Free Office Without The Microsoft—ThinkFree Online
Are you looking for an alternative to the Microsoft office apps? Look no further because here comes ThinkFree Online.
ThinkFree Online is the free web-based office apps which allow you to do nearly everything you could with Microsoft Office but all for free.
Extreme Tech has posted an in depth look at this newly updated webware at their site.
Today ThinkFree releases a major update to its suite, upgrading free online storage space from 30MB to 1GB and adding a new lightweight AJAX-based collaboration feature and the ability to apply folksonomy to a document through “tagging” (very Web 2.0). Another Web 2.0 feature of the suite is Mashup—when a web application incorporates functionality with other web services. In ThinkFree’s case, the combination is with Flickr for inserting pictures into documents now, and later the company plans integrating Google and Yahoo for maps, and with del.icio.us for shared bookmarking.
Monetize your blog feed with Feedburner Ad Network
April 27, 2006 by Gaman · Leave a Comment
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Feedburner has announced recently the opportunity for publishers to make money from their feeds by allowing them to place ads and get paid for it. Publishers participation in the FeedBurner Ad Network is currently by invitation only. Selection is based on how long FeedBurner has managed your feed, your subscriber base size and frequency of posting. This is done to ensure the balance between supply and demand is maintained. However if your feed is well-subscribed and updated regularly, you can email them at publishers@feedburner.com to let them know your interest. In a follow up announcement, Feedburner unveils the availability of a self-service interface to help advertisers purchase ads: |
On the heels of our first announcement on the topic, we follow up with the availability of a self-service interface designed to make the ad-buying process easier for advertisers. The new self-service tools provide a quick way to bypass human contact and purchase media directly via the FeedBurner Web site. If you are a media buyer, ad agency or marketer looking to participate in this new medium, this is the place.
Pay per lead affiliate programs that have made me money
April 26, 2006 by Gaman · 15 Comments
I first got involved with affiliate marketing in 1998 when I created my first hobby website, AbsolutelyFreebies.com. Today, the website continues to generate income for me month after month. Besides that website, I’ve several other websites where I promote affiliate programs exclusively.
There are four main types of affiliate programs which I have been involved with
- Pay per Sale
- Pay per Lead
- Pay per Action
- Pay per Click
Pay per Click programs were quite popular before Adsense arrived at the scene but many advertisers are moving away from this payout model due to the click fraud problem. But this didn’t deter Google Adsense and the Yahoo Publisher Network from using and even thriving under the pay per Click model with the help of their fraud click detection technology to combat the problem.
The $100 hurdle before you get your Adsense check
April 26, 2006 by Gaman · 5 Comments
There’s an interesting article over at the Rough Type discussing about how Google makes money from the $100 rules.
As publishers, we know that if our Adsense balance is below $100, the payout will be put on hold until it goes over $100.
So imagine how the amount adds up for all publishers with Adsense balance below $100 which Google is collecting by not paying them out. This can be serious money for Google.
That may be true but I think Google makes money when the publishers make money. The money in the publishers accounts are rightfully theirs which are kept temporarily but not consumed by Google.
After all Google has already taken out their 22 percent share.
[via Google Blogoscoped]
Click Fraud is not bad as you might think?
April 26, 2006 by Gaman · Leave a Comment
ClickFraudIndex.com which is backed by click fraud auditing company Click Forensics has recently published a finding that says click fraud that inflates the cost of online advertising is actually lower than expected.
The average click fraud rate across the industries is 13.7 percent which is much lower than what the industry had expected which was 20 percent to 35 percent.
Click Forensics also reported that click fraud on tier one search providers such as Google and Yahoo was 12.1 percent, which was far less on tier two (21.2 percent) or tier three (29.8 percent) providers.
The problem with this data is that it comes from a limited pool of advertisers who are part of the Click Fraud Network. This figure alone is not enough to represent the entire state of the industry.
Danny Sullivan points out in his blog:
Hypens in file names are often better than underscores
Vanessa Fox from the Google Sitemaps team was a guest blogger at Matt Cuff’s blog recently. She gives out several SEO tips which should be useful for those interested in optimising their sites for the Google search engine.
I even find a tip which is new to me such as the hypens vs underscores in file names.
Hypens are often better than underscores.
As an example, african-elephants.html is seen as two words: “African” and “elephants”. african_elephants is seen as one word: african_elephant. Who’s searching for “african_elephant”?
Some of the other tips suggest these
- Make subscription-based site more search engine friendly by using good structuring
- Stay away from flash based site
- Avoid using images as text and navigation
- Include important keywords in file name and content. (This one seems obvious but most people do not bother. Those who do, include the wrong keywords!)
Affiliate Marketing in Asia
April 25, 2006 by Gaman · 6 Comments
Chris Sanderson over at reveNews has written an interesting article about the state of affiliate marketing in Asia.
According to him most Asian merchants prefer to manage their affiliate marketing program in house, instead of turning to networks like that of CJ.com and Linkshare.com.
I agree with him. I’ve never came across an established affiliate marketing network that caters towards Asian merchants from several different countries at once.
In Malaysia, most affiliate programs that I’ve found were managed in house. Because of this, the quality of each program varies widely from one to the next and looking for good merchants can be frustrating.
One of the reasons why it’s harder to manage affiliate marketing in Asia is because of the language barrier.
Adsense for Feeds
April 25, 2006 by Gaman · 3 Comments
SEOlogs.com points out that Google have just released Adsense for feeds, a program that allows webmasters to monetize their feeds by displaying Adsense.
AdSense for feeds will work just like the Adsense for content, delivering relevant ads in your XML feeds.
Looking more closely on the Google website, more specifically, this statement from the guidelines: “Don’t include more than one ad unit per article”, It looks like Adsense for Feeds ads are added into each individual article within a feed.
Right now, Adsense for Feeds is only available to a select few, and the Adsense folks are not accepting applications at this time.
Check out AdSense for Feeds FAQ
Google is making $10 million a day from Adsense
April 25, 2006 by Gaman · 6 Comments
Google recently announced its first quarter 2006 results, in which Google made $928 million through Adsense programs.
That’s about $309 million per month or roughly $10 million daily!
This got me thinking how many Adsense publishers Google has. Someone over at DigitalPoint forum has estimated the number could be around 250K.
If that’s true, then an average, a publisher earns about $40 daily from Adsense.
However, that seems a little bit on the high side to me unless there are many high earners who are bringing the big dough. This should include a guy who is making $10,000 a day from his dating site.
[via TheForumFix]
Google offers text links for referral programs
April 22, 2006 by Gaman · Leave a Comment
Now you can use text link to refer potential publishers/advertisers to AdWords, Adsense and Firefox.
Previously, the referral formats were limited to buttons, well, not anymore. This is good news but is still not very flexible. The wording of the text links are fixed although the font type and size is fully customizable to match your site font.
But there’s a potential abuse waiting to happen as described by JenSense
While it is nice that the font can be customized by publishers, the fact they allow the font size to be customized did surprise me, since I easily changed the font size so that the sentence took up a considerable amount of the browser window. And bolding, italics etc are able to be used on the text as well. I can definitely see this being abused fairly quickly, and there is nothing (currently) in the policies that would prohibit it, since a publisher would not be changing the ad code to do this.
