I am what?

If you live in the Uk, I am sure you must have seen the "I Am" ad on TV. The tag line is part of a multimillion global ad campaign launched by UK mobile operator Orange. I was driving to the city centre when I noticed the sentence below: search online for "I am".



Intrigued, I did search it in Google and found out that it was there on top of the results page but it was not # 1 in the actual results but rather a sponsored link with a light yellow background. I am not sure whether anybody searches for "I am" on search engine. Clearly they are not going for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). However, I guess the ad campaign is working because it got me to search for it and ultimately go to ther special site where I hung around for a while. I will bet that there are a few other geeky guys around doing the same thing as well.

BTW, according to the Gadget show, Orange' Dolphin 15 is the best mobile phone deal along with 3's Mix and Match.

I should point out that in another show, they pointed out that the Flext 35 (£27/month) was the best because it came with a free Nokia N95. I tried to find it on the T Mobile site but the offer is not there any more. However, they did have the Combi 30 (18 months) plan where you only pay £30 per month for FREE phone, 700 minutes and unlimited texts. That's even better.

Best that Orange.

End of google AdSense Referrals program

Just found out that Google's AdSense Referrals program ends during the last week of August. I used to a few referral ads on this blog but right now the only one is the Firefox with Google toolbar ad banner at the bottom.

The email from Google recommends joining the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network, which is now part of their empire.

Do remember to remove the referral codes from your site before the last
week of August.

For more information check out the Google help centre.

Adsense optimisation guidelines

The latest post on the official Adsense blog -"Another look at optimizations" mentions two guidelines for optimising your site for Adsense, namely:

1. Ads shouldn't be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.

and

2. Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.

I have noticed a lot of web sites and blogs openly flouting these guidelines. Their intention is clear - to make it look like the ads are their own created content and thus increasing the click through rates.

On my blogs, the ads are either after each post and/ or on the side bar and visitors can clearly make out that they are ads.

I am wondering whether Google is going those sites that flout the guidelines. Will they be penalised in anyway?

Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords

If you are using Google Adwords to advertise your website, products and/or services, you will either use ad agencies to handle your advertising campaign or do it yourself. I guess most people would prefer to leave all the hard work to the agencies even thought they charge quite a lot.


What if you learnt all the secret methods used by agencies on running a profitable campaign? Well! It's not a secret anymore. PPC Professional Steve Baker has come out with the Google Adwords ebook. Google Adwords - The Ultimate Guide reveals all the PPC Agency secrets. I found the ebook to be highly informative and useful. Best of all, it's completely free to read online.

Going through the site, I found the comments really interesting. Steve further clarifies doubts and replies to questions raised by the visitors.

Anyway, you can also download the entire document, which is published by Epiphany Solutions Ltd for £12.49.

Consumer Generated Advertising

My doctoral research looks at the credibility of blogs carrying sponsored content. While doing my review of literature, I was quite surprised to find that I couldn't find the definition of "Consumer Generated Advertising" anywhere on the web (not even on Wikipedia) even though it was used on a number of sites. I may be wrong, and please inform me if you do come across any site with the proper definition.

So here's my definition:

Consumer Generated Advertising refers to advertising on Consumer Generated Media. Generally used to refer to sponsored content on blogs, wikis, forums, etc. These sponsored content also known as sponsored posts or paid posts contain links that point to the home page or specific product pages of the website of the sponsor.

Check out the page I created on Wikipedia as well. Go ahead and add to the page.

Easier management in Adsense coming soon

According to a news coming out from Google, they are going to release a new feature soon that lets us manage ad units from within AdSense publisher accounts without the need for changing the code as we used to do earlier.

From what I understand, we can change colors and channels for new AdSense for content ad units by just updating from within our AdSense account and the changes will be visible automatically on your website or blog.

It isn't live yet and they plan to roll it out in phases.

For more info go to the Inside Adsense blog.

Introduction to TNX.net

There has been a proliferation of link farms - a group of websites/ blogs that link to each other, all over the net. This was a very common search engine optimization (SEO) technique. It was hoped that increasing the number of sites that link to yours would lead to higher Google page rank. It did work for a while until the search engines started penalizing an banning sites on such link farms. I have to admit that I am also guilty of joining a few of them. After I learnt of that these SEO techniques were frowned upon by Google and other search engines, I deleted the links from my sites.

TNX.net is a new online advertising company that combines the benefits of contextual advertising, text links exchange as well as permanent non-reciprocal text links. They avoid the above problem by not placing many links on each page by default. Their link ads don’t have any unique HTML coding that would enable search engines to identify the links. If you do happen to buy links, they allow you have full control over the link ads placement speed. Having too many links to your site suddenly appear on the web may be considered suspicious, if you know what I mean.

Their system has over 30 thousand webmasters worldwide and a database of more than 33,500,000 pages, out of which more then 500,000 have PR>0. Anyone who's interested in increasing the volume of targeted visitors to their sites can join in. That was for advertisers. Besides earning money by putting up ads on their sites and from referrals, publishers can take advantage of TNX.net to promote own websites as well. Unlike other companies, a publisher is also an an advertiser automatically.

Registering was really fast and easy. After registering, you can then add your sites to the system. However, before your site can be recognised, you need to put up the TNX code on your site. It should be noted that the TNX code does not work on pages or websites that are hosted on servers without PHP and/or Perl support. Ad-links will show up as soon as your site is approved. Unfortunately sites not indexed by Google or with PR 0 are not accepted.

After your site is approved, you'll receive 5000 points as a bonus that can be used to buy links from up to 5,000 websites.

By now you are probably wondering how much it would cost you to join in. Well, it is totally free for webmasters who install the TNX code on their websites. In case you are interested in advertising, check out the advertising costs here: http://www.tnx.net/price.php

A lot of bloggers have a problem deciding how much to charge for putting up ads on the blog. Well the Income Calculator on the TNX home page should come in handy.

For a limited period they are also giving away 2,000 points to people who join in now. This would enable you to buy up to 2,000 links for a month. So, what are you waiting for. Give them a test run as you have nothing to lose.

Get reviewed for only $5

I am really annoyed.

Haven't received a single offer on PayPerPost direct till date on ANY of my blogs. I keep reading about other blogs having received several offers.

My wife told me that I am probably overpricing my blogs. So, I want to test it out.

SO I am lowering the Minimum Offer Amount for this Blog to $5 till the end of August. Will see whether I do receive any offers after this.

TV Advertising experts

Advertising via the medium of television remains one of the most popular forms of advertising. Unlike other forms of advertising media such as billboards and magazines, TV advertising is more persuasive as it is beamed directly into households of customers. It also offers a wide range of programming and advertisers can target specific consumer groups through segmentation. The effectiveness of this medium can be seen from the fact that some ad campaigns remain in the mind of television viewers way long after the end of the campaign.

Ad campaigns of TV are not limited to companies seeking to create awareness about their products and services but even individuals and non governmental organisations are keen to harness the power of the TV. Right now we cannot even image any political campaign without ads on TV. The spread of cable TV has made this media even more accessible.

In order to maximize your campaign's performance, it is essential that you get an experienced company to take care of your campaign. Some ad agencies just design and create your campaigns and leave the rest to you. If you want someone to handle the entire process of running your campaign, a company like Hawthorne direct Inc is the answer.

Hawthorne specializes in creative/production, media and integrated marketing including advertising on TV.

They will help you manage every aspect of your ad campaign right from design and creation with their in-house facilities, even funding and to market testing and campaign rollout. Since 1986, they have handled over 331 clients managing nearly 500 media campaigns.

Going through their site, I was surprised to see a list of resources - related to direct response (DRTV) industry information which they were sharing openly with visitors to their site. Tell a lot about the company.

Don't ignore blogspot blogs

Can't recall the blog but one blogger was saying that if you are serious in making money from your blog then you should get your own domain name. I toally agree with that but what I didn't agree was his suggestion that advertisers should ignore all free blogs including Blogspot blogs hosted on Blogger.

Also noticed that on a number of online advertising sites, several advertisers exclude Blogspot blogs from carrying their advertisements. I agree that there are thousands of Blogspot blogs that are really lousy and hardly receive any web traffic but to generalise them would be a mistake. I know of several Blogspot blogs which are highly popular. Take My Asylum for example. It is a PR 5 blog and receives around 200 visitors per day. Not much but way better than a lot of blogs with their own domain names.

Barring blogs from carrying ads just because they don't have their own domain names simply doesn't make sense. Google PR might be a better screening option.

Ad free almost

A little update about my blog.

Finally, decided to remove all ads from my blog - apart from the Google AdSense ads and referrals.

I haven't earned anything from them so far and feel that it's a waste of my blog's real estate. They were just plain distracting.

Might put them up again in the future when I have more visitors and I have a higher PR ranking.

AuctionAds up

If you look at the side bar of my blog, you will notice live eBay auction listing. I got these though AuctionAds.

So how do I make money?

When ever anybody clicks on one of the listings and take an action on eBay, i earn some cash. By action, I mean a Winning Bid, a Buy-it-Now or a confirmed user registration.

All I had to do was register with them, generate the code, copy and paste on my blog.

However, it is not contextually based ad and you have to specify the ad keywords. This may not be a bad thing as it is not Google AdSense TOS and you can thus run them alongside Google ads.

I guess you have to play around with the keywords. For example, I got some unexpected and unwanted ads when I put gadget.

Will tell you guys if I earn anything from it, after a few months.

Tags: ads auctionads

PR 10

Was just wondering whether there are any websites with a perfect Pagerank of 10. As I found out, there's more than a hundred of them out there. This includes Google's home page of course. However, Google UK page has only PR 8.

According to this site there are 148 PR 10 sites (as of today).

Do you want to be a PR 10 too?

I don't know about you, but that's my aim. In the meantime, I am going to wear the t-shirt shown here. There are more in my SEO Expert store

Tags: pr 10 t-shirt

Upto 3 Google link ads now

Just learnt that we are now allowed to place up to three Google link ads on a page. previously we were allowed only one unit per page.

This is really great as I prefer link units as compared to the other formats and they are definitely more user-friendly.

View sample placements here.

Bye Kontera

I signed up with Kontera some time back and tested it on my ah ok lah blog.

In case you are wondering how it works, you have to insert a snippet of coding into your website html coding. Contextually relevant keyword is identified on your web page and automatically turned into a link to the most relevant ad from among Kontera´s advertisers - Kontera calls this ContentLink™. You earn revenue on a Cost-Per-Click basis.

After the trial run, I have decided that it is not right for me.

A lot of my friends complained that the links were distracting and made my site feel too commercial. I also found out that the money earned was negligible. No even US$2 in 22 days. I earn more from Google adsense and their ads are unobtrusive.

Kontera might be a good means of earning revenue for websites who receive thousands of visitors every day but not one like mine.

Tags: ads adsense google kontera

Comparison of customer generated advertising companies

I am only going to compare 3 of the services I currently use.

i) PayPerPost: They have the maximum number of advertisers and thus loads of opportunities. Also have the biggest payout. Sometimes upto $1000/. Payperpost also has a referral programme in place. Blogs with a non-writing period of 30+ days in the past 90 days are not eligible to register. Blogs with zero or low PR may have limited opportunities. They also have a very lively community of loyal "posties". I have two of my blogs registered with them with another on the way.

ii) Loudlaunch: Very few opportunities. I have taken a few. However, the fact that most of them require word count of 150 and above with payouts of only $5 has put me off this service.

iii) Creamaid: Like Loudlaunch, very few opportunities. However, I like the fact that you don't have to register your blog with them and can thus post on any including those with zero PR, including this blog. Most opportunities also don't specify a word count. Payouts quite low but a few exceptions like the last opportunity I took ($20).

The clear winner is definitely PayPerPost.

Tags: advertising creamaid loudlaunch payperpost posties