Month: August 2007

10.5% CTR. Hmm.

The company that I am using to make money by writing sponsored posts, PayPerPost, has recently done a study on the average CTR (Click Through Rate) of their advertisers and bloggers. This included 48,000 of them!

The results showed that there is more than a 10% CTR through this form of advertising. In other words (as I understand it), for every 100 people who visit a sponsored blog posting, such as this one, more than 10 of them will click through to the advertiser. That is a pretty high number.

In their article they state that their advertising through another popular ad campaign has been only .5 to 1.5% CTR. That is a huge difference in effectiveness. In my own experience with another campaign I have only seen a .3% Click Through Rate–even lower than theirs. This means that the CTR for PayPerPost is quite high. I am not sure though what the CTR of my sponsored posts would be. I am sure PPP knows, but that is not a statistical feature that I am privy to.

My questions to you are: Have you clicked through to the advertisers that I have written about? Have you bought anything from them?

“I’m weady to go wunning”

Road ID Wrist IDAs I was putting on my Road ID this morning to go for a tempo run, I was reminded of a story that happened a couple of weeks ago at camp.

We were using colored wrist bands for all the campers to separate everyone into teams. Everyone had a bracelet, even our 3 year old daughter. One day she got up in the morning and after getting dressed she declared, “I have my shoes and my bwacelet. I’m weady to go wunning.”

That is what she sees me do when I go running. I get my shoes on and look for my Road ID (that she often hides) so I can go out for my run.

Nothing escapes their observation.

I got turned on to the Road ID through the Run to Win website.

Alan Webb 1 mile video

Alan Webb broke the American record two weeks ago for the 1 mile race. He did it in 3:46:91.

I saw a video of it yesterday. Even though I knew he was going to break the record, I still got caught up in the excitement and emotion of the commentators.

There is a hi resolution version and a low resolution version of the video. It took a while for the hi-res to load in, but that is the one I watched. Apparently many people are having trouble getting it to work. So the low-res may work better for you.

This video is done by a company called Flocasts. They do videos for a couple of different types of sporting events. Their FloTrack division covers track and field. Just buzzing around the site, it looks like they have training programs and such. I have just seen a few videos from them. They do a good job with those. From what I understand, they are doing the filming themselves. They are not pulling news feeds.

Even if you are not into track, it is really neat to watch him break the record at a very small track meet.

Are you digital yet?

I bought a new camera when we were in the US. Our old camera was being fritzy. This new one cost just $100, though I realize that it is not a high end machine. I did not have time to really research out a camera like I am wont to do. Also, I did not have a lot of money available for the project.Samsung 630s

Since I will probably buy a much better camera at a later time, this camera fulfills my desire to have a small, low cost camera that I can take running with me as well as be a great camera to keep handy at all times. I looked at some of the Nikon digital cameras that are available. Especially the smaller compact ones. I like that they use standad SD cards as opposed to a proprietary system like Fuji or Sony.

The Samsung camera won out because it fits all the requirements I had set forth in a previous post. The only rule I broke when buying this camera is that I bought a 2 GB memory card with it. The card only cost $20 and was just $2 more than a 512 MB card. Though that card will hold 600+ pictures at this camera’s best quality, I think it would be foolish to put that many on there. I like to pull the pictures off my camera as soon as possible. I rarely have more than 20 pictures on there before I dump them to the computer, unless I am out to something special for the day and I take a 100 shots or so. But then they get moved to the computer as soon as I can that evening. In the old days if you lost a roll of film to a tragedy, you lost fewer than 40 pictures at the most. If you filled up a card with 600 pictures and had a tragedy, it would be much more devastating. I would encourage anyone to shy away from having your large memory cards maxed out.

I recently saved 253 pictures for a lady who’s memory card got corrupted. It was really just dumb luck that I was able to do so. I was sick about the whole thing because she is someone who highly values her pictures, but has fallen into the trap of buying 1 and 2 GB memory cards and filling them up just because they are cheap.

Digital is becoming much less expensive today. You can get a fairly good quality camera for $100. There is really no reason to do without. With digital you can shoot as many pictures as you like without any further cost. With digital the cost is all up front. When shooting film the cost of the camera is cheaper, but you never stop paying for the privilege to shoot.

[This is a sponsored post.]