WordCamp Buenos Aires Part 3

Monetizing Blogs.

Guillermo Bracciaforte.

Guillermo Bracciaforte from Google AdSense. There are tons of blogs with publicity.

Question: Should we even try to monetize our blogs? It depends. If the blog does not have visits it will not make money. Mariano Amartino says that with less than 10K visits per day you won't be able to make a living.

AdManager: Ad Serving. You can manage ads from various sources. With Ad Networks you allways fill all ad spaces on the blog. The Ad Server will always show the highest CPM ad.

Ad Sense. Searches for keywwords in the content and decides to display a relevant ad according to those keywords. Placement is key for the ads.

Formats also pay a big part on how much money we will get from publicity.

Understanding profits. We can see how much money each format makes and decide the best practices.

Juan Bongiovanni

Juan Bongiovanni, Zed Digital. How big companies spend their online money. Creatives and media are separated in agencies. Big corporations have global accounts which centralize all ad spend.

Big Media is not growing traffic. Traffic grows on Social Media. Agencies are loosing their main ally: Media. Big companies start paying more attention to bloggers because they have good page rank and they have growing audiences.

The industry has forked into 2 perceptions, CPM and CPC. Blogs should focus on building their value. Although CPM remains stable, the audiences on sites are different, but CPM does not reflect that.

Bloggers should understand where brands spend their money. Bloggers should try to avoid dealing with media agencies.

A good alternative is to aim for PR budgets instead of Maketing Budgets.

Q&A

Amartino: AdServing agencies should be 100% transparent, if they are not end relationships with them.

Traditional Media Agencies only talk to bloggers if their clients ask them to do so. They are too used to picking up the phone and just calling the newspaper to work online Ad positioning.

You have to have accountability regarding your audience because that is the only tool you have to better sell yourself.

Above and Beyond plain Text.

Alejando Ponicke and Miguel Angel Saez, Microsoft.

Alejandro and Miguel Angel are demonstrating how easy it it to install a WordPress blog under Microsoft IIS using Microsoft Web Platform. They use the infamous Microsoft method of next -> next -> finish.

IIS 7 modified its Architecture, leaning towards modularization, thus PHP is another module within IIS.

2 installers, one for the platfomr, one for the aditional packages (WordPress amongst them).

Miguel Angel is going to demonstrate how to use Microsoft Live Writer. Live writter was born because they found out that Word wasn't all that good for Blogging.

WLR's nicest feature is that it is an extensible software. They have a plugin architecture.

Demo: they get a video from soapbox and embed it into Facebook.

SmoothHD.com. Service built around silverlight. I must admit the streaming looks very crisp. Service automatically lowers quality if it detects that the bandwith is not optimal.

This type of service will become publically available (as in giving people the ability to upload HD videos) soon. When you embed a video using WLR it creates an iFrame that points to silverlight.live.

Now they showcase photosynth.com. Service builds a 3D wireframe directly out from user-uploaded photos. The example they show is of the statue of liberty using 57 pictures. People can create their own 3D models. Output of photosynth can also be embedded into WordPress.

Ismael Briasco.

Ismael is going to present miravos.tv.

They used WordPress because it is easy and flexible. WordPress is a CMS.

How to use WordPress for a VideoBlog. Not difficult, just posts with embedded videos and a good design wrapping it all.

Why did they decide to do miravos.tv: psicofxp.com and trix started discussing about doing somethign with video on last years WordCamp. There are no well-positioned video blogging sites in Latin America.

Ismael says he could feel how different links and pingabks feeded their launch.

Juan Codagnone

Juan from Flof. Flof is a tagging platform based on wordpress. They use Google Maps and Open Street Maps. All data can be exported and reused in other sites. Juan underlines that ecverythin at flof uses open formats.

Short on Juan because I head to the stage.