This is very weird. I never or rarely get into online contests because you always have to do a bunch of things to earn credits and get more chances of winning. It’s not that I’m lazy and I don’t want to do it, it’s just that the usual mandatory step is to subscribe by email and I really hate email subscriptions: I receive enough bloody emails and that’s why I use Google Reader to read my feeds. Then, you have to blog about the contest because let’s face it, subscribing by email will give you 1 entry and blogging about the contest something like 10-20 entries. So you better blog about it if you want to win a little something, right? That’s the second part I hate! I mean, if the contest is any good, people will blog about it anyway! No?

I’m not saying I’ll never blog about a contest, I’m just saying I kinda feel like a contest bitch if I blog about it just for more entries. In fact, I don’t see any problems, I just don’t want to feel like I’m “forced” to do it if I want to win anything. Anyway, it doesn’t matter I guess and I’m going off topic here so let’s get back on track. (more…)

Google's 10th birthday

Today is Google’s 10th birthday. If you googled a little something you probably noticed this new Google artwork: to celebrate the event, Google used its original Google logo from 1998. It’s impressive really how they managed to establish their brand in such a short period of time. Everybody knows the name ‘Google’ and most people use their services everyday. They control something like 50-60% of internet searches and all that happened in only a couple of years. As Internet Marketers or webmasters we often bash big G, but we all have to admit they changed the way we used the web and…They give to some of us an impressive amount of money through AdSense for running websites!

So, happy 10th anniversary Google and thanks for giving me money even on your own bday!

When asked what they would like to for their birthday, Google answered on their blog that they’d appreciate a nice new server rack. Where do you want me to ship it, big G?

Here’s a problem I know some people would like to have to handle, because having too many comments on a post also usually means your blog is popular. It’s nice to have a popular blog with popular articles and people commenting a lot, but trust me it can become a huge problem.

I recently had to face that situation:

It’s a huge load of comments to handle and while it’s fun to know people like what you write, it’s a pain for first time visitors. First time visitors comming from Google have to wait for the page to load and it’s a pain. Not only the visitors have to wait, but with a 1Mb page it hurts the bandwith a lot!

How to handle it?

The solution is the Wordpress paged comments plugin. This little plugin allows you to have paged comments on your blog instead of having a single page with hundreds of comments. You can decide how many comments you want per page, how to order the comments, etc. There’s even a CSS sheet included with the plugin that you can modify to fit your template. I decided to display only 25 comments per page and the article went from 1Mb to 80kb. Quite an interesting improvement for the bandwidth and also for the poor users!

So there you go, now you can handle the popularity of your blog. I hope you will face that problem!

Aright folks, let’s put aside the serious stuff and let’s have fun a little bit. You know, I like to teach you stuff or tell you what not to do and I might actually post a little something about that later today, but I have a funny thing today for you guys.

Part of blogging is to accept you’ll receive tons and tons of spam. Sometimes, spammers are actually good at writing general enough statements so you believe these are actually related to your post and approve the comment. I call them the Nostradamus of spam: write general enough statements so that even 500 years later, people can relate them to actual events. That’s what being a Nostradamus of spam is, even in 500 years, a blogger could question himself if he should or should not approve the comment! Now, Saturday I got spammed by the opposite of the Nostradamus of spam! Let’s have a look at the comment I received:

Saturday In searching for sites related to AdSense but more specifically to %KEYWORD, I found your site which has great content.

Man, this thing is funny! The dumb dude forgot to change the spam template and replace %KEYWORD% with his own keywords. That’s what I certainly call a failure.

When spamming like that, you know you’ll probably get 98% rejection, but this case is a case of 100% rejection rate. I just wanted to share that with you guys. You too might have some funny spam stories, so feel free to share them!

We all have genius ideas that come and go and if you’re like me, you forget half of them. My best ideas come when I’m walking, at the gym or in the car and never when I really try to find one. What’s good is that I don’t have to spend hours thinking, it just comes to me when I don’t expect it, but what’s bad is that a couple of hours later, I don’t remember anything. I learned it the hard way, but now I always carry with me a little something to take notes.

Just take notes

I usually have my ipod touch with me all the time, so that’s what I use to take notes. Because it also act as a PDA and not only an iPod, I’m sure I always have it on me. I even have it with me at the gym because I listen to music so I really carry it everywhere. I usually avoid to have it with me in the pool, but that’s another story. When I think about something I think is a genius idea, I simply make note of it and when I look at the same idea a week later, it might not be a genius idea anymore, but at least I can re-evaluate the idea. On the opposite, when I look at it a week later and feel like it’s the best thing in the world, I’m glad I wrote it down.

Create an ideas backlog

You know these days when you simply don’t know what to write about? Well, it won’t happen anymore if you write down every idea you have. When I don’t know what to write about, I simply read my notes and pick a little something I feel would be good to talk about. This way, I don’t waste two hours just wondering what I should write about and I can take that extra two hours to do some useful stuff for my websites.

Ideas filtering

Have you ever written posts just because you felt you had to write? Have you written posts you weren’t proud of? Well, with an ideas backlog, it also act as an ideas filter. You might write down a hundred of ideas, but only pick five of them in the end because the other 95 weren’t that good after all. This way, you make sure you always write quality content and don’t write impulsive posts. By impulsive posts I’m talking about articles you think are awesome, but when you read them a week later, they aren’t that great anymore.

Bottom line, wether it’s your cell phone, iPod, laptop or a simple piece of paper, always carry a little something with you to write down your ideas.

I made a post recently about sponsoring a category in BlogCatalog and I’d like to make a follow-up on that. So first of all, I’m a sponsor for the SEO category of BlogCatalog and this ensure me to always be in the top 5 ranking for this category. Wow, that sounds great with a reach of over 45 million visitors annually, doesn’t it? Well, let’s have a look at how this little thing performs.

Always and forever #5

First of all, let’s start with one of the thing I hate about being a sponsor in BlogCatalog. While BlogCatalog assure you to be in the top 5 ranking for the category you sponsor, it is based on a first-come first-served basis. What does that mean? This simply mean that I was #5 to buy the spot and for this reason I’m #5 in the ranking. What’s that? I mean, the #1 pays 12$ a month and I also pay 12$ a month, why would the other website get a better ranking? Oh yeah, that’s true, the guy subscribed first! That’s ridiculous from my point of view and there should be something to rotate the websites across the top 5 spots. If there’s such an algorithm it must really suck as I haven’t seen my website above #5.

The price ain’t bad

I must admit the price ain’t bad. Depending on the category you want to sponsor, the price can vary between 8$ and 25$. The SEO category is currently 12$/month and it’s not that bad for a reach of 45 million visitors annually on BlogCatalog.

What about the traffic?

I’m getting traffic from BlogCatalog for sure, but I doubt it’s because of the sponsorship. Most of the traffic I get is from the friends and also because I get involved in the community a lot. I haven’t noticed a significant increase from BC in the past couple of days and I’m really disappointed with the service.

The directory doesn’t bring traffic

The reality with BlogCatalog is that people don’t usually reach your site via the directory. I mean, who’s browsing the damn directory, it’s a 10 years old technology! The real BlogCatalog traffic comes from friends, neighborhood, broadcasts and groups so it’s no surprise being a sponsor for a category doesn’t give you that much exposure.

I was expecting that kind of results and I mentioned it in my initial post. I analyzed other websites sponsoring categories and by looking at their public stats, their traffic didn’t seem to sky rocket because of BlogCatalog. I really wanted to try it, but I don’t think I’ll pay for another month.

Worth it?

No. With 12$ you could do so much more for your website. With a little 12$ you can pay someone to submit your website to like 750 link directories or something like that. It’s a much wiser investment to be honest. I had to try it but now it’s done. I’ll probably give some more feedback at the end of the month as now it’s only been a couple of days but I don’t think this will get better. Bottom line: invest that 12$ elsewhere.

I’m a big fan of BlogCatalog and I actually much prefer it to MyBlogLog but I won’t go into details as to why I prefer it as it’s not the purpose of this post. I actually want to talk about sponsoring a category into BlogCatalog to get more exposure. I was interested in sponsoring a category to increase my visibility but I’m not sure it’s really worth it.

The price

The rates to sponsor a category are actually pretty good for a website like BlogCatalog which is receiving thousands of visitors everyday: it goes from 8$ to 25$. Prices depend on the category you want to sponsor. For example, a scrapbooking category will cost you 8$ while a Finance category will be 25$. It just goes with popularity.

What do you get?

Here’s what BlogCatalog gives you for sponsoring a category:

BlogCatalog’s Sponsored Category program is a way for you to get more visitors to your blog by taking advantage of BlogCatalog’s traffic of over 45 million annual visitors.

• A premium position in BlogCatalog’s Category specific directory
• Your blog will show up in one of the top 5 positions in the category you select
• Your sponsorship links to your BlogCatalog description page which links to your blog.

Worth it?

Well, with BlogCatalog, you can actually see the number of recent visitors on the website’s BlogCatalog profile and from what I’ve seen from other sponsors, I’m not convinced. The amount of recent visitors was similar to my profile’s recent visitors count and I wasn’t sponsoring any category which makes me think it’s not a big traffic source. These are only assumptions as I’m not sure how reliable the stats ar.

These are only assumptions, let’s try it!

Anyway, I don’t like to assume things so I decided to sponsor the SEO category on BlogCatalog for the next 30 days. So, if you search into the SEO category, you’ll see me appear in the first five listings:

So I say, if you were thinking about sponsoring a category to increase your exposure, just wait a week or two. I will provide some feedback in the next weeks as to wether it’s giving good traffic or not so this way you will be able to make a good decision and won’t throw away 10-25$. Let me do the dirty work!

A common thing to monetize your website is to flood it with AdSense ads. While AdSense ads are a great way to monetize a website, more ads doesn’t necessarely mean more money. Many people think that by flooding the website with AdSense, they increase their chances of receiving clicks and thus, maximize their profits. We’ll have a look here why it is not always the case.

Why?

Let’s start with the base principle of AdSense. Google actually “read” the content of your website to figure out what your page is about and deliver ads accordingly. For the particular subject your website is about, Google has a pool of potential campaigns to show. In these campaigns, certain have a high CPC (Cost per click), certain have an average CPC and others have a very low CPC. Google wants to make you and their advertisers happy, so that’s why they’ll try to provide you with ads having a good CPC, but if you offer enough ad spots on your site, they’ll definitely provide you with some crappy ads as well.

Now, let’s say you display 25 text links on your page from Adsense. For the particular subject your webpage is about, Google may only have something like 5 extremely good targeted ads with high CPC, 10 average ads and 10 crappy ads. If you display these 25 text links, there are good chances someone will click on one of them because there are so many, but there are 80% chances that the clicks you receive will have an average or very low CPC.

Now, let’s say you only put 5 text links. There are less chances for you to receive clicks, but the clicks will usually be worth more money! This is for the simple reason that google won’t display (Well, not every time) 5 crappy ads on a total of 5 possibilities.

So what’s the perfect balance?

You have to test a lot of different ad placements. For some websites, having more ads might bring more money and for some other sites, a single ad might do the job. On another website I worked on, I displayed only two ads and this was giving me more money than when I was displaying three or four. I received less clicks, but the clicks were actually giving me more money.

This trick won’t work if you don’t optimize your ad placement. Less ads will only be efficient if you know precisely where to place them to get clicks. I usually achieve this by “flooding” the page with ads and then analyzing the ones with the highest CTR (Click through rate). When you know the top spots on your page, it’s time to get rid of the poor performing ads. This way, your top spots will always receive the best ads and you’ll make more money out of the same traffic.

If a page full of ads does the trick for you, keep it this way. It depends a lot on the type of website you run and the type of traffic, so that’s why you have to test a lot of different scenarios. It is not science, but this technique works for me most of the time.

There are thousands of e-books about making money online and they all promise the same thing: make you rich. You can easily pay between 10$ and 100$ for an e-book, but the real question is: is it worth it?

Worth it?

I think it’s not worth investing in e-books for a couple of simple reasons. At least, it’s not worth investing in a lot of ebooks. The main reason is that making money online is not something you can learn in books: it’s a lot of hit and miss. You can surely learn techniques to maximize your chances of success and learning in e-books is one of the possibility. Basically, the most important thing is to know the basic traffic & SEO techniques and there are a lot of places where you can learn these techniques. The way to learn them is your choice, wether it’s e-book, blogs or forums. There are so many good resources out there that I tend to think e-books aren’t really worth it.

Where to buy

If you really want to buy one I’d say the best way to do it is the Digital Point forum. If you don’t know Digital Point, it’s a webmaster forum and there’s a market place on it. In the market place, there are a lot of people selling ebooks but wait for others to review them. Once you see good reviews, then I guess it’s ok to buy the e-book. Don’t buy too many, it’s a common mistake to buy a lot and then realize it was worthless.

You can’t learn everything in books

Remember that making money online is not something you can learn in books: you can only learn basic techniques. The internet is a lot of hit and miss and you might end up starting 10 different projects before finding one that’s working. Knowing the basic and advanced techniques might lower that to 2-3 projects, but it’s still hit and miss. Once you have a good project, it’s the same story: you have to figure out ways to monetize it and it’s a whole different story every time.

Don’t spend too much into stuff like e-books. Instead, why not take that 10-20$ and pay someone for 500 directory submissions? That would be a 10-20$ well invested and a concrete way to increase your traffic and future profits. You can learn most of what e-books teach you if you keep well informed by reading blogs (like this one!) and forums.

There are a couple of websites that offer free e-books if you subscribe to their newsletter or stuff like that. It’s a good way to get yourself some free e-books for nothing. Get them and read them. Read wathever free stuff you can get about making money online, but don’t spend too much money, it’s not always worth it.

Do you publish summaries of posts in your RSS feed? If you do so, I’m pretty sure the reason is to monetize your blog. RSS feeds are extremely hard to monetize and limiting the size of the posts to force the user to visit your website is a common thing. Unfortunately, it’s the opposite: in the long run, you will loose money.

The preview feed

I think most bloggers started this way with their feed. What’s the point of putting ads on your website and publishing your content in a different place? What’s the point of having 5,000 readers if they all can read my content ads-free? Well, I’m sure you all read other blogs and even yourself get frustrated when you can only read a preview of an article in your favorite news reader. You don’t feel like visiting the website just to read a single article, so what’s the point of subscribing if you still have to visit the damn website? My usual reaction is simply to unsubscribe.

If myself, as a reader, unsubscribe from “preview” feeds, I’m sure you do and I’m also pretty sure that’s what your readers do! That is one of the main reason some blogs aren’t able to increase their number of subscribers. You might gain 10 readers a day, but there’s a strong possibility you’re also loosing 10 readers every day.

So, what do I do?

You should publish your full articles into your feeds. You can also place some ads into your feed if you really want to maximize your profits: it’s something we’ll see more often in the coming years. I personally don’t like to put ads in RSS feeds but this really is a personal decision and I don’t think this would impact the number of subscribers a lot. The main reason why you want a full feed is to keep your subscribers. You might not get a buck from your RSS feed, but loyal readers will comment on your blog often and also talk about you on other websites. What you really want to do is getting loyal readers in order to make long-term gains.

Thinking short-term is usually killing a business. Long-term thinking gives you less money at first, but it’s definitely worth it in the long run. I personnaly think full and ads-free RSS feeds are the way to go. You just have to make sure you write good enough content so that people feel the need to comment or visit your website for whatever other reason.