The Google Traffic Diet
May 27, 2006
Google has dropped new guidelines for it’s search results and once again webmasters are hopping mad. They feel that they will be dropped in the search results and lose income especially from adsense and other affiliate programs.
The point is that if you are not doing the questionable practices that Google forbids why get angry? If Google and any other company online and off didn’t make changes then the bad seeds can worm their way in and do fraud or worse simply because they figured out different ways to pull it off.
Some of the new changes include:
Simple and to the point.
About Affiliate Programs
May 21, 2006
How to get your web pages to pay for themselves: Affiliate Programs
by Thomas Baurley
I’m a age-old member of the affiliate program scheme … though over the course of the last several years have let them drop and now realize many of my older web pages are junk-filled full of old invalid codes. Who knows if any of those companies owe me anything or not because living a nomadic life, I am really bad keeping up with address changes and signing in. So in my honest opinion, sometimes affiliate programs are more work than they are worth. Though I remember when I ran a movie review website (todaysmovies.com), I used to get over $100/month from a movie link page Reel.com (the precurser of netflix) that would allow people to rent movies online, but they died, and Netflix jumped on the idea. I think Reel.com no longer does affiliate programs. At least I couldn’t find it anymore. Same thing with CDNOW. But it appears to have been bought out by Amazon. So where did the affiliate programs go? You snooze, you lose. I did make quite a bit from Amazon.com referrals, but then they changed their payment policies. The big key, is to make sure you keep up with it, passing on your contact information, and updating, and keeping your links and referral codes active. Also make sure you have relevant information that will link into their pages. Of course Google’s AdSense is a big one these days that is pretty popular. A Good resource for finding affiliate programs for your pages is affiliateguide.com. I also use www.darkblue.com. They have an assortment of affiliates to choose from and you only have to register through them. Hotelclub.com is also a pretty nifty group. I’m going to get back into them and I’ll post here when I find anything spectacular that works well. Good luck!
Is Chitika Faltering?
May 13, 2006
Chitika was once the promising new opponent to Adsense and was great because it could be used in addition to Google’s adsense unlike many other ad providers. Most members were pleased when they also saw that they were being paid more per click as well.
However it all seems to be going downhill now and started with the auditing and not well kept accounts. For instances you cannot check your accounts in real time, you almost have to wait 24 hours and sometimes even then your daily balance is not yet posted. With the auditing every month you could see your balance of $100 drop to as much as $40 or less because they would say that they determined the other $60 to be fraud so even then your daily balance means nothing.
The final kick in the teeth came with the payments. One month they put up a message saying something about the auditing and that payments would be late. Not a problem unless this started happening frequently which it did. I no longer use it but still see at least two emails a month telling me that payment will be late.
Can Chitika bounce back? I have no idea but they need to do something soon because many webmasters I talk to say they no longer use it or plan to stop soon.
Movie Reviews in blogs, making money?
May 9, 2006
I have no clue on the true legality of it, but its been an idea I’ve been using and writing off for several years now. If you are a webmaster, and offer web design services, add a Movie review blog, that promotes your writing, of a review of each movie you see. The way I see it, you can write off your movie attending expenses that were essential in order to create that review. Posting the review to the web crosslinked with your web design business, is actually ADVERTISING. Therefore, you should be able to write off your movie reviews as “advertising” on your taxes. Again, with the web still being new and constantly challenging the tax arena, why not? In addition, if you sell movies on Ebay, Amazon, or Half.com, why not cross link those items you are selling into your reviews as they are associated? I have and its brought much traffic to various web stores I have. Good luck and enjoy!
Google Adsense Click Fraud In The Billions
May 7, 2006
Google’s ad revenue class action lawsuit is over and the search engine giant is paying back more than 60 million dollars. Some experts are saying however that the click fraud more than likely in the billions of dollars so Google is getting off cheaply.
Adsense customers are saying that there are too many scam artists that click on ad links with no intention of buying anything and that they are losing money. But Google says that in many cases they caught the attempted fraud and didn’t charge anyone.
Having used adsense myself for advertising I can see how they can be upset. I ended up losing close to $500 in a relatively short amount of time and only made $80 in sales. It wasn’t worth it.
