Can Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer play nicely together? (Part I)

Over the past couple of years, I've run both Google Analytics (GA) and Google Website Optimizer (GWO) on the same site. The problem is that out of the box, if you add a GWO experiment to a set of pages, GA will stop reporting correctly about those pages. (The situation that I run into is that I add a GWO experiment to one of my Goals -- say a lead gen funnel -- and then the GWO stats are correct. But GA stops reporting on my goal funnel. Quite an annoying situation.) Given that I'm fundamentally lazy (in a bad way) I haven't really tried to sort this out (until now).

First things first -- does Google realize that there's a problem, and do they think it can be solved? Turn out the answer is "Yes" and "Yes".

How to fix it. Google gives instructions here. Those instructions look like they're a bit outdated, as they include a call to secondTracker._initData() -- and GA / GWO doesn't seem to use that function call anymore.

But, it looks like the change is pretty straightforward -- all your GA code is going to be using:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxx-xx");
pageTracker._trackPageview();

While all the GWO code is going to be using:

var secondTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-yyyy-yy");
secondTracker._trackPageview("/zzzzzzz/test");
-- or --
secondTracker._trackPageview("/zzzzzzz/goal");

So, I've made the changes -- I'll have to check in tomorrow to see if they actually worked!

Update 6/20/09: By the way, this solution works perfectly.

I need some Google Analytics Help!

A few weeks ago, one of the folks that I drive affiliate traffic for mentioned that another affiliate had seen improved revenue by running a 300x250 ad for their affiliate offer in place of an AdSense ad. I said I'd test it, and within a few days I was running a bright and shiny new clickable image. Now I must admit that I was lazy, and I ran the ad without really thinking through how I would tell which ad performed better. I was just hoping that the results would be so dramatic and obvious that I wouldn't be required to actually, you know, think. However, I did go so far as to add a JavaScript call (pageTracker._trackPageview('/affiliate/click1')) to the image that would record the click with Google Analytics each time someone clicked the image.

Now that I've dug around on the web a bit, I have a strategy for comparing the revenue generated by the two, and I'm looking for some feedback on this approach.

Basic Methodology

I'm going to write a cron job that switches the ads every 5 minutes. So, the AdSense ad will be displayed half the time, and the affiliate ad will be displayed half the time. (I could display the ads randomly on every pageview, but I can't think of any bias that this simpler approach introduces.)

Calculating AdSense Revenue

The AdSense ad is its own channel within AdSense, so I can slice and dice the data by channel and date.

Calculating Affiliate Revenue

This is a bit trickier. Basically, I'm setting up an "advanced segment" within Google Analytics for everyone that views the page '/affiliate/click1'. Then, if I segment "Goals -> Total Conversions" for the date range that I'm comparing to AdSense, I can get the total number of conversions. By multiplying the conversions by the revenue per conversion, I can get a dollar value for the affiliate ad.

If the two ads are alternated for a week, at the end of that week I should have a dollar amount for AdSense and a dollar amount for the Affiliate revenue. Whichever is higher, wins, no?

Potential problems


I'm assuming that by alternating the ads every 5 minutes, I will serve about as many of one ad as another. If it turns out that in fact, I've served 10x the number of affiliate ads as Adsense ads, then the results would be biased. Is there a straightforward way within GAnalytics to show the number of times an image is displayed? (An onLoad event for the image perhaps?)

One of the issues that comes to mind is that people may be more likely (or perhaps less likely!) to click on an ad if they see it multiple times. So it might be that the very act of alternating between AdSense and an image ad increases (or decreases) the number of conversions. So, I think ideally this would be further segmented: A group that sees only AdSense ads, a group that sees only Affiliate ads, and a group that sees both (if they request multiple pages from the site). But I can't think of a straightforward way to implement this (absent a cookie infrastructure that I'm not currently willing to invest in). Any thoughts?

This feels sort of kludgy -- is there a more elegant way to do this from within Google Analytics?

Why Geeks Suck at Organic SEO

Or, Why Google Loves Links

I have a t-shirt that has #!/usr/bin/perl on the front, and a bunch of obfuscated perl code on the back. If you were to type that code into a file, and submit it to a perl interpreter, it would print: "The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris". Now I'm as much of a fan of automation and a willingness to boil reluctant oceans as the next person, but such virtues don't apply to everything.

Success with organic SEO depends on two things: (1) Good long-tail content; and (2) Good inbound links. People say other things matter, but they're wrong.

Geeks excel at the first task: generating long-tail content. That's because content generation scales. You can create a technology platform that makes it relatively easy to published edited articles; you can integrate databases with templates to create endless variations on subtly different keyword combinations. If you're a fan of generating textual crap you can scrape RSS feeds, use a rewriting script to munge the text and publish limitless text with the push of a button.

But, Geeks don't excel at building good inbound links: acquiring inbound links doesn't scale, and hubris is rarely your friend. It requires repetitive work that isn't easy to automate, such as making phone calls and developing relationships.

This, of course, makes the quality and quantity of inbound links an ideal criteria to keep the world's most effusive content generators from spamming Google's index. Look at how Google reacts to link acquisition strategies that do scale: link-buying (removing pagerank of participating sites, requesting that people report purchased links), links in comments / forum posts / wikis (devaluing IBL, promoting the nofollow tag) not to mention older link-building techniques such as massive link farms.

Geeks suck at organic SEO because Google has to make organic SEO depend on something Geeks suck at. Or, said differently, if Geeks were great at building good organic inbound links, Google would have to put its algorithmic weight behind factors that Geeks suck at.

Charles & Hudson: Best Home Improvement Blog

I just thought I'd give props to my favorite home improvement blog: Timothy Dahl's Charles and Hudson. As you know if you read my blog regularly, I work in the home improvement industry, and Timothy's blog is the best I've found.

He has a long history in writing about home improvement issues, and you can expect to read posts that cover tools (here's my favorite), DIY news and new products. If you use a RSS reader, you subscribe to his RSS feed here.

New experiment in selling domain names

I've written in the past (here and here) about my attempts to sell keyword-rich, but typein-traffic-poor domains. I'm going to try again.

I'm going to sell the domain name via a reverse auction, using Twitter as the platform. Starting at 8:00 am CST tomorrow, I'll twitter the initial price of the domain on my Twitter account (you can follow me here: http://twitter.com/madbury). The initial price will be less than $100. If you want to buy the domain, just reply (publicly) to my tweet with the word "SOLD", and we'll work out the payment details (via PayPal). The first reply with the word "SOLD" will win the domain.

If the domain doesn't sell at the initial price, I'll drop the price a few hours later -- and continue dropping the price during the day.

The name I'm going to sell is: Curtain-Rod.com. Google's AdWords keyword tool show 246,000 queries for the term "curtain rod" per month, with a clicks costing $1.33 apiece. Given that consumers are holding off on larger home improvement purchases, my guess is that they're shifting their spending to less expensive repairs and improvements around the house. (Indeed, Google's December traffic numbers for "curtain rod" show 301,000 queries, rather than the average of 246k queries.)

Generic keyword domains are great tools for ranking on the keyword in question, so you could easily tie this domain name with content from a service like AEIOU.com and potentially develop a valuable site for a very small investment.

If you have questions about the auction or the domain, please feel free to leave a comment, or email me at: madbury at gmail.

What does a "natural" distribution of links look like?

From time to time I see articles claiming that link-building campaigns should try to acquire a "natural" distribution of inbound links. Sometimes people think you should have links from sites of different page ranks (text-link-ads.com used to claim this). Other times people talk about the distribution of anchor text for your inbound links. (Here's a SearchEngineWatch article that claims this.)

If you're out there doing weird artificial stuff with inbound links (like buying them, or link farms) then I agree -- you should worry about having a "natural" link distribution.

However, the problem is, you and I have no idea what a "natural" link distribution looks like.

When I used to run Talkr.com, people would often link to the site with the link-text "Talkr" or "Talkr.com".

When I linked to the SearchEngineWatch a couple of paragraphs ago, it was much more natural for the anchor text to say "article" than "anchor text distribution article".

For the last few great feature articles that I've published, I've gotten a few links from very popular high-pagerank sites that made the editorial decision that it was a good story. But no links from little sites.

So what does a "natural" link distribution look like? You and I don't know. And I doubt that Google knows.

How would Google build up a corpus of websites that only had editorially chosen links, against which they could train their algorithm? (Perhaps it would be easier to build a corpus of websites that had spammy inbound links -- but the problem there is that good sides with spammy inbound links would also attract natural links, because they would tend to rise in the search results.)

Probably, there's a distribution of distributions. And it may be quite possible for Google to spot dramatically-manufactured link distributions.

But the irony is that there's a good chance that manually trying to tweak your anchor text or the PR of your inbound links results in easy-to-spot unnatural distributions like:

• Buying links based on pagerank formulas (ie buy x PR 5 links, 2x PR4 links, 3x PR3 links, etc.)
  
• Systematically varied anchor text (ie 20% says "mortgage leads", 20% says "mortgage quotes", 20% says "mortgages", 20% says "buy mortage", 20% says "insurance.com")

My guess is that the easiest way to make your link distribution stand out as manufactured is to manually try to vary it.

What do you think? Am I an idiot, or is this spot-on?

One reason fighting paid links is so difficult

I contacted a website today with a pointer to a great new article that I just published. The writer that wrote the article probably spent more than 20 hours on it. I spent another 10-15 hours, and the editor that worked on it spend 3-5. It's a 1600+ word article that nails an important commercial topic, and it's a very strong piece of work.

As part of promoting the article, I contacted a number of websites that are interested in the vertical that this article covers. One of the replies that I received said:

"We normally charge $25 to include links, but I've waived it in this case and added a link to the article to XYZ.com"

Has Google flagged XYZ.com in the past for selling links?

In my opinion, this link should pass PageRank. I think Google should think that it should pass PageRank. Yet there's simply no way (unless they're parsing Gmail messages with some very sophisticated algorithms) that they could attain a sophisticated enough understanding of my site's relationship with XYZ.com to correctly pass PageRank on this post, but not the ones that are sold for $25.

The reality is that there's a chance that this link will pass PageRank (ie Google hasn't penalized them for selling links in the past). Or, as I understand how Google addresses paid links, the link simply won't hurt me. I suppose the net takeaway is that I'm glad I don't have Google's job!

PPC is a Dead-End Strategy for Affiliates

Affiliates should exit the PPC market as quickly and efficiently as they can. Here's why:

1. Barriers to entry in PPC are incredibly low. If you're working in a space that has decent payouts you either (a) have lots of competition -- which means small margins; (b) are in a really small niche -- which means a relatively small upside; and/or (c) are about to get lots of competition as other PPC affiliates test your niche and discover that it has good margins.
   
2. As an affiliate, every conversion has a relatively small lifetime value. (I see this all the time in life insurance -- a single conversion might be worth hundreds of dollars over its lifetime to MetLife, but only $13 to me. There's simply no way I can compete with the 300+ life insurers (not to mention potentially thousands of insurance agents and the networks that funnel leads to them) in the PPC space.
3. You have no long-term competitive advantage and no assets. On the technology side, let me describe the ultimate technology to you: you know on a keyword-by-keywords basis how much a click costs you, how much it's worth to you, and a pretty good estimate of how much more traffic you could get if you increased the amount you spent per click. You're able to tie those three pieces of information together programatically, so that you maximize your profits. Here's the problem -- lots of companies figured this out 3 or 4 years ago, and they're busy expanding this formula to every niche they can find. Their technology is more robust, more scalable and better designed than whatever you will throw together in the next couple of years. They've already tested and wrung advantage from the next 10 niches you think of, and they've negotiated better payouts on their conversions.

Mini strategies that might buy you a bit more time:

• Get some of your PPC traffic to subscribe to your email list. Good idea, but it still won't save your bacon -- you'll probably lose them as a conversion in the immediate term, thereby driving up the average cost of your traffic, and running a successful email list takes actual work.
  
• Hope that some of your PPC traffic will link to your site, thereby sending you more organic traffic. Yeah, not likely on the a/b tested, limited content landing page you just sent them to. Either (a) your landing page solves their problem so that you make no money from them but 1 in 1000 might link to it; or (b) your landing page convinces them that they need to buy a product to solve their problem, so they leave your page and link to the wonderful product or service that you just pointed them to.

Of course, I don't mean to sound like an idiot -- PPC is great for lots of folks. For example, the folks you're acting as an affiliate for, for example. They make a lifetime value from each conversion 10x what you make. They're reinvesting in an actual business that solves people's problems. They're getting better and better at converting their visitors, so their cost per lead probably stays relatively stable as increasing PPC competition drives up their prices. They reinvesting the money you've earned them into building a bigger affiliate network, meaning that you are less and less important to them, and are subsidizing their attempts to reduce your margins. You're just the sucker that sends them cheap conversions between now and when you're run out of business.

Free Domains a Complete Flop

So, in my continuing attempts to sell some of my domain names, I've tried three new (and completely unsuccessful) approaches:

1. Giving away domain names in return for someone giving me the one true sales solution. (Two people did give interesting replies -- essentially suggesting that I manually try to sell the domains to end users.) However, neither expert was interested in the domains I was giving away. (Thanks Andy, though, for your kind words.)
2. I tried selling Bridal-Fairs.com on DigitalPoint's Buy/Sell/Trade forum. No nibbles, even at the bargain basement price of $8.
3. I approached Rick Latona about selling WoodFurnaces.net and WoodBoilers.net. He politely declined -- though whether it was because he didn't like the names, or because he thought my price was too high, I'm not sure.

Which leaves me, perhaps, slightly wiser and slightly disappointed. Next up: contacting end users.

Giving Away 5 Commercial Generic .COM Names

During the year and a half that I have been experimenting with domaining, I have developed a portfolio of about 400 names. The best names in my portfolio are quite good, and pay for themselves and a good portion of the rest of the portfolio. The worst of those names have expired (or are expiring). The remainder (which make up the bulk of my portfolio) is made up of what I consider to be 2nd-tier names. These are largely ".com" domain names, made up of 2 commercial keywords, and separated by a dash.

Monetization options for these 2nd-tier domains are limited:

1. I can park them -- although only a handful pay their own registration fees
   
2. I can develop them myself (see, for example, Sport-Trucks.com), which is time and money-intensive;
3. I can outsource their development to a company like AEIOU.com (see this post);
4. I can sell them

While I cannot claim to be an expert in acquiring domain names, I can certainly claim to be a complete novice at selling them. I'm hoping that the folks that read this post are considerably more experienced in that area than I am. To that end, I am going to give away 5 domains to readers that can help me figure out how to sell some of my other 2nd tier names.

The following 5 names are representative of the quality of the bulk of my portfolio.

1. ARTIFICIAL-TREE.COM
2. DRAFTING-SUPPLY.COM
3. SHAPED-SKI.COM
4. SILVER-BULLION.COM
5. TOILETRY-BAG.COM
   

I will give these names away to 5 people that tell me useful things I don't already know about selling domains. This decision will be purely subjective -- but I'm serious about giving these away to people that provide truly useful information. (You need to supply a GoDaddy account that I can push these names to -- one name per person.)

This might include:

• Contact information for a good domain mailing list that promotes these sorts of names
• Contact information of a person or company that buys these sorts of names in bulk, for a substantial multiple of the reg fee
• Contact information for services (or qualified individuals) that will find and approach end user buyers in return for a percentage of the sales price
• Other techniques that you've found to be genuinely useful

It's important to me that you have actually had experience with the person, service or company that you submit. (Simply sending me a list of all the domain mailing lists would not be terribly helpful, for example.)

Thank you for taking the time to read this far. You're welcome to leave tips in the comments (please leave contact info) or email them to me at madbury at gmail daught kom. (Spell that phonetically, of course.)

Quick Review of AEIOU.com

Rick Latona launched AEIOU.com a month or so ago, to provide a way for domainers to build natural search engine traffic to their 2nd-tier domains. (ie Domains that are built on strong commercial keywords, but that don't get substantial type-in traffic.)

As the vast majority of my domains fall into this category, I thought I'd give the service a spin. I plunked down $500 to have AEIOU build two websites for me, on cross-country-skis.com and ski-hats.com.

About 2 weeks later, the domains were active, and after about a month, cross-country-skis.com is now the top result on search.msn.com for the term "cross country skis". (It has bounced in and out of this position once or twice, so who knows how stable that position is at this point.)

At current traffic levels it would take about 6 years to pay off development costs, but given this initial success it may be worthwhile to build out more content so that the site ranks better over time.

So, if you have strong commercial 2-3 word domains with dashes that aren't monetizing well on type-in traffic, you might want to give AEIOU a try and see what happens.

Amazingly Bad Customer Service From GoDaddy Handled a Dispute

I have been in something of a running customer service dispute with GoDaddy.com since June. I have a small (400 domains), middling-quality domain portfolio that I manage with GoDaddy. Apart from registering the domains with GoDaddy, I also used their CashParking service to place ads on most of those domains. I had a couple of minor complaints with their CashParking service:

1. they charge about $9 a month to place ads on the site;
   
2. they charge an additional $10 a month to mail me a check (the checks were each less than $100, so this represented a large percentage of revenue);
   

However, those complaints were far overshadowed by one amazing benefit: every time I registered a new domain with GoDaddy, it would be placed into my CashParking account by default. That means that all the work was in discovering new domains, rather than configuring them.

So, at the end of the day, I was quite happy to continue working with GoDaddy.

However, all this came to a screeching halt in late June. I received an email from the CashParking team saying that my parking account had been irrevocably suspended. Sure enough, all of my parked domains were offline with a message saying that the site was unavailable. I called the CashParking team to find out what happened, and they said that they could not give me details -- but that pay-per-click traffic had been sent to one or more of my domains in violation of the terms of service, and therefore they were cancelling my CashParking account.

I found this frustrating, but I understood why they cancelled my account. First, for the record, I did not send pay-per-click ads to any of my parked domains. Nor did I encourage, suggest, allow, barter, trade or in any other way influence the placement of those ads. Nor am I aware of who did it. And if I could think of any more disclaimers, I would add them. I simply had nothing to do with whatever happened.

GoDaddy had a right to cancel my account, and I understand that they can't take my word that I had nothing to do with it. After all, someone (apparently) sent those ads -- and whoever sent that traffic apparently sent it without any financial incentive -- after all, they wouldn't make any money off of the traffic! Since GoDaddy displays Google ads, and Google doesn't allow arbitrage, GoDaddy had a responsibility to suspend my account.

Here's what makes me angry, though. GoDaddy removed all of my stats for the year that I hosted CashParking with them, and won't give them back! Because I did not keep regular backups (my mistake) I don't have a record of which domains get the most traffic, and what the eCPM is for all the domains. I can't calculate stats on how the length of a domain affects the amount of type-in traffic that it gets. I can't look at seasonality in traffic. I've sent emails, spoken with customer service reps, and even left a voice mail for a Cash Parking supervisor. (The voice mail has not been returned, the better part of a week later.) No dice.

To add insult to injury, GoDaddy just started showing parked ads on those domains again! Let me say that again -- they won't give me a revenue share for the ads, but they're now willing to show ads again as long as they can keep all the revenue!

One other cute little "feature" of the CashParking team canceling my account. They stop showing ads, but they don't stop the $9 / month billing!

GoDaddy -- I must say I am very disappointed in how you've handled this.

How to Choose Colors for Web Design

One of the real (unfilled) market niches in web design is a designer that knows how design affects conversion -- ecommerce conversion, lead gen conversion, home page bounce, etc. When I hire someone to design a website, I'd love it if they were aware of the following sorts of considerations, and had well-grounded opinions on how to use design to address them:

• How different colors encourage or discourage people from buying, or even from sticking around for a second click.
• How images (of people, of products, of pets) affect whether people will buy, register for my site, click on a link.
• How design affects download time for webpages, and how download time affects people's willingness to stay on a site.
• How a/b or multi-factorial testing works, and why that matters for a designer.
• How to balance the SEO value of actual text, vs the "it looks pretty" value of images of text.

And there are a thousand more issues like this. None of the designers that I've ever worked with have ever even thought these issues were important, much less thought that they were a fundamental part of their job.

Anyway, end of rant. But here's a useful article that talks about some of the implicit meanings of color.

Develop many "thin sites" or one deep site?

Just thought I'd give some link love to Andy Sweet, who's wrestling with some interesting issues related to simultaneously developing an entire portfolio of domain names.

Free as in Beer

I've been meaning to talk about my friend Jonathan's new startup DealLocker.com, which is sort of Delicious meets coupons. Let's say that you're about to register a domain name at GoDaddy, but you can't remember that coupon code that saves you 10%? Go to DealLocker.com and search for "godaddy". Better yet, they have a little javascript bookmarklet that you can install in your bookmarks toolbar, which will tell you if there are any deals available on the website that you're surfing.

It's social, because you can store your own coupons there, record whether or not a deal code worked for you, etc. I've been saving $5 - $10 a month with it for the last few months, so I think it's worth your time to take a look.

And, finally getting back to the title of this post, Jonathan just posted a great deal for free Guinness in Boston on Oct. 11, 12 and 13 in Boston.

If only Ask.com's traffic was as good as their support...

I must say, I'm impressed with Ask.com's support folks. I bought 183 clicks from ask on a very competitive keyword. And the average user that came from their network of sites viewed exactly 1.0 pages. Not 1.06 pages, not 1.3 pages, 1.0 pages. During the same time period, the rest of the traffic that came to the site averaged more than 3 pageviews per user.

If you know anything about buying traffic from second tier sources, you know what this means: click fraud. (Someone set up a site, displayed my ads on their site, and then had a bot click on the ad. They got paid, Ask got paid, I lost money.)

Now, this is not a post about the evils of click fraud. As John Battelle would say, it's simply a tax, and if you want to play this game you pay the tax.

But Ask did the right thing when I complained. They researched it, they blocked traffic from that site, they refunded my money and they called me to explain the situation.

The most interesting lesson learned? If you want your ads to appear on Ask.com for competitive terms, buy AdWords ads. Ask backfills their own search results with AdWords. Think about that for a second.

This is no longer the Talkr Blog

So, it's official. If you want to latest news on Talkr, you'll need to go to the new official Talkr blog: http://blog.talkr.com.

I have completed Talkr's sale to LiveOnTheNet.com. You can read the press release here. That's a smart bunch of folks over there, and I think they're going to do great things with Talkr and with the other tools that they're working on.

If you're still reading, here's the sort of stuff that I'll be posting on this blog: experiments in search engine optimization, link-building, and improving monetization. If you have a sneaking hunch that the world already has enough blogs on these topics, you may be right. Here are a handful of blogs that I read religiously:

• SearchBlog (John Battelle)
• Matt Cutts
• JenSense
• linkbuildingblog.com
• ShoeMoney
• Cost Per News

Still reading? Really?

Okay, then I suppose I should tell you what I do. I build content websites that have old-fashioned, useful content on them. Then I drive traffic to them. And then I monetize that traffic. Doing that successfully is all about testing -- A/B testing, multivariate testing, back-of-the-envelope "does it feel like this works" testing. So if you continue to subscribe to this feed, that's what you'll find. Lots of analytics, lots of testing. If that gets your motor running, stay tuned. If not, point your browser to blog.talkr.com.

An Update on Talkr's Sale

I've had a number of interesting phone calls in the last few days. If you are planning to wait until the last minute to place a bid on Talkr (in hopes of avoiding a bidding war) I would encourage you to call me instead: (603) 397-3935.

Professor Larry Press blogs that Talkr's sale "illustrates the attraction and risk" of web 2.0 startups.

Bloggers that have mentioned Talkr's Sale

For those of you "avidly" following Talkr's sale, I thought I'd point to some of the bloggers that have written so far.

Read / Write Web (a long-time user of Talkr) provides the most in-depth post and suggests that Talkr may not be the last Web 2.0 company on the market. Emergency Trap wonders whether Talkr is giving up too soon. 21Talks hopes Talkr will find a buyer. Tycoon's Row provides an alliterative title and describes Talkr as "outstanding". One by One Media suggests that someone with deep pockets ought to roll up Talkr and several other Web 2.0 companies for a later buyout.

Of course, these are just quick summaries -- several of the posts (and comments) offer measured doses of criticism as well.

I'll continue to summarize posts over the next few days.

Talkr is up for sale

This has been a tough decision, and perhaps one that has been long in coming. But, Talkr is now for sale.

I began work on Talkr in March of 2005, and after nearly two years of banging on this idea, I have decided to try to find it a permanent corporate home. I strongly believe that Talkr will thrive as methods of monetizing podcasts become simpler and more robust. Bloggers will provide content and distribution and Talkr will provide increasingly sophisticated text to speech, and ad integration.

However, the companies that monetize podcasts effectively today have full-time ad sales forces. And, although I have immense respect for the people that spend hour after hour on the phone selling ads, it isn't a skill that matches my skillset.

In the meantime, the bloggers that use Talkr deserve better support than I can offer them. They deserve new features, better voices and they deserve to be paid for their time. Since I haven't been able to successfully monetize Talkr, I can't offer that to them.

Thank you to the countless bloggers that have offered support and encouragement. Your excitement and support have kept me going for almost two years. Talkr is still checking feeds and creating audio, so you don't need to make any changes to your site. I'll give you an update next week about this new phase in Talkr's life.