The latest round-up of articles from the blogosphere Are you the sharing type? Well, one of the best ways to share your ideas and content is with widgets. And you wouldn't be alone â€" marketers and publishers are expected to spend about $40 million on web widgets this year, according to the Marketing Vox news site. Marketing Vox recently published a beginner's guide to widgets , which are anything that can be embedded in an HTML web page.

High gas prices could pump up your site traffic and sales With the cost of gas climbing and consumers looking to save money by driving less, introducing new targeted ads could not only save consumers some gas but also fuel a lot of additional sales for online advertisers this summer. More and more consumers are looking to take the pedal off the metal and avoid getting behind the wheel when possible. According to a recent study by the National Retail Federation,

Five guidelines to help keep you in YPN compliance When reviewing YPN publisher sites for guideline compliance, I see the same "problem areas" over and over that prevent sites from passing the guidelines. Here are a few things to avoid in order to keep your site in compliance with YPN. 1. Competing Ads Be sure that Yahoo! ads do not appear on the same page as contextual ads from other companies. It's okay to rotate these ads along with Yahoo!

5 steps to make sure you're bidding for the right place It's a fairly well known fact that the higher your search listing appears on a page of results, the more likely users are to see it. In search marketing, a general rule-of-thumb is to get the best possible placement you can for your ads. Consequently, everyone covets that top spot. But"surprise! There are times when being number one not only doesn't help, it might actually hurt you.

Much of what we do in the Local search space is related to what our brethren in Web Search are also doing every day around Yahoo!. So, we made the decision to start posting our local search news directly to the increasingly popular Yahoo! Search Blog . And as the use of online maps has grown far beyond driving directions and into entirely new realms, we are starting a blog devoted to all things that are geographically inclined at Yahoo!.

Publisher-related news items from the blogosphere The next time you're stuck for an idea to run an image on your site, you may want to check out new Flickr groups feature for some creative inspiration. Recently, the Flickr blog announced a new groups tool that lets you add up to six photos or videos at a time from your Flickr account to share with friends. Speaking of Flickr, the next* blog posted a story about a new technology by Yahoo! called BrowserPlus,

Case Study: How Internet marketing company Wave Direct helped its client increase leads by 50% It took more than a 90-minute presentation to convince a new client to step out of its marketing comfort zone. But for Internet marketing firm Wave Direct , it was a matter of persuading its customer, an internationally known five-star hotel chain, that an aggressive Sponsored Search campaign could help generate more timeshare purchases.

There's more than one way to optimize your ad performance Want your account to run the ads that work best for you? Our ad optimization feature automatically displays the Sponsored Search ads that perform the best"based on how you choose to measure ad performance. We know that not everyone measures success the same way. For example, you might want to optimize for ads that deliver conversions more frequently. Fortunately, you have control over the way ad optimization works,

Put the "worldwide" in your Web with Yahoo! Sponsored Search Is your company looking to expand abroad? International sales can be a great way to boost your company's growth, and Yahoo! Search Marketing is a simple way to get targeted customer leads. With the announcement of the opening of three new markets for Sponsored Search â€" Southeast Asia, Latin America and India â€" now's the perfect time to consider getting a few new stamps on your "advertising passport.

Open Search's Graham Mudd discusses the benefits of Yahoo!'s new open search platform   Earlier in the year, we ran an article about Open Search, a.k.a "SearchMonkey," on our Search Marketing Blog . As a follow-up, we recently chatted with Product Marketing Manager Graham Mudd on how Open Search can impact publishers. YPN Blog: What exactly is SearchMonkey, and what's the goal of it? Mudd: SearchMonkey is Yahoo! Search's open platform.

How to Reach Customers Shopping for Father's Day Father's Day may not get the same amount of attention as Mother's Day"ask any dad"but consumer spending for Pop is on the rise. According to a 2007 poll conducted by BIGresearch, consumers were expected to spend $9.9 billion on Father's Day gifts in 2007, with the average person spending $98.34, up from $88.80 in 2006. If you own or work for a site that sells items that are possible Father's Day gifts,

A trio of publisher-related news items from the blogosphere Earlier this week, the Yahoo! Search Team announced changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. According to the Yahoo! Search blog, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index throughout the transition process, which should be completed soon. Worried about robots taking over the world? Don't be. They are our friends"especially the mini-robots mentioned in the MyBlogLog Blog .

Case study: CourseAdvisor teaches how to master the creative side of search CourseAdvisor , an online education research directory that connects prospective students with more than 500 colleges and universities, had mastered the numbers of search marketing but hadn't leveraged the creative side of search. With help from Yahoo!, CourseAdvisor wrote new ads and restructured its account"and saw its clicks go up 44% during a five-month period. As a technology-focused company,

Attend our pricing change webinar Are you still unclear about how the way our minimum bids are now set for Sponsored Search? A free webinar for our advertisers on Thursday, May 29, will help you understand the change. Sponsored Search keywords can now be lower or higher than $.10 , depending on value and quality of that term. The webinar session is designed to tell you everything you need to know about the pricing change, so that you can maintain the performance of your Yahoo!

How to get approved on Right Media's Direct Media Exchange Yahoo! has a lot of different ways to work with our publishers. One of these, Right Media's Direct Media Exchange )DMX(, is a free web application that allows publishers to auction their ad inventory. In a new Right Media blog post, new Right Media blogger Kelly Kitchel posts an interview with, um, Kelly Kitchel about getting approved for DMX.

A bunch of enhancements have just been installed in Sponsored Search "It's the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen." " Legendary basketball coach John R. Wooden Things continue to be busy here at Yahoo!, and not just because of any on-again/off-again courtship by a company from a rainy land. Here at Burbank HQ, our engineers continue with their regular schedule of tinkering with and improving Sponsored Search to make it more intuitive,

Steps to help you avoid hiccups in the payment process One of the most universal questions"after "Are these dishes clean or dirty?""has to be, "When am I going to get paid?" Well, no need to fret here at the Yahoo! Publisher Network. Here are a few administrative items to keep in mind to help avoid any hiccups in the payment process. Payment methods As we noted in a previous blog article , the Yahoo!

Today Yahoo! Maps releases an expansion to our real-time traffic offering, increasing both coverage and comprehensiveness. In terms of coverage, we've expanded to a bunch of new markets from Bakersfield, CA to Rochester, ME, and improved some markets such as New York, where we previously only had incident data. For more comprehensive coverage, we've expanded beyond just freeways to major thoroughfares as well. Now roads such as East 14th in New York,

Like the London Tube Map , recording and retrieval of locations and their relationships doesn't always have to do with their Lat/Lon. There is a more elegant way to abstract the relationships of location, and unambiguously describe places in a permanent, language-neutral manner. Since Where on Earth joined Yahoo! in 2005, Yahoo! has geo-enabled the network, including geo-tagging advertising, Flickr photos, Yahoo! Maps, and so many of the location based services that Yahoo!

Enter the Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! Publishing Contest As if monetizing your PDFs weren't enough, Yahoo! and Adobe are giving you another great reason to participate in the Ads for Adobe PDF powered by Yahoo! beta: great prizes. The prizes are for a contest"our attempt to find the best publishers of ad-enabled PDFs out there. To enter, just sign up for the beta and start publishing your ad-enabled PDFs.