The good folks at Pontiflex are hard at work educating the publishing community on how to increase revenue using the cost per lead business model. That’s where advertisers pay for a completed lead resulting from a form or part thereof being completed.

Together with SearchForecast, we are working with them to identify publishers from our AdSense Directory which are best suited to increasing revenue beyond text advertising from Google.

Watch the video on Cost Per Lead Now!

Qualified leads are very important for advertisers who can pay handsomely for them. For those AdSense Publishers who are looking for extra revenue from their website without disturbing their current monthly check from Google, Pontiflex have over 100 brand advertisers who will pay you every time a visitor completes an advertiser form.

What I like about Pontiflex is their commitment to transparency and  sharing with their publishers the opportunity to select and choose the advertisers!

Be sure to ask for Leora Blumberg when you speak with Pontiflex or email her at leorab@pontiflex.com

We recently enabled Retargeter.com as an advertiser on the AdSense Publisher Directory at SearchForecast.org.

ReTargeter helps AdSense publishers by bringing traffic back to their sites. I know many marketing VPs here in Silicon Valley who use retargeting technology to build brand credibility – ads show up on premium sites all over the Internet.

Here’s how it works….. Mary visits an AdSense publisher, leaves the site and continues to surf the web. One day later she is checking her mail on Yahoo! Mail or surfing Facebook and she sees an ad for your website. Instantly she is not only impressed with the fact that the site is advertising on major premium sites (“wow they must be legitimate”) but she also clicks on the ad, returns to the site. The theory is returning visitors will convert to customers more readily.

Each day thousands of visitors to our AdSense Publisher Directory look at the keywords which the publishers have used to describe their website.

Finding “like sites” by keywords which publishers have “tagged” their site with yields thousands of new keywords which provide insight into the intent of the publisher and therefore a contextual relevance that advertiser networks want to tap into.

Here’s a sample of Publisher Websites Featuring Relevant Keywords for Advertisers:
find, inexpensive, budget, affordable, america, fastest, cheapest, site, canada, usa, best, is, how, why, where, when, what, who, american, printer, cables, specialty, paper, ink, refill, kits, ink, refills, printer, inkjet, cartridges

With over 1.2 million keywords in our AdSense Directory, adnetworks, affiliates, publishers and technology providers can find the precise keyword that the publisher currently use on their website.

As the picture illustrates, if each publisher was a ping pong ball, the interconnectivity and overlap of keywords in the publisher universe is constantly moving.  Our crawler updates 50,000 websites per day to ensure greater targeting of relevant publishers. This will ensure advertisers have greater click through rates and better return on investment.

Last month, we opened up our AdSense Publishers Directory to a select group of adnetworks and technology providers, including OpenX and Payoneer, who have the vision of helping us connect the community of AdSense Publishers.

I visited the New York Public Library recently. The names of  contributors who built and maintain this safehouse of literature where the public can openly access the publishers  reminded me of our vision for the  SearchForecast Publisher Directory which now holds 5+ million publisher website URLs.

In the same way as FlickR tagged photo’s – providing better descriptions from owners – we have done so for Publishing websites running Google AdSense. Each Publisher website in our Publisher Directory is “tagged” by keyword. There are 1.2 million keywords.

As we help AdNetworks find publishers via partnership lead generation program and connect publishers via our CRS Conference, we are striving to build and preserve SearchForecast.org to provide future generations with a digital roadmap of publishers and how they described and published their websites.

Localyte is a start up based here in Silicon Valley which I am an advisor to.

Localyte.com has built a growing army of 42,000 local experts in 10,000 destinations across 170 countries. These locals produce geotaged reviews about points of interests (like Restaurants, Museums, Shopping Places, Cafe, Parks, etc.). They have developed a “secret sauce” for growing a worldwide community with very little resources and they also cracked the code for engaging the community to generate reviews about local places in high volume and for free. At current growth rate they expect to have more than 500,000 reviews in the next 12 months. Here’s an example of what they are producing: http://www.localyte.com/places-to-visit/Sri+Lanka?

Watch the video on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4_c3E2aTxo for more information and an example of how Localyte’s “real time” technologies are helping travelers today enrichen their holiday experiences.

Localyte.com produce high-volume geo-taged local content by using Google Map API.

Over coffee in San Francisco this week with Dax Hamman, Head of Display Media at iCrossing, we  discussed the EU cookie law change. Check out the overview here: http://www.daxthink.com/2009/11/eu-passes-cookie-law-opt-in-required.html.

So when I think of retailers such as BestBuy, Eddie Bauer and advertising networks such as Permuto, I can’t help but realize there are going to be a lot of compliance required – not least of all for management here in Silicon Valley to understand the regulatory changes. Perhaps the consumer age of the Internet is going to take on more of the restrictions that mass marketing channels such as direct mail and tele-marketing services now have to comply with.

When Lily Allen – English singer – left a note saying she’d quit Twitter, 2 things come to mind. Firstly, its annoying even those who are famous. Did Google ever do that? Secondly, what about the 138,541 followers who also are now thinking twice about following someone else. So despite Lily saying she was an “Neo Luddite” I think there are just so many times you want to or have something to say to someone else. The guys up the road in San Francisco at Twitter HQ should be watching carefully as it’s becoming ridiculous how people feel an elephant herd mentality to “tweet” everything. Its like having online tourettes syndrome. Maybe that’s why Lily swears so much in her lyrics!

For the record Twitter was down again today! Probably gave everyone some peace from the tweeting I’m subconsciously hearing these days. One of the secrets of MySpace success was the reputed members which switched from FriendFinder when their service crumbled under a technologically weak infrastructure.

I remember sitting in a meeting in LA in 2005 and listening to people who worked at FriendFinder and them lamenting about how their technology platform failed. The story goes here in Silicon Valley that MySpace picked up lots of dissatisfied FriendFinder customers.

When I hear of Jack Dorsey, who coded Twitter, working on other projects, I put two and two together and voila – we have the real issue. The guy who built the app is not there to oversee it.  I’ve seen shooting stars before and when entrepreneurs see this happening here in Silicon Valley, they pounce. Beware of your trajectory Twitter, programmers who understand scalability and inflection points of customer dissatisfaction are watching.

I like my coffee and find inspiration in sitting with iPhone in one hand, double expresso in the other, flipping the NewYorkTimes.com or other websites around the Content Revenue Strategies Conference we run twice a year – looking for new start ups that need help.

Raised in the coffee capital of Melbourne, Australia, its easy to consume 3-4 cups per day. So now I find myself in cafes from the famous Buck’s of Wooside to Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto to Peets in Menlo Park. Whilst the coffee is different, there is the familiar site of two guys sitting around talking about their start up company. So I’ve noticed that often, the same people go to these cafes and are often talking to different people. They have a knack for striking up conversations with others and so welcome to Silicon Valley, where coffee is helping – as it has done for centuries – people pitch ideas to each other.

I was in London in the previous weeks and visited the BBC on several occaisions. The full impact of the Internet dawned upon me as the plans were unveiled to launch the BBC.com to the world in Q1, 2010. It is a milestone that my firm, SearchForecast can work with the technical leaders at the BBC to help architect the structure of how that content can be maximized for search engines.