related to an election-year scoop of sorts was that in early August to the website Funny or Die. While the site frequently has a viral hit, the surge to a scripted announcement by Paris Hilton of her own political aspirations in response to John McCain's ad about Barack Obama's celebrity. Putting that one on the graph makes the others seem like mere blips.

Blogging Questions & Answers 22

OK - here’s a little experiment for us to participate in this weekend. Below I’d like you to ‘pitch’ us on why we should read your blog. Read on to find out how.

I get asked these two questions a lot:

Can you link to my blog on ProBlogger
Can you recommend a blog on the topic of (insert topic here)
The answer to #1 is invariably no. It’s not that I don’t want to promote great blogs - but the reality is that if I promoted every blog I was asked to link to it’d take over this blog completely.

The answer to #2 is for me to sometimes give people a link but more often it’s a blank look. You see while I track the feeds of over 700 blogs that is just a drop in the ocean and the blogs I follow tend to be on just a couple of narrow topics.

So - what I want to do is give people an opportunity to promote their blog here on ProBlogger and an opportunity for others to find new blogs to read.

It’s all going to happen in the comments section of this post.

Here’s how it’ll work.

Over the next 48 hours I am leaving the comments of this post open for you to give an elevator pitch for your blog.
To keep the ‘pitches’ short - you have to do it in 140 characters or less.
You can ’sell’ your blog to us in any way you like as long as it’s 140 characters. Use humor, tell us what it’s about, tease us… what ever you want. Just keep it family friendly please.
Feel free to use your blog’s name in the ‘name’ field in the comments section and to leave the URL in the URL section to help you save on characters.
Please only pitch one blog to us. If you have multiple blogs just pick your best one.
After 48 hours I’ll close the comments on this post and will point people back to it and encourage them to surf through the list and find some new blogs to read. I’ll also encourage people to link up to the ones they find and enjoy reading.
I’m not going to do a summary list of all blogs submitted (I suspect there will be quite a few) but I will pick out a few of my favorite elevator pitches to highlight in the 2nd post.
update - Please include the number ‘140′ in the comment. This will help us find any comments that are filtered as spam. The ‘140′ doesn’t get counted in your 140 characters.
Will this bring you tens thousands of new readers to your blog? Probably not - but it could bring a few, and they could bring others…..

I’m looking forward to seeing how you pitch us your blog (I think it’s important to be able to sell your blog in a few words so hopefully this is a useful exercise) but also to discovering some great new blogs! Your 48 hours starts…. NOW!

Subscribe to my feed to be notified when the project ends so you can come back and surf the list!

update: If you don’t see your comment come up immediately please be patient. It will have been queued for moderation - we’ll get to it eventually. There’s no need to add a 2nd comment. Thanks!

If you have a spare 55 minutes and 33 seconds this weekend….

Produced by Dr. Micael Wesch and his team at Kansas State University - via David.

Tags: social media, Video Posts, Youtube
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Should Blogs Have Comments?

Posted: 11 Oct 2008 07:21 AM PDT

Should blogs have comments?

It is a question that comes up fairly regularly in blogging circles and one that different bloggers take different approaches to.

Most bloggers have them - they’re on by default when they set their blog up and they never switch them off. They see the comments as adding a lot to the blog - making it a place of shared learning, interactivity and dynamic conversation.
Other bloggers decide not to have them. Their reasons vary from not having time to moderate them to being frustrated by comment spam.
Between these views other bloggers take a variety of other approaches ranging from:

having comments on some posts but not others
switching comments off over a certain amount of time (to protect from comment spam)
to not having comments in the early days of a blog and switching them on later once there is a big enough audience to justify them (this is what I did on DPS).
to requiring membership for comments (thereby effectively switching them off to the general public and reserving the privilege to comment for those willing to sign up).
There are many options - but I thought it’d be interesting to open it up for some discussion.

Do you have comments on your blog? Why or Why Not?
Do you think a blog is a blog without comments?
What are the advantages of having or not having them?
Interested to see where this discussion leads us.

Further Reading on Comments on Blogs:



Blogging with or without Comments?
Should Low Traffic Blogs Disable Comments
10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog

Amazon Associates Program Add ‘Site Stripe’ - Make Affiliate Links from Any Page on Amazon

I just logged into Amazon Associates just now and found that they’ve done a redesign of their Associates area and have added a very handy new feature for Amazon Associates publishers.

It’s called ‘Site Stripe’ and essentially it allows you to create affiliate links as you surf Amazon. It’s a little grey stripe that appears at the top of any Amazon.com page that allows you to link to that page, add a product to an aStore, see your Earnings Summary, See ‘what’s New’, go to a discussion board or see ’settings’.

Here’s how it looks (click to enlarge):



Click links and you are taken to an Associates area relevant to the selection that you make.

This is going to be really handy for Amazon affiliates that link to a lot of products on Amazon - it’ll save flipping between Amazon pages and Associates back end pages and should speed up the process and remove a few steps in the process.

When you log into the back end of Amazon Associates you can set up the settings for this feature by clicking the ‘Links and Banners’ tab and then clicking the ‘Learn More’ button in the ‘Site Stripe’ section. Here you can turn Site Stripe on and off as well as selecting which features you want in the stripe.

How to Increase Subscribers and Reader Engagement

Last week I decided to find some quality Australian blogs to subscribe to. I used a newly compiled list of Australian Marketing Blogs that Julian Cole put together as the basis for my search.

I was excited by the quality of some of the blogs on that list - but it struck me as I surfed through the list that there were three frustrations that I had with quite a few of the blogs on the list (definitely not all of them, but enough for me to notice).

None of these problems are issues that just Australian bloggers or Marketing bloggers face - I see them every day around the web (although I did find it ironic that a list of ‘Marketing’ blogs would have some of these problems).

1. Hidden Subscription Options
I was on a mission to subscribe to great blogs - but one disappointing thing that I noticed was that quite a few of the bloggers didn’t make this easy for me simply because they ‘hid’ their subscription methods way down the page (and a couple didn’t even show them at all). Most browsers these days give those who use them the ability to subscribe by clicking the RSS icon in their address bar - but many web users don’t know that they can do this (or are using old browsers).

If one of your goals as a blogger is to grow your readership then one great way to capture first time readers is to get them to subscribe (whether that be to an RSS feed, an RSS to Email service or a newsletter. If you hide or obscure these options you’re not likely to get the conversions.

My own approach with getting subscribers is to place these subscription options prominently in a sidebar and then under posts on single post pages (usually below the fold). This means that whether a new reader is above or below the fold they are invited to subscribe.

Further Reading - 11 Ways to Get New RSS Subscribers for your Blog

2. No Way to Contact the Blogger
There were a number of blogs on the list that I was really impressed with - so much so that I wanted to contact the blogger and congratulate them on their blogs. The only problem was that on a couple of occasions I found it difficult to find any way to contact the blogger other than to leave a public comment.

I understand some bloggers desires to have privacy or to cut down the admin of their blogs by keeping themselves difficult to contact but in doing so you not only filter the loonies approaches but also legitimate opportunities, potential partnerships etc

Contact options don’t necessarily have to be giving out your email address - you could have a contact form, give Twitter details, have an IM option or give other social networking profiles (the key is to give ones that you actually check).

Further Reading - Why Your Blog’s Readers Should be Able to Contact You

3. No About Page
This one is probably more my personal preference and less essential than the first two points - but when I find a blog that I’m interested in one of the first things that I like to do to help me decide whether to subscribe to it is to search for more information about the blog and who writes it.

Some kind of an ‘About Page’ is a great way to satisfy and draw in curious potential readers (like me) and to deepen the connection with them.

Your About page is a wonderful opportunity to make a connection with new people to your blog, to sell yourself and give reasons why people should read you.

You can of course do this in other ways (an intro in your sidebar perhaps) but a page dedicated to sharing your information in this way can really work well.

Further Reading - Add an About Page to Your Blog, How to Write Your “About Me” Page and Conduct an About Page Audit

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Amazon Associates Program Add ‘Site Stripe’ - Make Affiliate Links from Any Page on Amazon

Posted: 16 Oct 2008 07:01 AM PDT

I just logged into Amazon Associates just now and found that they’ve done a redesign of their Associates area and have added a very handy new feature for Amazon Associates publishers.

It’s called ‘Site Stripe’ and essentially it allows you to create affiliate links as you surf Amazon. It’s a little grey stripe that appears at the top of any Amazon.com page that allows you to link to that page, add a product to an aStore, see your Earnings Summary, See ‘what’s New’, go to a discussion board or see ’settings’.

Here’s how it looks (click to enlarge):



Click links and you are taken to an Associates area relevant to the selection that you make.

This is going to be really handy for Amazon affiliates that link to a lot of products on Amazon - it’ll save flipping between Amazon pages and Associates back end pages and should speed up the process and remove a few steps in the process.

When you log into the back end of Amazon Associates you can set up the settings for this feature by clicking the ‘Links and Banners’ tab and then clicking the ‘Learn More’ button in the ‘Site Stripe’ section. Here you can turn Site Stripe on and off as well as selecting which features you want in the stripe.

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Types of Blogs - Can we Categorize Them?

Posted: 15 Oct 2008 04:07 PM PDT

I just received the following question about categorizing blogs from Ann Handley (from MarketingProfs) that I thought would make a good discussion starter.

“A few weeks ago, Chris Brogan (writing on Shannon Paul’s blog) talked about the importance of being consistent on your blog.

Some blogs, like my personal blog Annarchy are “craft blogs,” Chris wrote. While others, like Brian Solis’s — and this one at ProBlogger — require regular and consistent updating, a constant “pulse” of information.

Which made me wonder, what are the types of blogs?

Can we categorize blogs by type of content they consistently produce — for example, news (like Drudge or Huffington), commentary and opinion, essay or “craft,” and the like? What say you?”

Over to you!

If You Missed the Last ProBlogger Newsletter - Here’s a Sneak Peak

One of the strategies that I use on each of my blogs these days is to have a newsletter (I use Aweber to send them) that is associated with each blog. On my photography blog this newsletter is a weekly affair (I send them each Thursday) but here on ProBlogger they are monthly (ish).

I sent this months email yesterday - but if you are not yet subscribed you can get a sneak peak of it as a html version (the formatting doesn’t convert perfectly from the email version) at:

October ProBlogger Newsletter

If you like what you see and want to receive future editions via email you can sign up by adding your email address here:




Free Bonus
As a small thank you bonus for subscribing - on the thank you page for subscribing there is a link to a one hour podcast interview that I did a few months back with Denise and Patsi from The Blog Squad. In it they interview me about my journey as a blogger and I share a lot of tips on how to improve your blog.

This is not available anywhere else on the web for free so the only way to get access to it is via the newsletter. Enter your email and you’ll have immediate access to the podcast.

Lastly - I’m hoping to expand ProBlogger later in the year. I’ll be inviting those subscribed to the newsletter to beta test the new features before everyone else. So if you’re interested in getting access before everyone else the only way is to be subscribed.

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8 Tips for Affiliate Marketers on Using Twitter

Posted: 10 Oct 2008 07:10 AM PDT


Two days ago I asked Does Affiliate Marketing belongs on Twitter. The conversation that has emerged from that question has been rich - thanks for your contribution.

At the end of that post I said that I would post some tips today for affiliate marketers on how perhaps they should engage in the practice on Twitter (if at all).

As I mentioned in the previous, post I’m not anti affiliate marketing or doing it via new media - but I think the ‘method’ and ‘attitude’ of the marketer is very very important. It can mean the difference between conversion or not - it can also mean the difference between keeping followers and losing them.

Before I get into some Twitter specific tips let me share a previous article with some general affiliate marketing tips for bloggers.

Let me also say that I’m still not convinced that Twitter is the best place for affiliate marketing. However if you do choose to do it on Twitter here are some starting points:


Tips for Promoting Affiliate Products on Twitter
1. Relevancy is Key
One of the things that I noticed earlier in the week about those who were promoting the affiliate product on Twitter (an AdSense tips product) was that quite a few of them were not normally writing about anything to do with AdSense. Adding a link to an affiliate product that has little to do with what you normally write about on Twitter is not smart. For starters it won’t convert and secondly it potentially will annoy your readers. If you’re going to directly promote products from Twitter make sure they are relevant to the followers you have.


2. Personalization Matters
Another obvious flaw in many of the tweets that we saw in the example mentioned in the previous post were that they were identical to everyone else’s. We saw Joel Comm set up a system where he pre-populated tweets with a script that simply told those reading it to go download a product. Joel actually stopped by my previous post and reflected (among other things) that those who personalized their messages converted better than those who did not. I think this says a lot. A personal recommendation is going to get a much better response in terms of actual conversions and it is far less likely to hurt your relationship with your followers as the tweet will be in your voice and hopefully out of your experience with the product.


3. Genuine Recommendations
My policy with affiliate marketing is to only recommend products that I have used or have had someone close to me who I trust use and recommend. This is again something that will add weight to your recommendation and increase conversion - but it’ll also help your reputation and stop you from promoting products that are rubbish. Recommend a product that doesn’t work and your own reputation and any trust you’ve built up with those who follow your advice will suffer. Don’t sacrifice your own brand for the sake of a few quick dollars.


4. Be Conversational
I have used affiliate links directly on Twitter on three occasions (from memory). In each instance they were Amazon Associate links and they were a part of a conversation that I was having with other Twitter users (from memory they were at times when followers asked me for recommendations on products). The links that I left were relevant, the conversations were started by others and they fit naturally into the conversation. From memory I declared that they were affiliate links on at least two of those occasions. The opposite of this ‘conversational’ tweeting is the ‘cold call’ tweet which comes out of the blue.


5. Link to Affiliate Products Indirectly
If I were to recommend one tips above others it would be this one. I think it would be much more effective and less intrusive with the culture on Twitter to tweet a link to a post you’ve written on your blog that includes an affiliate link - than to tweet the affiliate link directly. Write up a review of the product on your blog, give a balanced review, share why the product is relevant to your readers, tell them who would benefit most from it etc. And THEN tweet a link to the review. The problem with Twitter is that you’ve got 140 or so characters and to really do the product you’re promoting service and to give your readers a well balanced review you need more than that.


6. Moderation is Important
In any affiliate marketing (and perhaps all types of marketing) those who you are speaking with will begin to ’switch off’ and become blind to your promotions if you hit them too many times with marketing messages. This will especially be true on Twitter where I see the audience is highly skeptical to marketing messages, are attuned to transparency and where they can very quickly opt out of receiving future communication with you. Not only can they opt out when your messages get too much - they often subscribe or follow you on the basis of what you’ve already written. If all you ever do is promote products (or yourself) you’re unlikely to grow a readership or become anyone with any kind of influence on Twitter.


7. Listen to Your Followers
The thing I love most about Twitter is that it a listening device. A lot of people use it and promote it as a broadcasting tool (which is can be useful for) but I’m increasingly finding it to be a fantastic way to hear what people are thinking - both about life in general but also you. If you engage in affiliate marketing on twitter make sure you stay in tune with how people respond. This doesn’t just mean watching what people ‘reply’ to you but also means watching what happens to subscriber numbers after you tweet and also watching what people say about you without using your @username (you can set up an RSS feed on Twitter search to watch for keywords like your name).


8. Be Useful
This is a fairly general Twitter tip but it applies to affiliate marketing. If you’re going to promote a product on Twitter make sure it’s highly useful to your followers. This is connected to being relevant - but goes beyond it. I find that the more useful my Twittering is the more positive feedback I get from followers. The same is true from blogging and interestingly enough it applies to the products I’ve promoted over the years. The best feedback that I can possibly get after an affiliate product campaign is from someone who bought the product and thanks me for recommending it because they found it useful. To me this is the ultimate feedback because it means I’ve not only made a little money, but more importantly I have a reader who is happy, who remains loyal and who is perhaps even more loyal than they were before I made the recommendation. This really comes down to smart selection of products to recommend - make sure that they are the best!

There you have it - my guide for Affiliate Marketing on Twitter.

Have Your Say about Affiliate Marketing on Twitter
I’m aware that some will still be pretty anti the idea of promoting affiliate products on Twitter (and I remain unconvinced except through the indirect method of promoting links on your blog rather than direct ones that I mention above) but IF you’re going to do it - those are my starting points.

I’d love to hear more discussion on this topic though. Marketing on Twitter (and all kinds of social media sites) will only continue to happen more and more so the more we discuss it the better!