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. Continue reading »

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.

Tags: google, adsense, advertising, referral, firefox, google toolbar