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. The winner will be determined by a combination of success metrics, such as the number of PDFs published, revenue, impressions, and other ingredients in the “secret sauce” we use in the beta.

Did we mention the great prizes? For the Grand Prize winner, we are offering the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection, which helps you to design across media---print, web, interactive, mobile, video, and film---in the most comprehensive, creative environment ever produced. The Grand Prize is valued at $2499. In addition, all publishers who participate will be entered into a raffle for $100 Yahoo! Search Advertising dollars, a great way to start publicizing your PDFs and increase your audience.

To enter, click over to the sign up page and send us your Ads for Adobe PDF powered by Yahoo! beta application. If you already have an account, just start publishing your ad-enabled PDFs! See the official contest rules.

Lightbulb first made its mark with the creation of The Wall Street Journal Guide to Understanding Money & Investing, a well-known best seller with over 3 million copies in print. You can easily find this at your local bookstore. With this success, they went on to develop a series of guides for The Wall Street Journal, including those about personal finance and retirement.

So enjoy the free collection, a subset of the more than 500 online educational articles, that Lightbulb Press has offered to you as a gift.

This publication was launched back in 1987, well before global warming became common knowledge, and their mission was to change the way people generate and use energy. Their print magazine is available for subscription, but they also offer tons of great PDFs for free on their website such as: Get Energy Smart - Insulation Options and Top 10 Eco-friendly Building Products.

Check out their website and get some great ideas for green living!

To kickoff this series, I am highlighting a collection of PDFs from Remodeling Center, a part of the Better Homes & Gardens parent company. This website has over 240 PDFs that cover How-to topics for a variety of home projects catered to the remodeling enthusiast. Learn all the tips and tricks on how to tile floor, lay patios and walkways, put up crown molding and numerous other projects. As a homeownwer, I feel quite inspired to start up some spring organization projects myself!

In order to access the content, you'll need to sign up for a free account, but the helpful step-by-step information provided in these PDFs is worth it. Check it out at:

http://remodelingcenter.com/how-to/

Over time, pricing for each publisher is automatically adjusted based on the performance of their PDFs. Therefore, if you publish a lot of poorly matched PDFs that don't result in clicks, then it can have a negative impact to the monetization of even your well-matched PDFs.

The best analogy is the real estate market. Everyone wants to live in a nice neighborhood. When some leave and depress the prices, that drives others to leave and results in a cascading effect. Likewise, when people are buying in and there is too much demand for the same location, then the prices go sky high. The marketplace team applies this principle of market planning so that all participants are, in the long run, better off in the market.

• Check that your PDF has a main theme or topic that is discussed throughout the document.

• Check for spelling and grammar errors. Inconsistent spelling of the words affects the analysis accuracy.

• Use words that are related to the main theme or category of your content.

• Use common synonyms and variations of the keywords.

• If you use slang or new terminology, use it consistently.

• Keep paragraphs brief and avoid using long, run-on sentences.

• Avoid discussing too many unrelated topics in the same document.

Marketing Sherpa has a great article containing tips on how to ensure that your PDFs can be indexed by the search engines. I have included a summary below from a fellow blogger at Searchnewz:

Text Identification

In order to identify the text in an image in Acrobat, you would need to run OCR(character recognition) after opening your image-based PDF. Then go to the document menu, where it will scan the document and translate the image-text into text. You can then even edit the text according to your search engine optimization requirements.

Dividing the larger files

Dividing a large PDF file, into many smaller files would make it easier for the search engines to easily find your web page. By specifying your files, you can reduce the PDF download time, while you have the choice of opting for broader range of search keywords.

Optimize your PDF copy

After you have indexed the text PDF for search engines, you should also optimize the text with SEO techniques. Use specific keywords for the PDF and use them in the PDF text headlines, subheads and copy.

Discard duplicate content

You should be aware that the search engines simply hate duplicate content. So why bring the wrath of the search engines on you. Therefore, you should either alter one of same content that you have on the site, or delete it all together. Also, another option would be using proper meta tags. As it can prevent the search engines from indexing one of the pages.

Adding metadata

Another PDF technique would be adding text related Metadata. It would describe your file to the search engines and the search engines would use these information to index your page.

Adding links

In Acrobat PDFs you can add links, so that the customers can have a look at the product and can even add it to their shopping cart if they are interested.

Add your company footer

A company footer would include your companys name, address, contact information and website link. You can add these information to every PDF to facilitate searches for your business.

Optimizing links to the PDF

In order to convince, the search engines that your content is relevant, your website should have a display text containing the text specific keywords.

I've run across a few great examples of how publishers have communicated this to their readerbase:

1) Kevin Kelly's ebook on True Films
http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/002538.php

This is a great ebook that reviews the best 200 documentaries. The link to his ebook includes a blog post that iterates why he is including ads with the ebook:

"I hope you get the updated version of the Reader and click to see the ads. Why? Because my hunch is that books-supported-by-ads is one way to extend the FREE. I would love to produce books for free, outside of big publishing, just as this recommendation site is given away for free. Cool Tools has continued for free for five years because it is funded by the ads on this site. There is a chance we can develop a similar culture and business model around FREE books. The engine would again be ads."

2) The Seventh Sun
http://theseventhsun.com/index.htm

The Seventh Sun publishes all sorts of fascinating articles and news about the virtual world. When you mouse over a PDF that has been ad-enabled, you will see a brief blurb describing the ads and why they are there.

3) Dinosaurs and Robots Dispatch
http://hooptyrides.blogspot.com/2008/02/dinosaurs-and-robots-dispatch-new.html

The previous founders of Boing-Boing have created a new publication for projects, techniques and tools, loosely arranged around the idea of transport. In their blog post containing the PDF, they write:

"There are folks who do not believe creative effort should be rewarded monetarily. I am not one of those people. Dispatch is released as a PDF with dynamic ads from Adobe/Yahoo. You can choose to turn off the ads or open the PDF with Apple Preview, which does not support ads. However, if you enjoy the Dispatch and would like to see future issues, I would appreciate it if you'd open with the Adobe Reader and leave the ads enabled."

Take a lead from your fellow publishers. Ad-sponsored content is nothing new, but sometimes, readers just need to be reminded how they are getting that content for free!

* Performance improvements for the entire PDF registration process

* Improved content analysis of the PDF for better ad targeting. This includes improvements in
- filtering of insignicant content themes
- filtering of numbers and graphic characters
- filtering of page header and footer templates

* Progress bar indicator when uploading a PDF in Safari browser

* Corrected sort order for dates while a PDF is in "pending" registration state

* Updates and clarifications in the Help documentation

We hope you'll take advantage of these new improvements. Any feedback on this release is always appreciated.

1) The network connection dialog, similar to other Trust Manager dialogs, will ask the user if they will allow a connection to be made to the network. This is the same dialog that you might see if you were to click on a URL hyperlink from within the PDF contents. Because Reader is a client application and it does not assume you want to connect online, this dialog is a means to inform users that the connection will take place.

2) This dialog will only appear when you are reading the PDF from within the Reader or Acrobat application.

3) This dialog will not appear when you download a PDF from a website and view it "in-browser" - meaning the PDF is opened using the browser's plug-in for Reader. The reason it doesn't appear is because the user is already connected online to the internet. Our data shows that users read PDF content in-browser a majority of the time as opposed to within the client.

I have read a number of posts that portray this dialog as being a huge hurdle for the business. However, if the dialog doesn't even appear for most users, then I don't forsee this as an issue. Of course, in the end, time will tell.

I hope this information helps clarify a few things and, at minimum, gives you the correct facts to formulate your own opinion. Thanks for the continued feedback in the blogosphere.