My Kontera Experiment – The Results Are In…
July 26, 2007 by Gaman · 15 Comments
Some of you may recall that I wrote about re-running Kontera ads (those text links with double underline) at Sabahan.com.
I was testing to see how much money I could make from it, and whether it’ll affect my AdSense income, traffic and readers experience. I was also watching the relevancy of the ads.
I setup the Kontera ads to run from 22 Jun 2007 until 26 July 2007 today. Up until 24 July, I’ve made $30.42 from 320 clicks which translates to around $0.095 per click. My effective CPM stands at $1.29, the revenue generated for every 1000 net impressions.
That amount doesn’t include those from my other blogs. Kontera is running on several of my other blogs.
8 Tricks You Can Use to Increase Alexa’s Traffic Ranking
July 25, 2007 by Gaman · 21 Comments
Yesterday I wrote about 5 tricks some people use to increase their Alexa’s traffic ranks. The point of the post is not to say that Alexa is totally useless but the methods I described do not usually help in improving the rankings.
To the general web surfers, Alexa’s traffic ranking means almost nothing. But many advertisers and ad networks use Alexa to gauge whether it’s worth spending money and pay the site owner to advertise on the site.
If you are a blogger trying to make money from Text Link Ads or ReviewMe, having a good Alexa ranking put you in the position to charge more on your ad inventory.
I’ve been repeating this point several times in my previous posts. If you want to make money from your website, putting some effort in improving your Alexa ranking will be worth your while.
5 Useless Tricks People Use to Increase Their Alexa’s Traffic Ranking
July 24, 2007 by Gaman · 38 Comments
For some site owners, getting a high Alexa traffic rank is more of an ego boost than a true reflection of their sites popularity. Others are trying to game Alexa so that they can command higher prices for their ad inventory among other things.
The recently released official Alexa toolbar for Firefox seems to re-ignite the obsession some people have over their Alexa ranking. I’ve seen several bloggers recommending tools and methods to game Alexa ranking.
Trying to cheat their Alexa ranks may be fun to some people but it degrades the value of the entire system and affects Alexa’s reputation negatively as it becomes less reliable as a traffic measurement metric. While I am aware that Alexa has its limitations, it’s essentially offering valuable service to webmasters and advertisers alike. Besides Google PageRank, I don’t know of any other universally accessible metrics for anyone when evaluating a site’s worth.
100Mbps Internet Access Is Coming to Malaysia
July 18, 2007 by Gaman · 12 Comments
That’s according to an article published in The Star Online today. Telekom Malaysia (TM) is currently testing a 100Mbps broadband access using fibre-optic connection and the electrical wiring in our house.
The first phase of the project will be rolled out in the third quarter of next year with an initial speed of 10 Mbps. Those living in high-rise building in big cities will get to enjoy the service first. Newer housing developments would probably be able to take advantage of this service as laying fibre optic cables become part of the development plans.
I don’t expect this service to become available anytime soon in my area though since I’m living in the interior division of Sabah (I give it 5 years). Anyway, I hope this is a sign that a speedier and better connection than the 1Mbps I am currently using is coming to town soon. I’ll be content with a cheaper 4Mbps connection.
How to Make Money from Your Old Blog Posts With Helium.com
July 18, 2007 by Gaman · 8 Comments
If you have old posts in your blogs collecting dust or perhaps you love to write, either way, you’ll be able to monetize your content and make money with Helium.com.
But before we go into that, let me explain what Helium.com is all about
Helium.com is one of the community based content generation sites cropping up recently to allow users write content in any topics they like . Some say it’s a combination of About.com, Q&A services such as Yahoo Answers, Wikipedia and Consumer Reports all rolled into one service. Currently the site gets around 8 million unique visitors a month and growing with 450,000+ articles published.
While you could write in any topics like pop culture or politics, I often find the articles incline towards advice, discussions and how-tos. Unlike Wikipedia though, your article will be published unedited by others.
The Internet in 1994
July 12, 2007 by Gaman · 7 Comments
I had heard about the so called Internet back then but only had my first experience surfing the net in 1995 when I was in the University.
I found things via links from other people sites. Link pages were well valued those days because they helped people discovered the hidden gems not searchable by even the most powerful search engines during those days.
I used Veronica to search the web and Archie for FTP search. Then Yahoo! came along and became the dominant search engine. Other search engines followed suit including Lycos, Excite, Alta Vista, Northern Light, InfoSeek before Google arrived at the scene in 1999/2000 I think. It took the center stage ever since because of its clean homepage and relevancy.
My first website was in The Tropics of Geocities. It was fun learning HTML and coding the design by hand, never realised I would be doing that sort of things for a living later.
FeedBurner Pro Is Now Free
Here’s another reason to love Google. Following their acquisition of Feedburner, Google has made two of their paid service free for everyone.
One of the services is FeedBurner Stats Pro. This is a feed analytics tool that gives you a more details look at your readers such as the number of people who have viewed or clicked individual content items in your feed and “Reach,” which estimates the daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content.
To turn this on, log into your account and go to the Analyze tab anc click on the FeedBurner Stats PRO link under services. Then click the “Item Views” checkbox to activate these PRO features.
MyBrand is another service which is now free for everyone. It allows you to match you feed address to your domain name. So instead of using feeds.feedburner.com/sabahancom, I can now use feeds.sabahan.com/feed
Save On GoDaddy Domain Names with GoDaddy Coupons
July 2, 2007 by Gaman · 2 Comments
Do you know that you can get an immediate discount each time you buy a domain from GoDaddy.com? There’s really no need for you to pay the advertised prices.
To get a discount, all you have to do is search using the phrase “godaddy coupons” at Google.
The search will return a list of websites containing GoDaddy coupon codes which you can use immediate in your purchase.
If you don’t fancy spending your time sifting through the search results, the DigitalPoint forum is a good place to start your bargain hunting. I’ve found a handy thread where their members are listing GoDaddy coupons as they become available.
To use a coupon, just apply it during the checkout and the price will be updated accordingly. If you have several coupon codes, apply them one at a time to find the one that gives you the best savings.
Submitted My 2006 Income Tax Form Via e-Filing
June 29, 2007 by Gaman · 9 Comments
I’ve told myself not to wait until the very last minute before I file my B income tax form. Unfortunately that’s exactly what had happened. Well, I did the accounting stuff a week earlier but only submitted my income tax form today. Lucky for me, we have e-Filing to help me do this quickly over the Internet. This was my second time using this service.
While I’ve noticed some marked improvements in the service (it’s working for a start), there are a few things that they could have done to improve the service further.
Since e-Filing is only compatible with Internet Explorer 5.0 (IE) and above, I had to switch to IE for that purpose. By default, IE 7.0 that comes with Vista is actually more much secure than Firefox when it’s run on Vista because it’s running on a Protected Mode.
An Interview With a Guy Who Buys Millions of Keywords For His Clients
Robert Scoble has a post up over at his blog about a candid interview he did with Jeff Figueiredo of Point It.
If you are running a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign, this is a great video to watch to get some insights into how the big (and medium) spenders are spending their money on their PPC campaigns.
Scoble covers many areas and asked questions that of interest to any PPC advertisers. These includes:
How do I find the keywords to advertise on?
How do I know how much to pay?
What is the difference between “exact match” and “phrase match” and “broad match”?
Why is Google doing so well?
And so on
