by Stoney deGeyter When you’re a business owner or manager, disappointment comes with the job. I love running a business. I love working with people. I love managing an office where the team members don’t hate coming to work on Mondays. But business isn’t always roses, and you often find out a lot about people once they are no longer in your employ. This is one of those stories. One of the things that I have always strived to do is to create a work environment where the employees feel valued and are rewarded for their work. But, no matter how hard you try, you will inevitably hit times where you can’t please everyone. And if you try, you’ll just displease someone else. A few years ago I had to face one of the toughest challenges as a business owner. We had expanded too rapidly, and the internal growth was not matched by growth in new client’s coming in. Our payroll expenses had grown beyond our ability to bear, and layoffs were imminent. For weeks I deliberated over what to do. Every option I could think of was on the table as I weighed the pros and cons of each. One option I was considering was borrowing money in order to keep my entire team in place, but I had already borrowed heavily to invest in the business and those loans were still being paid back. So, borrowing again, especially for an uncertain future, would only have made things more perilous for everyone. One solution I came up with, and ultimately decided on, was to get the team together and ask them all to make a sacrifice as a group. I had already made sacrifices by cutting back on personal income for myself, so I presented what I considered to be a team unification idea. I asked everyone to take a 30% pay cut for three months. The team had to agree to this collectively for it to be a viable solution. I had hoped this would unite the team together and that everyone would “circle the wagons”. The team united, but not in the way I had hoped. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming. The idea itself didn’t have much support by any of the team members, and it ultimately created a crisis of low moral. While I had assumed that letting a few employees go would have had a similar effect, I was caught off guard by how much resentment this particular idea had caused. Then, the real disappointment started. My team was like my family. They were not perfect, but I always tried to be encouraging and supportive as they did their jobs. I did my best to make each member feel important and I worked hard to help them grow in their positions to achieve greatness. Yet, suddenly… I was the bad guy. I understand that the employer/employee relationship is always a bit strained. In a way, it tends to be an “us against them” mentality. But, I have tried very hard over the years to break down those barriers, and to create policies that were fair, forgiving, and flexible. I was not always successful, and not every decision was popular. Inevitably, something would rub someone the wrong way. That’s just the nature of the job. But, even with all that, I still tried to develop positive relationships and create an exciting work environment. So, I was completely thrown by the level of animosity over an idea that I had hoped would build unity. By the next day, I knew I had to take the offer off the table. I had already been approached by some employees that they would not take a pay cut. And, even if some would, the environment had gone so sour that the across-the-board-temporary-pay-cut idea was no longer a viable option. The pool had been poisoned. By taking the offer off of the table, it became clear that I would be forced to let some employees go. By the time the first round of layoffs was made, everyone was fearful that they were next. (Is it wrong of me to find it funny that the highest paid employee, who adamantly refused to take the short-term cut because they were “worth more than that”, was one of the first I had to let go? It’s not right, I know, but you gotta see the irony.) It wasn’t long until I started seeing the signs of wear in other employees. As much as I tried to encourage them, moral was low, and there was almost no way to recover. Bitterness in the office had grown, and now layoffs were not so much essential because of the financial situation, but for the well-being of the environment. Employees which I had struggled so hard to provide for and take care of were now looking out only for themselves. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that everyone needs to take care of themselves and their families first. But, in this case, there was little regard for the needs of the company. I was still doing everything I could to rebuild the team and keep the “family” together, but the every-man-for-himself mentality had taken over. This was one of the saddest situations I’ve ever experienced. It hurt me to see people that I knew and loved turn their back on me when I struggled for ways to rebuild. I continued to foster a positive environment, teach, and encourage the team to improve their skills on a daily basis. I was “in it” for them, only to find that many of them were in no way willing to reciprocate. I knew I was not going to let this incident color my judgment going forward. And looking back now (several years later), I know that I have not. I have learned quite a bit from the experience, though. I am far more cautious and careful in growing beyond our means and making sure there is a cushion available. I’ll also look to continue to build a strong team, and hope to make better decisions when placed in stressful situations. I know not everything will be roses, and things may never be exactly as I want them to be. But, at the very least, I’ve learned some valuable lessons in the process, and I hope to never repeat the same mistakes from the past as we move forward into the future. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Confessions of a Disappointed Manager

Relevancy is a good thing. It makes search and the world more efficient. Many attempts at relevancy, like search is getting more social , may just create more noise. But computers are getting better at understanding language is a good thing “our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports.” But it seems each increase in relevancy justifies additional increases in irrelevancy to increase monetization. ‘Accidental’ Hijacking Each individual piece sounds useful and helpful, but the end effect (and goal) is hijacking and misdirecting traffic to display more ads. Search companies are hijacking publisher content to offer “answers” right in the search results , while testing displaying full images in the image search results . Even when you claim your own business listing, Google will show your customers recommendations of other competing businesses on your business profile page. One of the best advertising based business models is extortion . And while the sum of the pieces may amount to that, certain ad networks are clever in how they tie it all together to *appear* innocent, even when acting like a shark. What does a spam site do? Scrape content, misdirect visitors, and hope to get an ad click. Look at the above sequence through the same lens. It is the same thing - eeeeeeeeeevil . SEO is Evil, Except When I Am Selling It!!!! And yet a lot of the largest online spam publishers / scraper websites are taking a page out of Google’s book…call SEO professionals scammers selling snake oil, while building search arbitrage businesses based on stealing third party content and wrapping it in ads. Perhaps the goal of charlatan douchebags like Dave Sifry and Jason Calacanis are to promote the Google anti-SEO public relations messaging in hoping that Google will not burn their sites to the ground. It may well work. A popular SEO figure who sold a content management system based on cloaking mentioned at a secret meeting amongst Google’s spam team and top SEOs that he loves turning in spammers. If he didn’t promote Google’s misinformed view he probably wouldn’t get away with a business model built on cloaking. What are Technorati and Mahalo but glorified scraper websites? And yet to promote such trash they claim to be search evangelists fighting for the purity of the search results (while they scrape scrape scrape). While publicly those people trash SEO, they sell SEO services , and a friend told me that they are even using high pressure telemarketing and email spam to pitch “services” … one such message I was forwarded stated: Thanks for taking the time to review our new and improved demo. I’m glad you liked it and I’m forwarding you the PowerPoint version for you to truly experience the animation. Once you’ve distributed to the right parties I can always hop on a quick call to go through the demo really quick to really emphasize the value as an SEO component which is what the end result really is. Along the way you reap the benefits of having great content, a social media platform that all work to SEO and drive traffic. So even if up front the value is hard to fit into the normal SEO purchase, think of it as SEO with bells and whistles . And as long as Google continues to rank the main scraper websites from such companies, that provides the proof of value which sells the garbage content to big brands. And so the above pitch was made by you-know-who, and Demand Media is going to start selling content to old media sites “One example Kydd mentioned was Demand’s partnership with the travel section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which, like most newspapers, is strapped for cash.” Quick question: what is to prevent Demand Media from partnering with hundreds of such media sites to leverage the combination of cheap labor, keyword earnings data, the media site’s PageRank, and really just doing some serious damage to the search results? Unless the trend is altered, within 3 years almost any midtail to longtail keyword of value will have at least 7 of the top 10 results recycling the same poorly researched semi-legible informationless information . All of the top Google search results say it is true. SO IT MUST BE!!! AOL made a slight profit this past year and they are scaling a similar “content” business model, pushing tons of robo reporters to conduct flavor of the minute interviews . Who Does This Hurt? searchers who may presume stuff in the search results is factually correct publishers which actually do real research and ensure their content is factually correct individual artists and authors who are experts but who are not hype driven & not self promotional enough to outrank dumbed down rewrites of their content heavily wrapped in Google ads Recently there was an article about how fremium often does not work as well as advertised and the NYT highlighted Jaron Lanier’s take on the online social contract : “The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.” The above has been highlighted many times on this blog, but its damage has been far faster and far more widespread than even I anticipated. Since Google is scraping so much CitySearch content, CitySearch felt the need to become a distributed content & ad network to remain relevant. Strategic Advertising Fraud Many solid publishers are getting lost in the ad mix : The lingering effects of the economic recession, coupled with an expanding supply of efficient, and highly targeted online advertising networks, is reshaping the way big advertisers and agencies perceive the value of online media outlets. The result has been a pronounced polarization of the online advertising marketplace, with perceived demand rising for both the high-end of the most premium publishers and the low-end of ad networks and aggregators. This has caused perceived advertising value for the muddled middle of the marketplace - all but the most premium publishing sites, and the major online portals like AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo - to erode, as the ad industry focuses its attention on the top and the bottom players. Those ad networks are (of course) full of fraudulent distribution which helps make them seem cheaper than they are, while leeching off the legitimate publishers and driving down CPM rates on legitimate media. Click fraud has hurt the Google network’s image, but a lot of it was isolated incidents from amateurs . While Yahoo! search got killed by fraud , Google still did pretty well. But as Demand Media saturates their site the returns lower and they are in need of more links to get more “content” indexed. And so they are promoting a business model based on incentivized publishing , which includes both “The more high quality links to your article there are on the web, the more highly a search engine will rank it” and “Your family and friends are probably curious about what you are writing anyway. Send them links and invite them to take a look!” Given that those author’s articles are hidden in the bowels of a large site (and that they are already being encouraged to build exposure), how big of a jump is it to assume that some of them will search for this or this ? How many of them will create unofficial click rings? How many will ask friends to click an ad while they view it? How will Google be able to detect such activity given the big smokescreen such a large site provides? They can’t. The Shifting Moat As online ad networks become more polluted will that finally push brands into investing in top social media sites ? Yes a lot of social media is seedy …but, increasingly, the “content” websites are not looking much better. Who does the rise of content scrapers help? Those who are involved in the manufacturing of bulk misinformation, search companies which pay people to steal content and wrap it in their ads, and those who sell subscription content (well, up until some of the above outfits buy subscriptions to those sites to re-write and dumb down the content). In some markets (where the market leader is clear and obvious and oftenly referenced on the garbitrage websites) the backfill junk content might also help develop a competitive moat between the top brands and weaker competitors. It might also help some people involved in analytics , as more businesses need to squeeze every ounce of profit to stay alive. Success from scratch in many polluted markets will require more grit , more scars , and better differentiation . As robotic content fills the search results, people will likely gravitate toward the expression of emotions. At the same time some employers are trying to prevent employees from having the opportunity to get their hands dirty, leaving an opportunity for competing businesses who want the additional exposure.

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The ‘Information’ Age

Whenever I go home to visit my parents, I always assume a handful of new roles — I become the after-dinner dishwasher, the family chauffeur, and appropriately, my parents’ personal tech support. As I go home for the holidays this week, I’ll likely be asked to help fix the webcam that “used to be there” or make the font size “so I can see it again.” I’ll also perform a few regular maintenance tasks that my parents don’t even know to ask about, such as running a virus scan, uninstalling unused applications and upgrading their software to the latest versions. I know this phenomenon isn’t unique to just my family. If you’re unofficial tech support for family this holiday season like I am, one of the things you’ll want to consider is checking that your family is using the latest version of their browser . Why? For me, an up-to-date browser makes a huge difference: not only so that my parents can get to what they need when they’re on the web, quickly and easily — whether they’re writing email, viewing photo albums online, reading cross-stitching blogs or checking the weather in Chicago — but also so that I can rest assured that they’ll be browsing the web more safely and securely with the latest version of the browser with security updates. (More selfishly, a new or up-to-date browser would also make their computer notably faster when I’m visiting home and using their machine!) Most browsers have released major updates over the past year, and to ensure your family is getting the most speed and security out of their web experience, you can help your family upgrade to the latest version of Google Chrome , Firefox 3.5 , Opera 10 , Safari 4 , or Internet Explorer 8 — just to name a few modern browsers. Moreover, teaching your family what a web browser is and how to update it can help your family keep themselves up-to-date throughout the year. The browser is perhaps the most important piece of software on our computers, as we depend on it to get to the websites and web applications we use every day. You can also check out Google Pack , a collection of free Google and third-party software that’s ready to use in just a few clicks. From anti-virus software to keep a computer more secure and voice applications like Skype to help you keep in touch once you leave, to Google applications like Google Earth (where you can track Santa over Christmas), Google Pack’s applications help your family get the most out of their computer. Happy holidays, one and all — and happy trails on the web! Posted by Jeffrey Chang, Associate Product Manager, Google Chrome Team

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Unofficial tech support returns home for the holidays

Blogs, wikis, social networks, YouTube and Twitter are changing how many of us connect with others. Yet within most businesses, especially large corporations, the software hasn’t evolved much over the last decade. While traditional business technologies give companies the necessary security and controls, they do so at the expense of rapid innovation. Businesses shouldn’t have to make this compromise. This is one reason why customers are so enthusiastic about Google Apps . It offers enterprise-grade security and control while letting businesses instantly tap into a swift stream of innovation, based on services tested by hundreds of millions of people around the world. We’ve launched over 100 improvements to Google Apps in the last year, and the pace of innovation continues to increase. Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of Google Groups to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users. Google Groups is one of our most widely used applications, enabling everyone from the local hiking club to the family next door to create mailing lists and discussion forums. Now employees within a company can create groups for their departments, their teams or their projects. Employees can use these groups as mailing lists, but they can also share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, calendars, videos and sites with groups, instead of many individual recipients. They can choose to receive communications directly to their email inbox, in a digest format, or in the Groups forum view, and can access all the information in the groups archive, without the intervention of an IT administrator. Google Groups is a boon for IT administrators too. After enabling the new service from the administrative control panel (add “user-managed groups”), users can start managing their own groups without burdening administrators for support. Administrators can still set group policies and manage other group settings. If you want to learn more, check out our post on the Enterprise Blog . Google Groups is just one of the many consumer features that we’ve tailored for the enterprise since we launched Google Apps for businesses nearly three years ago, and we’re looking forward to bringing more innovation to our customers in the months and years ahead. Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

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Join this group: Google Groups joins Google Apps

(Cross-posted from the Google Photos Blog ) I used to take a lot of photos with the best intentions of sharing them with friends and family. But most of the time they just sat on my camera’s memory card, never quite making it to my computer, let alone to my friends and family. Three weeks ago we made extra storage more affordable for Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, and now we’re making it easier to get your photos in the cloud and share them, right in time for holiday picture snapping. We’ve partnered with Eye-Fi , makers of WiFi-enabled memory cards that make it easy to upload photos directly from your camera to Picasa Web Albums — no cables required. For a limited time, when you buy 200 GB of Google paid storage for $50 you’ll get a free 4GB SDHC Eye-Fi card (a $95 value). The Eye-Fi card lets you wirelessly upload photos and videos directly to Picasa Web Albums or to your computer. It even includes automatic geotagging, so you’ll know exactly where your pictures were taken. And you won’t need to worry about running out of space — 200 GB is enough storage for a hundred thousand original resolution photos. Visit picasa.google.com/eyefi.html to get yours today. By using Eye-Fi and Picasa Web Albums together, you can automate your photo sharing: photos are wirelessly uploaded and shared with the people that matter. Based on my experience as an avid Eye-Fi user, here’s some tips on setting it up: Configure the Eye-Fi card to send photos to an active album (in my case, “Axe Family 2009 Lifestream”) After the first photo posts to the album, share this album with individuals or a group (I created a “Family” group) Whenever the Eye-Fi card uploads photos to Picasa Web Albums, the people on the album’s shared list are automatically notified via a daily digest email. Advanced tip: If you add yourself to the group, you’ll get the digest email as well to remind yourself to curate your photos (delete bad pics, add captions, etc). Eye-Fi can even make the holidays more fun: With nearly instant access to photos of her grandkids, my mother-in-law felt like she was with us this Thanksgiving, even though she was two thousand miles away! Posted by Brian Axe, Product Manager

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Happy holidays from Picasa Web Albums and Eye-Fi

by Stoney deGeyter I don’t consider myself a real blogger. To me, real bloggers don’t have jobs, they just get paid for writing about their opinions. Kinda like journalists. I’m just a small business owner that happens to blog on a few times a week. But since my source of income is my business blogging takes a back seat to business needs. Most small businesses can’t afford to hire a full-time blogger or ghost writer so they have to work blogging into their many business-owner duties. And because those duties are so heavy on the business owner, blogging generally falls by the wayside as more pressing matters are attended to. Many small business owners are out there thinking “Blogging? That’s just one more thing to add to my already over-booked work schedule. No thanks.” I feel you. There is no doubt that sitting down to write a good blog post takes time. Add in artificial deadlines and blog posting schedules, that’s why most small businesses simply don’t do it. But blogging is an important aspect of growing your business. The key to good blogging is understanding how to work it in, prioritize it properly, and not to feel obligated to anybody but your family and customers. Establish your blogging priority Many small business that blog find themselves torn between business obligations and feeling like blogging is one of the most important things we can do to grow their business. It is important but it needs to be prioritized properly. Looking at the big picture, blogging isn’t just about communicating with our audience. Blogging, when done effectively, helps us improve our reputation, build a brand, get customers, increase search engine rankings and, ultimately, grow the business. Yet, missing a day of blogging here or week there certainly isn’t going to cause your business to fail or turn your customers against you. As with everything else, you have to keep your blogging time in perspective and prioritize it properly. You don’t have to blog every day. You can set time aside on a weekend, or on your typically slow days and write several posts at once and publish them later. If your designated “blogging time” gets interrupted by more important issues, take care of what’s important. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t get your post(s) completed on schedule. Know when to stop writing All of our time is limited so when writing a blog post sometimes we find it taking a lot more of our time than we anticipated. And BLAST!!! you still have two more posts to write today! Ok, stop for a second. Think about this. Can your really long blog post be broken down into several short posts? Snip here, cut there and you just met your blog quota for the week! You can also break your blog writing time into several shorter periods. Write one post a week, spending 15-20 minutes a day until it’s done. Change your blogging patterns It is often not so much a matter of how much you blog but a matter of the content you provide. Not every blog posts has to be 1200 words. Some can be a few hundred, so long as the information you provide is valuable. If you didn’t get time to sit down and write your typical blog posts, just think of something that you can share in a couple of quick paragraphs. Write it, post it, move on. You can always go back later and revisit on and expand the topic it later. Short posts can often be just as good, if not better than, long posts. Quick bits of information can be fantastic to readers who don’t always have time to invest in reading long pieces. Create a blogging schedule How and when you blog is up to you, but I recommend that you work blogging into your schedule. Have certain times of the day or days of the week or month that is designated as blogging time. It’s also a good idea to stay a few weeks ahead of yourself. I like to keep 4-6 weeks worth of blogs posts ready to go. This gives me a chance to 1) write a post and go back to it later for proofing, and 2) have blog posts ready to go should something interfere with my normal blogging schedule. Then you never have to worry about not having a blog post ready. Blogging can be very important to the success of your business. There is a lot of value and potential growth you can get from it, you just need to make sure you set time aside to make it happen. Check out our small business news site.

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How Small Business Owners Can Build a Blog Without Blowing the Business

When you’re searching on Google, we think you should have the choice to keep adult content out of your search results. That’s why we developed SafeSearch , a feature that lets you filter sexually explicit web sites and images from your search results. While no filter is 100% accurate, SafeSearch helps you avoid content you may prefer not to see or would rather your children did not stumble across. We think it works pretty well, but we’re always looking for ways to improve the feature. Today we’re launching a feature that lets you lock your SafeSearch setting to the Strict level of filtering. When you lock SafeSearch, two things will change. First, you’ll need to enter your password to change the setting. Second, the Google search results page will be visibly different to indicate that SafeSearch is locked: Even from across the room, the colored balls give parents and teachers a clear visual cue that SafeSearch is still locked. And if you don’t see them, it’s quick and easy to verify and re-lock SafeSearch. To use SafeSearch lock, go to the ” Search Settings ” page on Google. For detailed instructions, check out this video. We hope you and your family find exactly what you’re looking for in Google search results — and nothing more. Posted by Pete Lidwell, Product Manager and Aaron Arcos, Engineer

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Locking SafeSearch

(From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest and are pleased to have Sergeant Dale Sweetnam join us here. SGT Sweetnam is working with Google’s communications team this year through the U.S. Army’s “Training with Industry” Program. -Ed.) It’s not easy to stay in touch with friends and family when you’re fighting in a country thousands of miles from home. I spent 13 months in Iraq as an Army journalist where I flew in Black Hawks over Balad and Baghdad working to generate news coverage about my fellow soldiers. The whole experience was physically and emotionally draining, but it was especially difficult when I called home at the end of the day and nobody was there to answer. For servicemen and women who are constantly on the move, having a single number and an easy way to retrieve messages from loved ones can be invaluable. To help our service members communicate with their loved ones and show our support to those serving our country, Google is launching a new program. Starting today, any active U.S. service member with a .mil email address can sign up for a Google Voice account at www.google.com/militaryinvite and start using the free service within a day. When you deploy, your life is put on hold. While you live and work in a different world, everyone else moves on with life back home. Your family and friends keep moving, and this sometimes means it’s just not possible for them to stay awake until 2 a.m. to receive a phone call. Calling Iraq or Afghanistan is seldom an option. Google Voice provides a solution to some of these problems. Service members can set up an account before they deploy. Or if they’re already deployed, families can now set up an account for their service member. Loved ones can call to leave messages throughout the day, and then when that service member visits an Internet trailer, all the messages are right there. It’s like a care package in audio form. I signed up for an account when I came to Google, and it’s already making communications much easier here in the States. I know when I return to combat, Google Voice will help make life a little more manageable. Posted by U.S. Army SGT Dale Sweetnam, Army Fellow

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Audio care packages for service members with Google Voice

It’s hard for me to imagine going without email for a day. It’s such an easy and convenient way to communicate with my friends and family. However, there was one limitation that bothered me: my family members and friends who prefer to communicate in Hindi did not have an easy way to type and send email in their language of choice. I am extremely happy to announce the launch of a new feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type email in Indian languages. When you compose a new mail in Gmail, you should now see an icon with an Indian character, as the screenshot below shows. This feature is enabled by default for Gmail users in India. If you do not see this function enabled by default, you will need to go the “Settings” page and enable this option in the “Language” section. When you click the Indian languages icon, you can type words the way they sound in English and Gmail will automatically convert the word to its Indian local language equivalent. For example, if a Hindi speaker types “namaste” we will transliterate this to “नमस्ते.” Similarly, “vanakkam” in Tamil will become “வணக்கம்.” We currently support five Indian languages — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam — and you can select the language of your choice from the drop-down list next to the icon. We built this new feature using Google’s transliteration technology, which is also available on Google India Labs , Orkut , Blogger and iGoogle . I hope you find this feature useful to communicate with those of your friends and family who prefer to write in their native language, and it will be available soon to businesses and schools using Google Apps. Now back to replying to all those Hindi emails I got from my family and friends today! Posted by Chandramouli Mahadevan, Software Engineer

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Email in Indian languages

In times like these, we know that generating as much revenue as possible is on many publishers’ minds. This will be the first of many posts that will hope to explain how to better configure AdSense for feeds to help maximize revenue. Before going into specifics though, it’s important to understand a couple important differences in how your subscribers are different from visitors on your website.  If you use an analytics package for your site such as Google Analytics, most publishers will see that a large amount of their traffic comes from web searches.  Many of these visitors may have been searching for a certain item, such as one of those blankets with sleeves and a hood - let’s call it a shanket.  You happen to have written about how much you love your shanket, and let’s face it, you know how to write with the best of them, so your page ranks high in search results.  That visitor may see an ad for a shanket next to your search result but wants to know more.  So he or she clicks and reads your post, which seals the deal on this visitor needing a new shanket.  You use AdSense for content, which includes ads for shankets that are matched contextually; the visitor clicks; a shanket is sold; and you earn revenue in the process. Your feed subscribers, however, very rarely, if at all, get to your content from a web search.  On the contrary, they subscribe to your blog because you write entertaining musings about your family life, and occasionally also write about some of the wonderful products you have come across, such as your shanket. Because of this, the types of advertisers that run campaigns targeted at your feeds are not necessarily the same advertisers that are targeting search users.  Instead of targeting keywords that match a search, advertisers wishing to use feed subscribers target placements in the Google Content Network. How do you ensure that your placements are exposed effectively in the Google Content Network? That’s the easy part.  When setting up new feeds on the AdSense Setup tab, make sure you leave the box that says “Create a channel that allows advertisers to target the selected feed.”  If you are creating a new channel that aggregates all of your feeds or subsets of your feeds that you would like to show to advertisers (highly recommended), make sure by selecting the “Show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement.” In a week or so, these placements will show up in AdWords and some of the other tools used by Google advertisers to target the content network. Stay tuned for the next installment on Advanced Feed Placement optimization. Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds

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Intro to Feed Placements