Domain Parking Update

A while ago, I wrote a quick blurb about my decision to park some of my domains I’ve been sitting on. I figured I’d do a quick recap and look at the money made over the past six weeks. Read more

Book Review: Mobile Web Design

You’ve probably seen many reviews on Cameron Moll’s book Mobile Web Design around recently. I thought I’d add my own.

I purchased Cameron’s book on Wednesday and have been thumbing through it off and on. I find it extremely enlightening. Not only is the book well written, he provides links to some very informative pages about mobile standards and good mobile design practices. I’ve added quite a few new feeds to my reader after reading this book. Read more

Domain Parking

I own a ton of domains. I’m not sure how many, but I know it is a lot. I purchased the majority of them for projects that I never got around to doing. So many of my domains sit idly in my godaddy account collecing dust. Or collecting money for godaddy because their parking page is still on them. If you are unclear as to what domain parking is, there is a great Wikipedia article that will explain everything. Read more

Flash on Top of Flash

At work we just implemented a ‘Corner Peel’ Flash Advertisement. You can view an example over at the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. I had a problem when putting this ‘Corner Peel’ flash ad onto the home page, you see we run a handful of advertisements of various sizes throughout our website. One of those being a leaderboard ad (728 x 90 px). When the corner peel is ‘peeled back’ it lays on top of the leaderboard.

When I saw this for the first time, the leaderboard advertisement was a flash ad and was laying on top of the corner peel ad and thus looked very funny. This little problem caused me quite the headache today. I thought I’d show you the little trick that saved me an even bigger headache. Read more

Page Views or Ad Views

What is more important, page views or ad views? You may be saying to yourself, “shouldn’t they be the same?”. Well, yes and no, Johnny. You see, you can have multipile ads on a page, therefore creating more ad views than page views. Here lies the conundrum…Is page views or ad views a better metric of your sites popularity and overall worth? Read more

I’m Part of the Cool Crowd Now

Finally! After submitting this site to Text Link Ads almost 6 months ago, I have finally been accepted into their publisher program. If you would like to advertise on this site, you can do so here or by clicking the link in the upper right hand corner.

If you are unclear as to what Text Link Ads does, you can read their About Us page.

advertising, text link ads, affiliate programs

Split Testing Google Adwords

I just stumbled across a method of testing your Google Adwords ads that I’d never thought of. It’s called split testing and its a simple, yet powerful method to test your ads.

The idea is to create two ads that utilize the same keyword. Each ad has its own unique title and description. Place the ads with the same bid price. Google will alternate the ads accordingly for you. Run each campaign for 24 hours. The ad with the higher CTR is the better ad. Now repeat that whole process with a new ad and the winning ad from the previous split test.

Keep competing with yourself to create better and better ads. This little activity will help your click through rate grow while also letting you lower your bid price.

When doing a split test, you need to make sure that you select only the search network and NOT the content network because the content network, Adsense, will skew your results slightly. If you are targeting Adsense specifically, create a separate split test.

google, adsense, adwords, advertising, split test, ctr

Choosing a Good Domain Name

I own quite a few domain names, as many web entrepreneurs do. When choosing a domain name, one must take extra care to look at the domain name in question from another’s point of view. I ran across a list of the 10 unintentionally worst domains while browsing digg. You’ll laugh yourself sick. Needless to say, I’ve used a few of these site on multiple occasions and never thought twice about the domain name.

10 unintentionally worst domains from digg

Affiliate Programs are Cool

Being a wannabe web entrepreneur, I’m always on the look out for new ways to monetize my websites. One of the most popular ways to monetize websites these days is by using Google Adsense, Google’s PPC text ad program (see far right column). To be honest though, I’m not a big fan of the program. It seems to me that it is far too easy to fraudulently click on ads to make money. Plus it doesn’t seem like a great deal for advertisers as they are paying just for traffic to their site and not for legitimate sales opportunities. So I’ve been testing other affiliate programs lately. Read more

Adsense Referral Program

Yesterday(Nov 4, 2005) Google added a new feature to their advertising program. The search engine giant now allows current Adsense publishers to refer new users to the service.

Straight from google’s mouth:

Referrals offer you a new revenue opportunity while increasing your users’ awareness of useful products and services. Adding a referral button to your website enables you to generate additional earnings by directing users to download or sign up for products such as AdSense.

The referal happens when a potential adsense publisher clicks on a referal image from your webpage. You can see an example of a Google Adsense referal image in the lower right-hand corner of this page. Yes, I know it isn’t that graphically appealing, but it works. Google offers 22 different images to choose from. Different shapes and sizes are available as well as some designed to entice users to install Firefox with Google Toolbar. All 22 images basically look the same except for a few differences in text and size.

The appeal for adsense publishers to include the referal image is that Google will send you a 100 dollar check when each new referral of yours generates their first 100 dollars. Also, whenver a user installs Firefox with Google Toolbar from your link and runs Firefox for the first time, you will receive up to 1 dollar. Obviously you must be using the firefox images for this to work.

Although very unattractive, the Google Adsense referral plan is quite appealing. It makes you wonder what other products Adsense will be serving via their referral program down the road.

google, adsense, advertising, referral, firefox, google toolbar