Great news for local sites in Thailand. You can now benefit from better targeted ads with Google’s announcement of its support for Thai in Adsense for Content. Last year, it was already included in the Adsense for Search program, so this just comes as the next logical move. Hopefully, other languages will soon follow. I’m all for localized content. (more…)
For an average blogger’s needs, I’m inclined to think that Google Analytics is more than enough. The number of features and the zero tag price are definitely welcome. However, I’m sure out there somewhere are folks who have a nagging feeling that things can and should be better. If you’re one of them, you might want to stop and take a look at Clicky. (more…)
Being a compulsize AdSense checker, I look at my stats almost every hour, and just now I found that I couldn’t log in. Adsense gives me an error “UsernamePasswdNotMatch” in Opera. In fact, they do match, and yes, I’ve checked if caps lock was on and it’s not. On IE8, it gives me an Error 403. I did a quick Twitter search to see if other people were experiencing the same thing, and lo and behold, I wasn’t alone: (more…)
I’ve been doing business on the Internet for six years. Many things have changed on the World Wide Web since I launched my very first website, but there’s one (negative) thing that apparently will never be gone: this tendency to waste great opportunities that is evident in so many webmasters.
If there’s one huge problem that a smart webmaster should fight as hard as s/he can, this is it. This can never be stressed enough: grab any and all good opportunities that you find on the web as soon as you can. And once you start, do not give up so easily.
I’m going to tell you a real-life story to illustrate my point:
K. started surfing the web because she wanted to have some fun and research her favourite subjects. As time went by, she naturally made friends with other Internet users, joined forums, mailing lists and became a loyal visitor to various sites in a specific niche.
One day she realised that there was a certain type of website missing in that niche. So, she decided to fill this gap with her own web project. It was totally amateurish… yet it soon became pretty successful, because of three major factors:
1. She was a sort of pioneer, because she detected a need in her niche and was the first one to do something about it.
2. She really knew what she was dealing with and even devoted part of her time to expanding her knowledge on the subject, so she could improve her website on an ongoing basis.
3. She had good networking skills, so it wasn’t hard to spread the word about her site.
However, she wasn’t able to make a single cent from that site and eventually took it down. Why did this happen?
* She stopped investing in networking and promotion.
* She believed that the niche was about to collapse, so she lost the motivation needed to keep her site up.
* She thought a site like that couldn’t be effectively monetised.
This is what happened afterwards:
Talk about missed opportunities!
Had she persevered, now she wouldn’t have to use her own story as an example and alert for other webmasters.
The UN communications chief has estimated that by the end of 2008, 61% of the world’s population will be using mobile phones – an equivalent of about 4 billion people. Thanks to low cost, better infrastructure, and the human need to connect, mobile phones outnumber personal computers by a mile. We don’t only use them to call, we also text, take photos, play music, watch videos, and even access the Internet – albeit crudely. Several tech evangelists have predicted that the mobile web will be the next great frontier, but as industry players know, that’s easier said than done. (more…)
After Yahoo! signed the controversial advertising deal with Google a few months ago, some critics denounced the company for virtually hanging the glove and giving the online advertising monopoly to Google. However, with the recent launch of Yahoo!’s new advertising platform called APT, Jerry Yang & Co. seem to be keen on proving the naysayers wrong. (more…)
Google never ceases to amaze the webmaster community. The newest controversy involving the most popular search engine started when the team at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog posted an article about dynamic URL rewrites:
One friend was concerned about using dynamic URLs, since (as she told us) “search engines can’t cope with these.” Another friend thought that dynamic URLs weren’t a problem at all for search engines and that these issues were a thing of the past. One even admitted that he never understood the fuss about dynamic URLs in comparison to static URLs. For us, that was the moment we decided to read up on the topic of dynamic and static URLs.
After several explanations on the subject, they drew these conclusions:
Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems.
(…) Although we are able to process this URL correctly, we would still discourage you from using this rewrite as it is hard to maintain and needs to be updated as soon as a new parameter is added to the original dynamic URL.
And this was when the problems began. Reactions among webmasters, SEOs, programmers and Internet marketers have been varied, but most of them can be summarised in the following points:
What do you think? Will you stop using dynamic URL rewrites because Google said you probably won’t know how to deal with them?
If you read a lot of blogs like I do, I’m sure you’ve come across some with “Related Posts” at the end of each article (like this one). One obvious use of this tactic is to bump up the page views for CPM ads. It’s also a great way to increase “stickiness” – that is, to make your readers stay on your site longer, which in turn increases their chance of clicking on an ad or becoming a subscriber. So how do you do it? Well, you can always write them manually, one by one, but I’m sure you have better uses for your time, so why not try these WordPress plugins? (more…)
Building an email list is said to be one of the most profitable things a webmaster can do. Of course, you can’t simply ask people to give you their email addresses. You must offer something in return, and this “something” usually is a newsletter. However, many webmasters hesitate in starting their own newsletters because they already struggle to find fresh ideas for their sites; having to find content ideas for yet another venue looks like quite a challenge.
If that’s your case, fear no more. Today you’ll see there are at least two easy ways to create content for it.
1. Using your newsletter to plug your site
Even if at first you really, really can’t think of any exclusive content to fill your newsletter, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t begin collecting those email addresses now. You can always start out with update alerts and evolve as time goes by. Update alerts are great to generate repeat traffic, because subscribers will be regularly encouraged to visit your site.
Do not just put together a lame list of new items added to your site. View each site update as an important happening — and try to convey such view in your newsletter text. Use it to tease your subscribers, to make them feel that they must visit your site right away. Of course, you should never generate false expectations; if you’ve just published a new article, don’t make your newsletter’s subscribers believe they will find five new pieces.
In case you tend to update your site daily, you’d better send out weekly update alerts. Otherwise you may look pushy and even spammy.
2. Complementing your site’s content with a newsletter
This method allows you to plug a site on your newsletter and the newsletter on your site at once. But it depends on your site content’s structure. Here’s what you should do: whenever you publish a list of new items, make sure not to post all of them on your site; save some for your newsletter. Alternatively, publish only one type of media on your pages and save the other ones for the newsletter.
Say you’ve written a list entitled “50 Effective Money-Saving Tips.” What you want to do is post 30 or 40 list items on your site or blog and end the text with a paragraph like this: “The remaining tips will be published on the upcoming 20th issue of our newsletter. If you don’t want to miss them, subscribe now.” If you have shot a video to demonstrate some (or all) of the money-saving tips, you can post the whole written piece on your site and entice readers to subscribe to your newsletter in order to get the video’s link.
In both cases you must display on the newsletter some links to your site’s content. This way, subscribers who still haven’t seen the updates will feel enticed to visit your pages. Taking the examples above, they’ll want to either read the first items of your money-saving list or view its written version instead of the video one only.
Do you have a newsletter? Leave a comment to tell us how you create content for it.
If it’s true the the Internet is nothing more than a waste of time, then who else has the most idle hours to kill?
A survey conducted by Ipsos Mendelsohn between March to July of this year revealed that the higher a person’s household income is, the more likely he is to spend his time online. Additionally, the Internet is by far the most preferred media by the rich, with television and radio coming trailing far behind. (more…)
