Bonjourno,
First I’m going to take a minute and recount my non-tech Thanksgiving…
Well, Thanksgiving is over and done with and I feel approximately 8 pounds heavier. No joke, Im pretty sure thats the realistic amount of Turkey that I imbibed this Thanksgiving. I went the “I take everything to the next level and beyond” route this year and hauled a 29.8 pound Turkey home. It was the biggest one I could find at the store basically. (Mind you this beast of a bird was intended for a party of 8, and we didn’t even get through a quarter of it… HA well, LOTS of leftovers) I honestly could barely fit this thing in the oven. It had maybe an 1/8th of an inch extra room in there.
I enjoy cooking, so let me explain how I went about tackling my nemisis, the overweight Turkey. First I made a brine of 2 cups kosher salt, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 3 1/2 gallons of water, and a ton of different spices. Then I soaked the Turkey in that for about 20 hours while it defrosted. Then when it came time to cook her up, I stuffed the cavity with quartered onions, thyme, rosemary, salt/pepper. Then I made an herd butter rub for the skin. You mix rosemary and sage into 1 whole stick of sweet creme butter at room temperature. Then you take that and rub it all over the outside fo the turkey, and also seperate the skin and rub it all over between the skin and the meat as well. Throw it in the oven for 7 hours, basting it occasionally, at 350 degrees F. For the first 6 hours, cover it with tin foil, and remove the foil for the last hour to brown up the skin. Holy crap it was phenomenal. Ive never tasted turkey that good. The brine-soaking made an enormous difference.

So back to tech-talk. With Thanksgiving long gone and Turkeys everywhere taking a moment to sigh with relief, the Christmas season is fully upon us. How do I know this? Well I use a method called “walk-into-your-nearest-drug-store.” No one knows the seasons better than retail fronts that sell the accompanying possibly useless extras such as tiny santa keychain LED lights.
Now, with Christmas upon us, it is almost imperative that websites help people to make the decisions that they need to make. We find this is the perfect time to offer some interactive gadget buying guides to internet surfers. I mean, who doesn’t want help with figuring out which gadget is right for them, and the truth is that the vast majority of people trying to purchase things like digital cameras or printers, have no idea what they are really looking for. They simply know that they want it because they have heard from friends about how great that certain gadget is. Its a whole different story though when you get down to actually trying to make your decision out of 40 cameras…
By the way, did anybody see that Fusion pen? Looks right up my dad’s alley.

Cheers
-Pete

First off, here’s the link to the partner area on TechSelector.com where you can sign up:
Sign up and more Info
Hey guys whats up. Okay, this is tardy, I know. So Im going to finally explain the new service that we launched at Blogworld last week. Its essentially a portable version of our interactive buying guides, but here’s the thing, its not exactly like your run of the mill amazon store or api. We see the system that displays on your site as being one big very interactive advertisement that not only gives you a new PPC revenue stream, but also new space to place your own advertisments that you would normally serve. The PPC part of it is just sort of an extra bonus. What we are really after here is higher page impressions on your advertisements per user. See, a typical blog just doesn’t see a ton of page views/user, maybe 1-3 on average. But when you direct users through the buying guides, your going to see ad impressions of more like 6-10 per user. So you can take literally any advertisements you have, whether they are from an ad network, or a shopping widget, amazon ad, whatever… and place them in the ad spaces and serve them around the system.

What we are doing with this is on several levels, and thats why a lot of times people just don’t quite understand it at first. By placing one or several of these “interactive ads” on your site, you are giving your users a really cool service (that is actually going to help them!), increase your the ad revenue of your current advertisements, and also give you extra PPC revenue.
Its actually really simple to use and implement too.
First off, the system is javascript that you configure in the partner area, an then cut/paste into your site. This is a screenshot from the partner area:

Then you can click on the setup ads link and set up any ads you want to display in your ad space around the system. Once you set them up, you can then drag and drop them around the three spaces… its a really cool tool especially if you dont have a lot of programming skills. Check it out:

Okay so now that Ive done that, I can preview the interactive ad Ive created. In this case, Ive only chosen a few categories, Ive chosen to use the embedded version, and Ive chosen to put ads in all three ad areas. You also get a revenue share of any PPC revenue that is produced. That happens whenever a user clicks through one of the pricing links in the system. So check that out:

This is a ready-made solution for any blog, and yes I mean ANY blog. You don’t have to be consentrating on gadgets or on shopping for this to apply to your blog/website. There was a guy who came to our booth telling us about how he sold consumer electronics through his POLITICS blog… Totally unrelated subject matter, but everyone is interested in gadgets like these, especially because Christmas is coming up and its presents time!
Oh yeah, so another interesting point is this… We also have a referral program where you can get 10% of anything we make from new referrals for a year. You do that by just posting one of our “tagged links” and directing people through it to our registration pages. We automatically track everything.

So give it a try. Its ridiculously easy to sign up, its free, and the only thing it can do is help you on several levels on your site. If anyone has any questions, just email us at info@techselector.com

Cheers!
-Pete

Well, Blogworld was a ton of fun. I met a lot of great people, and found out about some really interesting things people are doing. I was really impressed with how well the show was put together for its first year. Aside from nice setup and asthetics of the show, it had a pretty impressive line up of speakers that I really didnt expect would be at a smaller show like this one. I really think that next year will easily be twice the size. There were a lot of company reps walking around, and one thing I definitely would have like to see more of is straight, pure bloggers walking around. Granted, I did get to talk to quite a few of them, but it would have been cool to see even more breadth of blogging backgrounds.
I think we represented the Select ta tha Tech pretty well. We had sort of an extremely multidimentional product that we were launching there, so it really took some explaining and demoing to get people to understand what we were trying to accomplish. Wait wait wait… I just realized that I havent even broken the news about our new blog revenue solution on our own TechSelector blog yet. That will have to wait for the next post though. Okay so where was I?… Ah yes. Explaining to people. It was funny because what we were explaining just totally clicked with some people, but others had a tough time grasping what we were doing there. I found the whole scene to be positive, mildly comical, and just plain fun. We were right next to the guys from Snap.com, and they were hilarious. (I ate a lot of their free mints, and let me just say that they were downright delicious…)

Well, its now somewhere around 2 am here. So its bedtime for me. My next post will likely be me explaining what we were actually at BlogWorld to unveil!

-CHeAs

Pete

Well, we are at BlogWorld, and I am getting ready to go set up our booth. If anyone is at the event, our booth is 227, so come check us out. We have a brand new revenue solution. Im going to do an in depth posting on it tonight sometime, but here is the link to information on it for now: