Adsense+Analytics Integration

I just signed-up with the integration of Analytics and Adsense today. It's a great addition to the already useful information that Analytics gather and display. You can now see what contents are giving you money. I think it's one of the missing links that makes Analytics and Adsense indispensable. Sweet!!!

In case you didn't see, the link is under the Contents Menu.

Currently, only one site can be integrated. Or maybe I just don't know how to do it yet. But at any rate, it's a welcome development and I simply love it! Kudos to the Google teams who worked on it. Keep them coming!

The Google 2008 Zeitgeist

Based on the latest 2008 Year-End Google Zeitgeist , the following are the top rising keywords for Singapore and the Philippines. I'm currently studying the report for my next project.

Fastest Rising in Singapore

1. edison chen

2. olympics

3. facebook

4. iphone

5. f1

6. google map

7. htc

8. maps

9. wiki

10. beijing olympics

Fastest Rising in Philippines

1. cabal

2. y8.com

3. psp

4. comments

5. emo

6. friendster.com

7. naruto

8. multiply

9. mozilla

10. realize lyrics

I have been targeting some the keywords mentioned here albeit I'm more focused on the long tails. Of course, these keywords are highly competitive and it would be hard to be at the top of the SERP. I'm not that good with SEO yet so I'll just focus first with the long tail as long as my target rising keyword is there.

November Revenue Report

It's belated but I'll post it anyway.

• Adsense : $286.15


• TLA : $147.83


• Project Wonderful : $0.00


• Total : $433.98

Bleak December

At least one post in seo philippines forum has confirmed that eCPM has dropped significantly. And that's exactly what we see on our websites... plunging as much as 46% in eCPM. If you can see $0.05 to $0.10 cost-per-click in November and earlier, what we see now is $0.01 and a max of $0.03 per click. We still get the same number of visitors and the same CTR.

We're still lucky that we were able to launch a community site and it already starts contributing. So for now, we're still at 60% from previous month. Still, that's too low we might not be able to hit $200 for the month of December for adsense.

We're expecting a decline from TLA as one of our sites saw its Alexa rank plunge to 1,000,000++ mark. Page rank also lost one notch for that site while the main money driver has seen its Alexa rank dip by 40,000 but with the same PR. That contributed to lower TLA rates on both sites.

What We Are Doing

We need to harness everything entrecard has to offer so we plan to drop ecs again starting this week. There are several posts are also on the line which will be posted within the month (some are already posted earlier this month). And lastly, we are doing a comment barrage as well as exchange link in various websites.

Hopefully, all these changes will provide fruitful results sooner than later.

Crucial Webhost Went Down

For several hours today, several of my sites went down with the disruption of service from CrucialWebHost. It was the first time that it happened to me in my almost one year with them. No explanations were given aside from the fact that the VPS where my account sits in is down.

To their credit, they were able to restart the service after a few hours. Support promptly replied to my ticket but then again, you wouldn't know how much was lost in those hours. It's a small glitch but a costly glitch. And it came when most of my visitors come -- between 5pm to 7pm when most of the corporate users starts to browse their favorite websites before going home.

But will I move to another host with what happened? I don't think so. My experience with them is commendable since I signed-up with them. But it sure taught me valuable lessons.

Where is Boy Bastos?

Do you wonder where the creator of BoyBastos.com is? Well, I assure you that he is free as you are. He continue to setup new sites and posting in his blog much like everybody. He may have been 'arrested' last September but we all know that he's out of the NBI headquarters in no time. We don't even know if he was charged with anything or not. Actually, the real term is that he was 'invited' by the NBI. I think it's just a kind of political circus brought about by Ms. Loren Legarda which the media bought and made the issue fly high in the clouds.

The scandal may have served Loren for her political ambitions but they may not know it, Boy Bastos has gained more than anybody else. It made Mark's site more popular in the internet and for sure, he's still there operating sites like that of Boy Bastos. Boy Bastos is just a victim of political persecutions because if Loren is serious with her so called convictions, the sites I know(and sometimes visit?) must have been shut down already. As a matter of fact, Mark's other sites include Bilyar.net, Bembang, Bembang Blogs, Jolaks and Thoughts in Binary : A Secret of Mark Venzo. Oh, did I say that he has even interviewed a lot of actresses that made his Bembang Girls site even more popular and added some class with it.

But as an online enterprenuer, we must be aware that Mark was treated with some kind of political persecution. He had it coming, of course, when he use used Loren Legarda's name as the registrar of his site, Boy Bastos. That kinda grabbed the senator's attention (or at least her staffs) and made war on him. In order not to experience what Mark went through, Yuga has listed down 10 ways to avoid political repurcusions from so called moralists. If you ought to know, you can go visit Yuga's post at http://www.yugatech.com/blog/curious/10-ways-to-avoid-the-boy-bastos-treatment/

It's still good to be aware of what's happening around. Though the law in the Philippines is lax, we must still be careful with who we play with... stay away from the influential and powerful.

CBOX Annoying Pop Up Ads

I have been using cbox shoutbox plugin (free version) for a while now and never took notice of the pop-ups that it has been serving on my site. I know that the free version has ads in it but I thought it's not through the annoying pop-up. All the while, it was the chiklets that was installed in the site that was the culprit. Besides, cbox already displays link ads inside the shoutbox and pop-ups will be an overkill. And I was DEAD WRONG!

I have since removed cbox from the sites where I installed it and replaced it with wordspew. It's a plugin for wordpress started by jalenack and is being continued by Pierre. During Jalenack's time, I did not use his plugin due to sql injections issues but contributions from users and the successful handling of the project by pierre solved most of the issues. You can download the plugin at
http://pierre.sudarovich.free.fr/index.php/2006/02/28/ajax-shoutbox/

Hopefully, my visitors will take notice of this. At least, they will have one less annoyance when visiting my site. But more than anything, I hope Google will take notice of the improvements that we've implemented.

SEO Experiment : Strike While The Iron is Hot

A little experiment last week surprised me when in less than an hour after I posted an article, hundreds of users visited one of my sites. Oh man, that site is just actually a test bed for my SEO expiriments but somehow, google noticed the post a few minutes after I published it.

What I Learned Here?

• Strike While the Iron is Hot - I saw an issue worth posting from a news website. It's about three hours after the original story was published online and five hours after the actual event showed on TV though the issue is already clogging emails for the past few days. I immediately created a post regarding it after realizing that there's not much results in google if you search for it. I created the post in 15 minutes and after 45 minutes, I got 250 visitors.


• Read your Inbox - there's a reason why people send those nonsense emails, including the chain-emails. They either like the contents of the email, they share it with their friends or they believe on what the chain-email tells them and do what it says. Either way, it generates interest and therefore, you may hit a gold with it.


• Post Title - it works, believe me. I carefully selected the title and basically, it was the keyword that I used in searching in google.


• Choose your keywords very well - A little hint. It's a controversial topic. People like controversies, people falling from their pedestal and things like that. A giveaway... SEX sells!!!


• Do it Even if you don't like it - I don't even like the topic but it sure gave me a lot of traffic. So as long as you give your visitors what they want, people wouldn't care if you like the topic or not.


• As always, Google is your bestfriend and Big Brother. So follow him and be obedient, OK? It's for your own good.

Unfortunately, I did not expect it and the template of the test blog is not optimized for adsense. As a result, it did not generate a lot. The CTR is less than 1 percent but that's ok with me. It proved something and whatever I learned from it will be definitely used later. As a matter of fact, I might create a niche blog for it. I think that post will give me a good number of visitors for a while. I would be more than happy if it stays for a week.

A Start to Follow Webmaster Guidelines

Feeling the wrath of Google dawning on the rest of my sites, I decided to finally follow the Google webmaster guidelines. First in my list is the NOFOLLOW requirement. All links from my wordpress sites now are already converted with NOFOLLOW tag. At the same time, I asked for reconsideration from Big Brother G for one of my websites. Again, that's through the Google's webmastertools

But applying the changes in a number of wordpress-powered site would be a pain in the ass. I sure not going to update my posts manually. One way to go around with it is to perform a SEARCH and REPLACE in the database but I'm too lazy to do that and that would also mean if I fail to monitor the outgoing links later, I'll again have DOFOLLOW links. And so I chose to use a modified wordpress NOFOLLOW. Presto, my links are good but except those in the sidebar. But that's manageable.

I say modified version because I the downloaded plugin is specific for Wikipedia. And since I want to implement the NOFOLLOW tag in all my links, I updated the code in the plugin. Huh! Do I need to explain that in detail? Maybe not. Am I going to share the modified version to you? I guess so but wait a little. I'll update this post later to provide you the link.

As I have said, revenue from Adsense has already become a vital part of our budget and i already have a quota to follow. And since the Big G is my main source of online income, I better follow the rules(which I always do, anyways).

Online Vagabond October Revenue Report

It's time again to give you an update on how much we earned for the month. You see, this endevour has already made my wife join into it. Two heads are better than one, right? Actually, she's been helping me for the past year already. So without further delay, here's the report..

Oct 2008 Earnings Report

• Adsense : $418.35


• TLA : $133.15


• Total : $551.50

Despite the slump in organic referrals from google for one of the sites starting at the second half of october, adsense revenue is still higher than the previous month. It could have gone higher had that site not drop from the ranking. But thanks to Yahoo, revenue for the problem site rebounded. It's still below the usual target but I'm still happy with it. We expect a slump for the month of November so we are trying to find new avenue to earn money online.

But one thing we learned here is that we really need to keep our site updated. I think it's one of the most important things that SEO gurus always say. One new post every week would be good enough but if there really is no time, at least once every two weeks. I know frequency also depends on your niche but we should strive better to give our readers something new or otherwise, they will no longer revisit your site.

Also, I might start converting the live links at the sidebars to NO FOLLOW to conform with the Google Webmasters Guide recommendation. Yeah, I know that I should have done that earlier and it may have been the cause of my drop in search engine rankings. But hey, I'm just human. :) Hopefully, google will reconsider my sites again.

As for this site, I think a template change is in order. Though it doesn't carry ad units, I think it is still good to make it look better in the eyes. By the way, the revenues from our online properties has already been vital to our budget, it helps pay some of the bills already. In that note, there's more pressure to keep the revenue at a certain level. To be specific, adsense revenue should be at least $300 a month.

Google Penalized my Site

One of my sites suddenly saw its number of visitors nose dive as if it's on a free fall. Immediately, I checked on analytics and was surprised to see that the number of visitors is at 35% of its usual level. Almost all of its visitors comes from search engines wherein around 70% coming from google and I suspected that I may have been penalized for whatever reason.

True enough, the site no longer appear in google results for my top 5 keywords. The site was always at the top 5 results for those keywords and losing that position send the site into its knees. It's still making some money albeit just a fraction of what it usually make. Google did not completely wiped out the site from its index as it still sends visitors. The site also keeps its top rank in Yahoo and MSN but everybody knows just how low these other search engines bring to your site. Actually, it is still number one in a number of keywords in Yahoo.

Now that one of my eggs is already rotting, I need to lay some new eggs. That's what I'm preparing this past few days. At the same time, I'm still trying to figure out what went wrong with my site. We have to keep laying eggs so that in cases like these, you'll still have income. Not much of a difference in making your investments in the stock market.

This penalty is the second of two unfortunate events that happened on my online properties. The other week, Entrecard kicked out my site. I made an appeal but I was told that my site does not really fit in the "blog" category. They maybe right, so I just leave it at that. As I have said, entrecard was just a complement. But referrals from search engines is a different story.

Kicked Out of Entrecard

I was surprised last Monday when two of my money blogs suddenly saw its visitors plunge by as much as 15%. Not a signifant number for some but for me, that's a considerable number. Most of you will agree that entrecard visitors doesn't really generate money but hey, it's still traffic. In one way or another, it will help you.

When I checked my email, I was informed by Entrecard that I violated rules 11 and 12. That's two violations! So when I checked the quality standards, here's what's written.

# 11 No autoplaying audio: This includes music that plays automatically when you visit the page, or short audio ads that come up unannounced.
# 12 Content must be recent: Sites that have not been updated in 3 months will be removed.

Ok, I admit that I'm in violation of both. For #11, I have this Pay-Per-Play plugin installed and I'm sure that's the culprit. Since that doesn't really give me money, I removed it from the site. But I hope in the future, entrecard will allow it.

For rule #12, I guess I'm part guilty. You see, I implemented a way to republish some of my old posts at the front page without changing the publish date. So since I thought it would be very helpful to my visitors to view some of them when they come to the website (as against to dig for them in the links), I just implemented the technique. But the downside is that the RSS will still show the last post. And since I didn't really published any new post, Entrecard thought that the site is stagnant. I'm preparing several posts for these two sites and after that, I'll re-apply for entrecard. For the mean time, I removed the entrecard widget until I'm ready with a number of new posts.

For the whole set of rules, follow this link

September Revenue Report

By far, September is the most profitable month for us. It's not phenomenal but at least, we already hit the $500 mark.

Here's the summary of the revenue for the month of September.

Adsense : $385

TLA : $145

Total : $530

So what was the changes implemented? They are as follows.

• 
  1. More SEO
  
  Two of my profitable sites get their traffic from search engines. To be specific, the 80% of the traffic comes from Google, Yahoo and MSN. The rest comes from entrecard, referrals and direct visitors. So I there's a lot of room for improvement in referrals especially from other sites. We did some commenting and shoutbox hopping. It gave us two things. One is the backlink(though currently no value for Google) and the other being some kind of advertisement of your site. We also did a lot of entrecard dropping and campaign. That's something that we failed to do actively in the last three months.
  


• 
  2. Change Template.
  
  As I already said earlier, a nice-looking template does not necessarily mean that it generates clicks. Prior to the current template I was using on my second site, the template looks good. It's clean and visually appealing. It's actually a copycat of a popular commercial wordpress template. But it only generates an average of $0.50 per day or roughly $15 a month. After the change to revamped adsense optimized template, it got $97 for the month. Click-through-Rate jumped from a mere 1% to 6.55%. Not bad, huh?
  


• 
  3. Add and Rotate Contents
  
  With wordpress, you can't really display your old but popular post at the frontpage without doing a hack on the template. But there are just times that you won't have a topic to post and you'll have to reuse some of the existing posts. A quick modification the template solved the problem. We added a Feature category that will display in the frontpage all posts under that category.
  
  
  Rotating contents also helps in frequency of the search engine crawlers as they would think that there's new content on your site when in fact, you only rotated your article.
  

4. Analyze your traffice

Google Analytics is just awesome. Some people may say that there's just too many information that it displays but you don't really have to bother on all of them. Analytics gives us valuable information on the behaviour of the visitors that allows us to give them a better experience and thus, make them visit again.

You see, there's no real secret. You only have to wait and continue on what you are doing and then rewards will come later. For me, later is today. We just need to be proactive to keep up with the changes. We(me and my wife) are testing some new projects in line and hopefully, they'll be contribute too.

And oh! I think it's time for me to reward myself...err, my wife i mean. I'll buy her a PSP once we get the check from Google.

StumbleUpon is Up For Sale!!!!

First, I didn't know that eBay bought StumbleUpon last year. And then now, it is up for sale again according to TechCrunch. It is not yet known how much the selling price would be but eBay has already enlisted Deutsche Bank to find the right buyer. Below is a excerpt from TechCrunch's article.

In May 2007 eBay acquired website recommendation engine StumbleUpon for $75 million. Now, less than a year and a half later, they’re trying to unload it according to a source with knowledge of the sale process.

I used stumbleupon for a year and gave good results. However, it sends useless traffic to your site since most of the users are bloggers trying to get traffic-money. My bounce rate is at staggering 86%. But at least, it helped bring traffic to my site and a few friends who exchanged-link with me that in the long run, helped my PR ranking. Not that PR really matters but it is still some kind of status symbol. :)

But I was banned when I joined stumbleexchange in DigitalPoint. I never re-sign again after that since I can't really monetize the traffic that I get. Besides, almost all my contacts/friends in stumbleupon were banned, too! But if I find something new with them, I might try to join again but will no longer be active as before.

Submit Article and Earn with FilipinoSG

I got an invite to submit an article on a online Filipino Community in Singapore that was recently setup. It's another addition to a number of websites that our fellow Filipinos in Singapore frequently visit. This new website isn't launched to the public yet but it already look promising.

What I liked about their system is when they said that I'm allowed to do the following:

• One adsense unit within the article (300x250) in size. Only Adsense is allowed though.


• Max of three external live links inside the article


• Author

I only got the invitation through one of the administrators (zimatar) since I know him personally. The group said that they are going to allow all the would be members to submit their own articles for some of the sections. I don't know what would all the sections be but I'm invited to submit articles for Jokes, FAQ and Opinions. They also promised a simple blog engine for every user. I don't know if that would be customizable, though. Let's see when it comes.

You see, one of the techniques in creating incoming links is to submit articles to sites like about.com or guest posts on other blogs. Opportunities created by this kind of invitations should not be wasted. And the icing of the cake is the prospect of earning through adsense right smack from their website. It's another avenue for a passive income. And for those who don't have their own site yet, Filipinosg would be a good way to start with.

I'm now preparing a news article that I plan to submit by Monday. The topic is more of Singapore OFW, though. So my articles should have something to do with life and work in Singapore.

ABS-CBNNEWS Domain Expired!!!!

Employees of ABS-CBN Interactive must be scrambling now to renew abs-cbnnews.com which expired last Aug 2, 2008. Actually, the expiration date was July 26, 2008. They may have been given a week's time to renew the domain but after failing to do so, the registrar put the domain in a domain parking service. Below is what you'll see when you visit the site

Ok, people. Don't let this happen to you. If you have a very valuable domain, make sure that renew it ahead of time. We don't know what went wrong with the domain. It could be a mistake from someone in ABS-CBN Interactive. It's such a big mistake that heads will surely roll.

To make sure that my eyes are not fooling me, I checked google to search for site. The cache is still there but if you follow the link, it goes to the domain parking. Still not satisfied, I checked the whois. It's confirmed! Below is the screenshot of the whois properties.

At least, their main site - WWW.ABS-CBN.COM -- is still working. But if you click on the News menu, the following will appear...

In my opinion, abs-cbnnews.com is the most priced online property of ABS-CBN. It's one of my two most visited site. The other one being inquirer.net (which is too heavy to load due to enormous amount of ads).

Multiple Adsense Publishers in Single Page

Talk about co-incidence. I've been reading the adsense TOS and searching for related topic about multiple adsense accounts on the same page. I couldn’t find any definitive explanation. Luckily, Adsense has just released an explanation on it on their official blog that clarified the issue. I can't simply copy what digitalforum is doing since they are premium adsense publishers.

You see, I'm about to launch a site with my friends that will allow members to show their ads on their submitted articles. It's some kind of revenue sharing but instead of splitting the proceeds, the members will get the full revenue of generated on their ad units displayed on their article. A separate ad unit, this time for the site, will be displayed somewhere else in the page. Revenue of this ad unit will be used for the upkeep of the site. It will generally make less money since the user's ad unit will be the one to be embedded on the article.

That's where the problem comes in. Though it's clear that a site can show multiple adsense publishers, doing the same in a single page isn't clear. And just about when I was going to contact adsense support, I visited their site and found their announcement. It's not just me having this problem afterall. And with this clarification we can go ahead with the development and eventual launch of the site.

The full text of the clarification can be found at the link blow.

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/07/sharing-your-ad-space.html

Free Hosting to Get You Started

000webhost.com recently catched my attention when a friend informed me about it. And after reading a post about this unbelievably free hosting

I always turn away from free stuffs in the web especially when in comes to hosting. Man, if there are paid hosting that sucks big time, how much

more with free, right? And it's just too good to be true, totally unbelievable! And that's my mentality until I found 000webhost.com. Now, I can't believe there really are some great things you can get for

FREE.

I also checked another friend's wedding website which she cloned from her existing wedding site and I was surprised to see how

fast the page loading was. I mean, it's not blazing fast but considering that it sits on a free server, the speed is still a lot better than my sites located

in paid hosting. Try to compare the two to see for yourself.

Now, I got to try this service too. Imagine, I've been paying $100 a year on my hosting that only gives me 3GB of space and 30GB of bandwidth.

Here, you can get them for all free! As my friend say, "don't take my words for it, try it!". I already have plans to put up some micro sites that I've

been itching to but can't continue due to lack of webspace (and money to upgrade!). I am also planning of moving some of my domains here. Yes, you can use your own domain with their service! Isn't that amazing?

This free service will definitely allow you to put you on track on making money online with the least amount of financial investment.

By the way, here's what you'll get when you sign-up

*** 350 MB of disk space
*** 100 GB of data transfer
*** PHP and MySQL support with no restrictions
*** cPanel control panel
*** Website Builder
*** Fantastico
*** Absolutely no advertising!

I hope it remains free for a long time. hahaha... Oh well, I plan to donate when I have the moolah. :p

ciao!

Pay-Ads is a SCAM

On my earlier post about Pay-Ads, I said that it's a very good eCPM ad service that pays well. Imagine, $3.50 for every one thousand unique visitors with IP count reset everyday! Coupled with a minimum payout of just $1 transferred automatically to your paypal account, this was really tempting. And good news ends there.

I got paid, yeah but on the third day that it ran on one of my high-traffic sites, popups and trojans started coming out! I really freak out especially when Lord Gooooooogle said that my sited drops malware. When you find my site in google search, it won't let you proceed to my site. Basically, google reported the site to stopbadware.org.

Luckily, I was able to correct it within hours and asked google to re-index the site through the Google Webmasters Tools. After that, traffic went back to normal and my site is out of the stopbadware.org.

Damn Pay-Ads.com, they are SCAMMERS!

Bux.to : Alternative Way to Earn Money Online

I stumbled into Bux.To pay-to-click service. The concept is very simple, you visit a site and stay there for 30 seconds and viola, you've just earned $0.01!!!! Yeah, that's a very small amount but if you have referrals, that can multiply! You don't even need to go to school for this!

Here's an earning example
» You click 10 ads per day = $0.10
» 20 referrals click 10 ads per day = $2.00
» Your daily earnings = $2.10
» Your weekly earnings = $14.70
» Your monthly earnings = $63.00

I'm on my second day on their service and got $0.30 already. I could have earned more than that if I have referrals. And speaking of referrals, they do sell referrals. I think it's one of their revenue stream while they are waiting for advertisers to come in. I don't know how popular their service is but one poster on their forum claims that he got 500 referrals in under 6 hours! I smell something fishy there.

Honestly, I don't know if they are wasting money as I noticed that almost(if not all) ads that you can click are actually bux.to sites. Yes, I saw several ads that look legitimate but I was surprised to see that one of the advertiser's sponsor is also Bux.to. Hmnn... That's the main drawback. The second one is the fact that you'll have to wait for 30 days before your checked-out payment is credited to your paypal. That's too long for me.

But at least, they are not a scam.... yet! Let's see if bux.to will survive. I'll give them 3 months(until end of July) to prove that they are for real!

Controversies : Uncoventional but Effective Way of Driving Traffic

Gossips is one of the most powerful way of driving traffic to your site. On my home country(PHL), gossips spread like a wildfire especially if it involves showbiz people or high-society individuals. And the advent of the internet made the spreading of news much more easier. And I cannot disagree when people say "May pakpak ang balita, may tainga ang lupa" literally means "News has wings, the land has ears". That refers to how fast news/gossips spread.

Seeing the potential of these, coupled with the Filipino's natural thirst on rumors and gossip, some enterprising bloggers cash on the prospect. And who can make a better rumor like this but gays! BryanBoy has done it before and shoot his ranking up in the clouds. He made up a controversial story, created an email, sent(spam) them to friends and then let the people come. It was so successful that some Filipino A-List bloggers bite into it and made BryanBoy a celebrity. In the old ranking sites, pinoytopsites and pinoyblogosphere, BryanBoy is consistently on top. What's good here is that Bryan got a following... regular visitors on his site full of crap! (oh, sorry about that but that's how I see his posts).

One of the recent example is the case of one blogger seeking revenge(he claims he only wants his money back) from a former lover. His name is Brian Gorrell. Go search for his blog on google to find his site (silly me, I wouldn't give him link from this site... hehee). It is so hot these days, the mainstream media took notice of it already.

I've seen his blog when it started to spread wildly in the net. I actually received an email about his story and to be honest, I got interested. On my first time that I visited Brian's site, . When it was featured on the news, I visited again and was surprised to see new posts. And guess what... ADSENSE!!!! hahaha...

Well, I think that's just natural. With millions of hits on the last two months, I guess he. Who knows, his account might be upgraded by Google if he can keep those traffic. But soon, the topic will fizzle out. So he better make money as soon as possible or better yet, fuel the controversy that he started.

As for you, my dear readers and entrecard droppers, start brewing your own controversy and sent them to your chismosa friends. hehehe...

Pay-Ads CPM Ads

UPDATE!!!!! PAY-ADS.COM IS A SCAM! See my latest post http://greasyperson.blogspot.com/2008/04/pay-ads-is-scam.html

A friend introduced me to Pay-Ads eCPM service that promises a better CPM payout for a 468x60 banner. It has absolutely no pop-ups and definitely no trojans. All you have to do is put the banner on your website (regardless of where... on top, at the bottom or whereever) and you're all set!

The service accepts international members though paid traffic are only from United States, Canada, Australia and Western Europe. IPs are counted every 24 hours. That's still better than other similar services that only counts US and Canada traffics.

The big draw here is that you can earn as much as $3.50 per thousand valid impressions. It says "as much" because Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, United States traffic are paid from $3 to $3.5 while those coming from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland are paid $0.50 up to $0.80 per thousand impressions.

Think about it, if you have at least 2000 daily visitors from the paid countries, you'll earn at least $7 a day. There's no minimum payout and you can even set a $1 payout if you like. Payouts are made monthly on 5th ,10th,15th,20th,25th and 30th through Paypal or eGold.

In addition, you'll also get 10% for direct referral(level). So what are you waiting for? Click the banner below and sign-up!



By the way, I just started yesterday and my account already generated $0.78 in less than 24 hours. I just tried it in one site with around 300 uniques daily. For me, that's already good. I just put the banner at the bottom of the page. For sure adsense won't give me that $0.78 if my 468x60 banner at least two pages below. It's really worth a try.

I'll post again about it next time to see if they will really pay. I'll also write better review of the services once I get accustomed to their very simplistic control panel. I'll save my comments(especially on their website) for now and let's see if this will really fly.

RankWidget Injecting Clicksor Ads on Your Site

My good friend has asked my help late this afternoon regarding the reported pop-up under advertisements that comes out from her site. Upon verification, I was surprised to see that it is not just the pop-up under that was added but a clicksor contextual ad is also implemented. My friend is not that tech-savvy to be able implement such kind of changes so I asked myself if I helped her before. Upon convincing myself that we didn't implement clicksor on her site, I started digging on the codes.

To my surprise, no clicksor code is existing in the templates or even in the widgets. No plugins either that implements clicksor and not even with mightyadsense entries. It is by that time that I decided to remove one-by-one all the javascript from various sources that she implemented that I was able to isolate the problem. Upon removing the technorati rank widget provided by RankWidget, the popup-under went off and the contextual ads no longer showed. For the benefit of the doubt, I re-added the technorati widget and viola.... I see porn popup-under. It's confirmed that the culprit is that widget.

In fairness to RankWidget, the site is already running in their code for several months already. It is only today when they implemented this "changes" that the unwelcome ads came out. It's kinda abusive so we had to take them off our site. Had it been a little more subtle, we wouldn't have known about it wouldn't care to remove it. However, I think it is a very poor judgment on the case of RankWidget. They have just lost almost a hundred of pages with PR linking to their site.

Honestly, I'm not in favor of showing their widgets at all. Though it feels good to see that technorati/alexa/google rank of your site, it is still the service provider that eventually benefits from it.

So friends, beware. Your widgets may already be ripping you off your money.

Google Bombing : Two Sides of the Coin

Most SEO/SEM people know that link-building is one of the most powerful tool not just to drive traffic to your site but mainly for ranking in search engines particularly in Google.

The term google-bombing is also popularly known as link-bombing. Essentially, it is a technique where hundreds of quality links are pointed to a specific website so that site will rank well in the search engines. In effect, the site will be on top of Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It's such a very effective way that has it's own caveats. That is ranking on an unflattering keyword.

There are two notable examples of Google Bombing done on a very bad way. One is about the "miserable failure" search keyword that when searched through Yahoo, will have President Bush's biography at the whitehouse.gov. Another one is the term "dangerous cult" that will lead you to scientology. The news about it would have not spread across the net as it has been if not for the marketing done with the technique. So basically, link bombing is one part and the marketing side of it is another.

The technique is well laid out in wired.com. It's definitely a good read and I advise that you read the article.

Upon reading, you'll realize that if a person have the resources (cooperative friends, websites and TIME), link-bombing a good and bad tool to rank a website in the search engines and drive traffic to your site.

Western Union Payout of Adsense

It's payout time and a lot of adsense publishers here in the Philippines are already lining up at Western Union branches to get their earnings. But where can we really receive our remittance? Google says that we can get them from any branch offering QuickCash payouts. However if you ask the teller at western union branches, they don't know about QuickCash! The website also doesn't help.

Actually, you can receive your money from any Western Union agent that accepts "RECEIVE" transactions. That means any WU agent here in the Philippines can service you since that's the main service thay they provide here especially for families of OFWs. So when visiting your local WU agent, just tell them that you are to receive the money and more importantly, don't forget to bring the following

• MTCN - That's the Money Transfer Control Number. That what they need to know which transmittal is for you. They won't process your request unless you have this. Of course, google gives you this.


• Exact amount to receive


• Google's address


• Two Valid IDs (company ID, any government ID like SSS, GSIS, Driver's License, Postal, TIN)
  

I print out the payment advise by google for easy access on MTCN and address. Of course, printing it will also help me remember the exact amount which is one of the questions that will be asked for verification.

Western Union QuickCash Centers

• Sanry's Foreign Exchange in Glorietta - I like this place. Since they are a money exchange shop, the exchange rate to peso is usually 10-15 cents higher than in the bank. It's a no-fuzz transaction and really fast! I recommend this if you happen to visit Glorietta.


• eBiz Solutions - I transacted in Paseo De Roxas but I saw this in other places as well. I saw one in Pedro Gil and they are open on weekends! They are also open until 7pm during weekdays. Like Sanry's this is highly recommended.


• RCPI - They allow USD payout. I tried but their system was down that time. They require you to fill-out a form. Some kind of membership card that they said will help speed up your next transaction. There's RCPI everywhere and like eBiz, they are open on weekends.


• BPI - exchange rate is a little lower than eBiz and Sanry's but still competitive


• China Bank - takes ages to complete the transaction. This is the first agent that we tried and it took more than 1 hour


• Tambunting Pawnshop - haven't tried yet

We hope that we helped you with this post. :)

dNeero Survey Advertising

There are just a lot of genius out there and the most that I admire are the ones that sees opportunity on whatever is available. They see things differently from lesser people like me. In the case of online marketing, I was amused to see people using dNeero survey to drive traffic to their site and at the same time, help charities. Too good to be true but that's what Skirt! Magazine just did.

At the end of their sponsored survey, you have to answer a question wherein the answer can only be found in http://skirt.com/. And what's more, the survey requires you to donate the earnings to your chosen charity. Well, I did take the survey and assigned Habitat for Humanity as the beneficiary. Simple reason is that they have operation here in the Philippines. But that's another story.

In effect, they gave the charity through you at least $0.60 for every visitor. That's quite expensive but I think it's still at par at what you may have paid to AdWords. As matter of fact, this could be better because you can get targeted visitors at a specific price.

One simple trick that for sure, really works! Simply genius... awesome!

Start With a Good Plan

For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, many websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace. I know because I've been there before and that was the reason for my 1 year hiatus. Time is money and I can't imagine how much I lost because of poor planning.

The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a "food" section, an "accomodation" section and an "entertainment" section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.

When you already have a broad and better-defined scope of themes for your websites, you can start monetizing your site with programs like Google's Adsense and Yahoo's YPN. You can also sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising your page. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly. I also use TextLinkAds on my sites when they already have established traffic and PageRank.

As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away!

By the way, as of Jan 31, 2008, this site is not yet well planned. I simply don't know how to do it with Blogger/Blogspot.

5 Important Rules in Website Design

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Take note that you only have 10 seconds to capture the interest of your visitors.

Here are five important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.
1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter" and sometimes with glittering effect. In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Don't be pushy. Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site
Aside from slowing your site's loadtime, you will want to make sure your visitors are not by some audio looping on your site while reading your content. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

Google PR Update Ongoing

I woke up this morning realizing that the pagerank of some of my sites reduced by one notch. At least, that's for those with PR rank. I first read about it late last night while browsing SEO.PH. Some of the members said that their sites now have PR0 especially those with paid posts for Smorty, PayPerPost, ReviewMe, etc. Of course, some members reported an increase in PR.

This is the first PR update by google for 2008. Oh well, it's another buzz that a lot of SEO specialist will talk about for the next couple of weeks. For sure, google has implemented another set rules (remember the NO FOLLOW rule?).

Follow the discussion in the following URL:

http://forums.seo.ph/showthread.php?t=2491

How about you? Have you noticed the change? Or does your site now have a PR rank? I check mine at http://checkpagerank.net

Blackhat SEO Goes to Jail

I've read in Matt Cutt's blog that Matt Marlon, the CEO of TrafficPower.com has been arrested. His company is infamous for allegedly implementing black hat techniques for search engine optimization for their clients.

The funny thing is that Marlon is not arrested for his blackhat antiques but because of Forclosed Housing Scam. His SEO techniques has resulted to removing of Traffic Power domains and domains of their clients from Google index. Same thing happend with Yahoo and MSN. This is due to violation of webmaster guidelines.

You may read the news about it here. Hmnn... I guess nobody is going to jail yet because of Black Hat SEO.

Importance of Templates

When I started blogging early last year, I more concerned on the overall layout of the theme. Just like anybody else who are just starting, I like fancy stuffs without thinking about the size of the template and how fast it would load into your browser. I don't even think about how I would make money from it.

But of course I learned some techniques as time went by. I got to implement some tips on Search Engine Optimization and began to realize the importance of template. Though content is still the King, it's not everything. There's a lot more things to do than just the content. You also have to think the user experience on your site, how to drive traffic to your site and most importantly, how to make money from it. Oh yeah, suddenly earning money online is no longer an easy task. But that should not deter you as there's a lot of themes out there that would help you on the user experience side as well as making money. That means you only have to worry about creating the content and marketing your site to drive traffic.

Actually, I got to find a wordpress theme that really converts well. The templates created by ScaredCrow are really good. I got to contact him and he sent me some of his works. I used one of his templates and it did help raise my CTR. I plan to use more of his templates. He hasn't published all his works yet, though. And he only have wordpress themes.

So there, if you want to lessen your workload in blogging, find a template that will suit both your taste and your visitor's.

Effective yet Simple Way to Join Adsense

We now know that adsense is the easiest and effective way to earn money online. Heck, this blog even has adsense in it. But Google is also strict in accepting new applicants and a lot of people have their accounts suspended or terminated due to violations.

So what's the best way to join adsense then? The answer is through Blogger or Blogspot(they are now one and the same). Yes, you read it right. Some people don't realize that Blogger has the facility to allow you to join adsense without the fuzz. If you already have a Blogger account, that's good for you. In few simple clicks, you have your application sent to Adsense for processing. But first, you should put in mind the following :
1. Your blog must be in English.

2. You must have at least 200 words in your blog. Or better yet, you already have several posts.

3. You have a valid mailing address (where Google will send your PIN and later, the cheques!)

4. Read the Adsense Terms of Service!!!! Very important if you don't want to lose your account. Treat it as a goldmine if you get accepted.

Some people says that within 48 hours, your account may be approved. But if you don't feel creating yet another blog in Blogger, you can alway choose to signup directly at Adsense. There is a link on the sidebar of this blog if you want to join.

For the uninitiated, here's the screenshots on how to join.
1. First, go to template/layout editor
2. Edit Posts Widget



3. Click on Sign-Up

4. Follow further instructions.

5. Wait for the confirmation/approval of your application.

That's it! Simple, eh!

Winning 1000 Entrecard Credits

It's my first time to join online contest of this kind and I won! Thanks for DulceNegosyante for simply commenting in her blogpost. It's as simple as that!

I don't know what to do with so many credits yet but maybe, I'll buy a spot from her blog or other popular blos. Who knows, I might conduct my very own contest.

Again, thank you DulceNegosyante. It's definitely a very good way to start the year!