My Top 10 Most Read Blogs
October 10, 2007 by Gaman · 15 Comments
Yesterday I noticed a trackback from Raymond.cc, one of the most popular Tech Blogs in Malaysia . Curious to know what he had written about Sabahan.com, I clicked the link to find a post where Raymond lists 10 of his most read blogs.
Apparently, Sabahan.com is one of the blogs that he read daily. I am honored to be on the list and am glad to know he finds Sabahan.com useful 
While I don’t usually participate in a tagging meme I thought this one is worth tagging along with. In addition to helping us discover interesting blogs from other people, I would also like to return the favour and thank Raymond for including Sabahan.com on his list.
The meme was started by Martin of gHacks.net where he invited the bloggers from his ten most read blogs to take part. The goal is to create a blog feed dependency list which shows the top ten most read blogs of all participating blogs.
Malaysian Can Now Withdraw Money from their PayPal Accounts
October 1, 2007 by Gaman · 64 Comments
Not that you can’t withdraw before this but the steps usually make your head spin. Some enterprising Internet marketers even took advantage of the complicated steps by selling ebooks telling people how to do it.
Anyway, Wayne Liew emailed me to give a heads-up about a new feature recently introduced by PayPal. Wayne’s post refers to the original post by Sweet Surrender about PayPal is allowing money withdrawal to credit and debit card.
I usually don’t much pay attention to such news before. While I spent thousands of Ringgit monthly via PayPal, I’ve never really used it to accept payments.
Some of you may recall that I promoted MaxBounty at some of my websites. My main gripe about this program is that it automatically converts my commission checks into Ringgit and there’s no way avoiding this. While this means shorter clearing time, I prefer getting paid in US dollars and put up with with the long clearing time.
Hits vs. Unique Visitors vs. Page Impressions – What You Should Know
September 24, 2007 by Gaman · 21 Comments
Once in a while, I came across a blog post that proudly announces their blog or site is getting thousands of hits per month. Either they don’t know what hits mean or it’s like the bragging rights for those who don’t know better.
Hits shouldn’t exist in your vocabulary unless you are a server administrator. There are better metrics out there to gauge a site’s popularity and hits are irrelevant as far as the average site owners are concern.
So what’s a Hit?
A hit is generated when a file is requested and served on your website. The file can be anything from the ordinary HTML document, an image file, a video and so on. An HTML document with 10 image files on it will register 11 hits (1 HTML file + 10 image file) when the page is viewed by a visitor.
BlogRush – The Answer to You Blog’s Traffic Needs?
September 19, 2007 by Gaman · 21 Comments
Recently I asked my readers a question about topics they would like to read more in this blog. Each time when I run such survey, most would say they want to know how to attract traffic to their blog.
Talking about finding traffic, it’s such a coincident that a service called Blog Rush that help bloggers to do exactly that was launched recently.
I am sure many of you have seen this service mentioned around the blogosphere especially if you are a reader of any money making and blogging blogs. It was launched 3 days ago and has been generating quite a buzz when the big name bloggers put it in the spotlight.
Blog Rush has done very well at creating the hype which was instrumental in attracting droves of new members in just three days. Just check their Alexa stats below and see how it surpasses ProBlogger.net’s traffic in about two days.
New Features Highlights for Google Reader, AdSense & Search
September 14, 2007 by Gaman · 9 Comments
I’ve been busy for the past few days planning and negotiating with the contractor on my parents’ house extension, which is probably evident from the patchy posting frequency you might have noticed for a couple of days.
Anyway, I’ll continue to update this blog as time permits.
I’d like to mention a few new features that have been added into several of Google’s applications these past few days.
Google Reader Search
If you are using Google Reader as your feed reader, you’ll be happy to know that they’ve just added search. This feature is one the main features I’ll look for in any feed reader.
Basically, you can search your feed right from the Google Reader interface. So, let’s say you recalled that I once wrote a tutorial about AdSense blend strategy. Without going to Sabahan.com, just enter the keyword into the search box and you’ll get what you are looking for.
How a 17 Year Old Girl Earns $70K Monthly From Her Website
September 10, 2007 by Gaman · 44 Comments
I came across an interesting story from Connected Internet about a 17 years old Ashley Qualls who earns as much as $70,000 a month from a website that gives away free layout for MySpace.
Most of this income comes from Google AdSense.
So far she has made more than $1 million from her site at Whateverlife.com. Her first AdSense paycheck was $2,790 and she had rejected $1.5 million buyout offer.
Whateverlife attracts more than 7 million unique visitors and 60 million page views a month. That’s a larger audience than the circulations of Seventeen, Teen Vogue, and CosmoGirl! magazines combined.
In contrast, TechCrunch.com gets 4 million page views per month, 15 times less pageviews.
Quantcast, a popular source among advertisers, ranked Whateverlife.com a staggering No. 349 in mid-July out of more than 20 million sites. Among the sites in its rearview mirror: Britannica.com, AmericanIdol.com, FDA .gov, and CBS.com.
A Beginner’s Guide to Making Money on the Internet
August 22, 2007 by Gaman · 22 Comments
When I first learned the ropes in Internet marketing, I was lucky to find several useful websites that had guided me in the right direction.
It was good that I wasn’t trying to get rich overnight since I understood that it takes hard work to be successful. That had helped me avoid pitfalls or getting involved in more seedy methods of making money online.
Today, a quick search on Google returns a plethora of information to help you make money online. Instead of explaining every money making methods conceivable, I am going to focus on methods that I’ve been using to help me make a living online.
6 Tips to Make Money with Low Profit Margin Products or Services
August 13, 2007 by Gaman · 9 Comments
In one of my previous posts, I’ve recommended that it’s easier to make money from affiliate programs by selling products with good profit margins
When you are operating a lower profit margin business, it limits how much you can afford to spend on advertising. The lack of promotion ensures fewer potential customers arrive at your website, hence limits how much money you can make.
Any little hiccup that may occurs along the way could cost your business dearly. In the end, this vicious cycle becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as there’s no way avoiding the impending failure.
The good news is, operating a business with low profit margins isn’t all gloom and doom, provided that you use a different approach in your promotion effort than that in a high margin business.
My Internet Income Report for July 2007
August 2, 2007 by Gaman · 58 Comments
Everyone (well more and more bloggers anyway) seems to be revealing their blogs’ income nowadays, following a trend started by John Chow Dot Com. If there were others who had chosen to reveal their blogs income before John Chow, I am not aware of them. Those that I know of didn’t go into as much details as what John Chow is doing.
I know how much you make is your own business so many bloggers prefer not to reveal their earnings.
They prefer to keep quiet about it for several reasons including the fear of being copied by others, or they don’t want to be perceived as bragging, or they don’t want to attract competitors which will affect their own income in the future.
Sometimes being discreet can be more intriguing as people are drawn to you, waiting for you to spill the beans.
The Single Most Important Number That Could Make or Break Your Business
July 27, 2007 by Gaman · 8 Comments
After I’ve written the 8 unusual tricks to boost your AdSense CTR, an interesting discussion in the comments ensued where a reader suggested that as long as you have lots of traffic you’ll have clicks. In response, I wrote that CTR is more important than your traffic; higher CTR makes you more money with less traffic.
Another reader wrote, having a 5% CTR with 1000 visitors is better than 100% CTR from 10 visitors. When it comes to AdSense, common sense dictates that the more traffic you have the bigger your potential income would be. That I totally agree.
However, I think there’s one important number people tend to overlook in their quest to increase traffic and hopefully make more money from it. The number is your CTR itself.
