Posted on

Curiosity and interest driven approach towards open source Joomla 1.5 technology and a backward shift

Recently my actions has been driven more by curiosity and interest than monetary purposes. I just splashed USD99 on this Joomla 1.5 component called the JomSocial. At first sight after having it installed on one of my instances, it looks rather promising. I will over the next few days during the weekends go through the documentations of JomSocial to explore the various features they have. Also I will try to see what cross features they have available with other more established Joomla 1.5 components.

The main difference between working on an interest driven project and a monetary driven project is that of the heart and the soul.

In the latter, there is always someone breathing down your neck, crazy deadlines to meet, the need to manage customer expectations so that interest of stakeholders are not compromised. high blood pressure often results. The downside risk is significant in the event of mismanagement in terms of additional cost incurred due to scope creeping by clients or misinterpretion by the technical team.  The upside rewards and capped. Do your job well or totally screw it up, the budget made available by the client is still the same. Haha, like Garis once said ” get bought, get used, and get discarded just like a bloody condom!”

In the former, I am free to explore any possibilities I can envision and things are pretty much dictated by my imagination with no strict deadlines whateverso. I can choose either to rise to great heights or crash and burn, all for the sake of fun and adventure, without the need to be answerable to anyone. The downside risk is ultimately determined by me (time and money), while the upside potential is remains hitherto undiscovered!

Also in terms of the long run, when we are looking at buidling up the volume of passive income, the former is the area to look at. Already a few of my sites are generating income of a comfortable level. Once it hits critical mass, I will do away with the latter option of selling my time to others for the sake of building their sites.

Taking one more step backwards, I am now spending less time ultilizing the skill set I acquired in university (that of programming and software architecturing) and more time ultilizing the skill set I acquired while I was back in junior college (that of reading financial statements and analyzing GDPs). Surprisingly the staff at the various banks have been very helpful in providing me with the information I need. I am also spending more time now receiving instructions from my dad on a daily basis for another skill set I have been thinking of acquiring for a while now. It seems he does know me very well and started imparting all the knowledge he acquired over the years in this field before I even asked! More than that, it seems I have already crossed path with the people of whom knowledge I need.

Talking about the alignment of stars!

Posted on

One gold mine leads to another

After being somewhat annoyed at the low pay per click rates I was getting for my adsense affiliate advertising, I sat down and started seriously analyzing the advertisements being served there. Most of them were really cheapo advertising about stuff nobody in the right mind will be interested. Thus I held a spring cleaning session. Interestingly, my earning made a jump and became 3 times what it used to be. Wow! This is really cool stuff. Now I can really concentrate on creating more quality and relevant content and not worry about junk served by advertisers via Google Adsense.

My goal for this year is to be able to generate passive income via online methods that will be able to cover up to at least 50% of my daily expenses. Once I have achieved this, I will attempt to scale up my operations to cover up to 100% of my daily expenses, all these at 0% increase in the percentage of time I spend per day to maintain my business model.

Fingers crossed, if all goes well, I should not need to worry about cashflow for the next years, but really start looking at places where I can park my funds to get some really serious capital gains. Ironically, I am enthusiastically waiting for the next serious worldwide economic depression to come around the corner.

Suddenly I remembered the time I was surfing off the Australian Gold Coast. Constantly I would pass the time away chatting with the folks on the surf board right next to me while waiting for the right wave to come. Seems like this is like surfing all over again. Haha

Posted on

Make money from YouTube another affiliate advertising revenue stream

This was sourced from google for my personal reference but feel free to share it.

Last week, we announced that the video units feature will soon be retired. Our announcement has created some confusion, so we thought it would be helpful to outline how Google will still continue to support revenue opportunities for video content owners.

The video units feature allowed publishers to create video unit players, with YouTube partner content and accompanying ads, within their AdSense accounts. They could then embed this special player into their web pages, and revenue generated from the ads would be split between the YouTube partner, the AdSense publisher, and Google. Although we’re retiring the video units feature, we’ll continue to offer the following monetization solutions to video content creators:

AdSense for video

AdSense for video gives video owners the ability to earn money from videos they create or own. They can run placement targeted instream video ads (pre, mid, post rolls) and graphical overlays or contextually targeted text ads in Flash players, and the ad revenue will be split between the video owner and Google.

Current AdSense for video publishers include Encyclopedia Britannica, Demand Media, and College Humor. If you’d like more information about the program or how to apply, visit our microsite.

YouTube Partner Program

Similarly, the YouTube Partner Program enables popular content creators to share in advertising revenue from their own videos hosted on YouTube. Participants can choose the videos on which they’d like to show overlay ads or accompanying banner ads. These videos earn them money whether they’re viewed on YouTube or embedded onto web pages elsewhere online, and the revenue generated from these ads will be split between the YouTube partner and Google.

The YouTube Partner Program has thousands of participants from ten countries around the world, and is accepting applications. To learn more about the program, visit the Partnerships Benefits page.

Posted on

Increase Adsense Revenue: Google Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites For Backlinking

This page is for my personal reference. The original is here

It has been under 6 months since I joined Google as an affiliate, during which time I have built up a respectable second income here on hubpages; most of this income comes from AdSense whilst Amazon is very much a secondary source. Publishing online content is a steep learning curve for those that wish to successfully monetise their efforts, it certainly requires a lot of smart working and at times purely hard working as well as a whole lot of patience. As I approach my 200th page of content here on hubpages (this is hub number 198), I have finally begun to develop and implement a clear strategy for success with AdSense which involves significant amounts of time but has shown me enough to suggest that it is one which will pay dividends for the long term. This AdSense strategy involves multiple sites all of which can generate you plenty of extra AdSense revenue whilst enhancing the performance of your primary content.

My ‘Bookmarker’ Adsense Strategy

The strategy is entirely simple and is in fact nothing more than you should expect to have to do to become financially successful on hubpages, and basically involves numerous means of ‘backlinking’. Please note that this strategy assumes that you already know how to optimise your hubpages for search engine traffic (SEO) and using keywords, otherwise you should research these things first; it also assumes that you know what a dofollow backlink is. This method works equally well with articles published on other good self publishing sites including Squidoo, InfoBarrell, Ehow, and HowToDoThings. It also assumes

  • Write your keyword optimised, informative, presentable hubpage (Primary Content).
  • Submit a bookmark of your hubpage to as many revenue sharing bookmark sites as you can, e.g. SheToldMe, Xomba, and RedGage. Use alternative search terms and in the description if possible – never copy and paste parts of your original hubpage (Secondary Content)
  • Have a look on the first few pages of google for any additional possible dofollow backlinks to your content, using your primary keyword phrases. Additional backlinks such as this do not pay but can be invaluable.
  • Write a shorter yet unique version of the primary article on your personal blog, with a backlink from the post to your primary content (Secondary Content)
  • Submit a bookmark of your blog post to exactly the same bookmarking sites, again using any possible new keywords and search phrases (Secondary Content)
  • – THIS STRATEGY IS ONGOING AND GROWING, IT WILL DEVELOP WITH TIME!

My Traffic Growth In 6 Months

This hubber does 0-6000 in under 6 months! Impressive?
This hubber does 0-6000 in under 6 months! Impressive?

It may not seem advanced, it may seem difficult and time consuming, but so many people have asked how I am gaining views at such a rapid pace – and this is how. I still have so far to go, so many more backlinks to build, so much more time to find and utilise. I have no secrets, nothing that many of you don’t know already, I just backlink in places which also directly boost my AdSense earnings. Is this strategy working for me? The picture above suggests so and I expect that the curve will keep on heading north over the next 6 months – the answer is yes. I am still only using 4 bookmarking sites, and haven’t yet finished using them, there are also another dozen or so to go! If you wanted to take your backlinking one step further then you could even bookmark your bookmarks!

SheToldMe.com

SheToldMe was the first Adsense Revenue sharing site that I used, and with great success. I soon found, following a Google page rank update, that my hubs bookmarked through SheToldMe were performing better in the search engines than my hubs which were not. This initial success prompted me to bookmark every single one of my hubs, and the improvements in my traffic have been clear for me to see. SheToldMe gives you 100% of the Ad Impressions attributed to each of your bookmarks, a scheme which is now making me a respectable $5-$10 extra per week. Remember that these bookmarks are ‘dofollow’ so each bookmark benefits the page of content that you link to, the direct earnings and 50 visits a day from these posts are nothing but an added bonus. All of my hubs are now bookmarked on this site.

Xomba.com

My success with SheToldMe led me to explore other bookmarking sites which shared Adsense revenue, and this led me to discovering a number of sites including this one – Xomba.com. It works just like SheToldMe but has a greater ‘page rank’ and more traffic because it is a lot more established. It is still early days for me with Xomba and I have only bookmarked 20 of my hubs, however I am already seeing AdSense revenues from them and my bookmarks are of course ‘dofollow’. Traffic to my hubpages, my primary content, has not yet been evident but the most important thing for you to consider is the positive effects on the search engine placement. I suspect that my direct AdSense Revenue from Xomba will eventually far exceed the $5-$10 a week that I generate from SheToldMe despite it only sharing 50% of ad impressions with it’s users.

Snipsly.com

Snipsly is another AdSense Revenue sharing bookmarking site, this one paying a generous 80% of impressions with its users. I am currently building up my portfolio of back-links on Snipsly and it is one which will benefit you more in the long term rather than the short, purely because it is yet to be truly picked up by the Google monster. I haven’t seen much in the way of revenue or traffic yet from Snipsly, yet I know that bookmarking now will see rewards in the future. I can fully recommend Snipsly for it’s easy to navigate wordpress theme, in fact I believe that it can outgrow any of the other sites listed on here. To find out more about Snipsly.com, check out my dedicated article ‘Snipsly.com – Make Money From Your Bookmarks’.

YouSayToo.com

YouSayToo.com is one which is best used with your personal blog, and basically links your blog to it’s website. Every time you publish a blog post it replicates and backlinks it to their site, giving you a 50% share of AdSense Revenue as well as giving your blog numerous dofollow backlinks. The trick for hubbers is to use their blog posts to link their hubs, with each blog post then being linked on your YouSayToo.com account. This one is entirely automated, if only they were all made like this!

List Of Other Revenue Sharing Backlinking Sites

I have so many hubpages to retrospectively bookmark, and so little time at the moment, that I haven’t even signed up to these sites just yet. The potential for improvements in search engine placement and increased AdSense revenue is huge when considering just how many variants of each bookmark I can create, each counting as a dofollow backlink. It is a slow but sure process that I will complete – and each six months on hubpages will see a new hub updating you on my progress. It was little over 3 months ago that Ryan Hupfer interviewed me and published a blog post charting rise to 1000 page views per day, now that he is gone it is left for me to tell you all myself. I hope that you enjoyed this light piece, I will leave you with that list of backlinking sites now!

Once again this page is for my personal reference. If you are thinking of looking for the original  article please go here.

Non-Revenue Sharing Sites

Remember that it is the dofollow backlink which is most important, AdSense is just a bonus, so you should take advantage of all available free backlinks. These sites offer free backlinks to your own content, all dofollow, but do not share any AdSense impressions with you:-

My Latest Content

Posted on

Using statcounter.com concurrently with Google Analytics

These two days I got really puzzled with Google Adsense. My page impressions were really high but apparently no clicks were registered on my page for the adsense. I wonder what went wrong. So ended up I started researching over the internet about Google Adsense click not registered. This was when I chanced upon this new tool called statcounter.com

This is a real time tool that shows you where visitors came into the site from and where they exited the site to. One of the really useful things about this is the fact that they could help track if someone actually clicked on the links in your adsense. This does provide a counter as to whether Google Adsense if just simply faking your click rates.

I would not have changed upon this site had I not found my adsense revenue to be suspiciously non-existant

Posted on

Alternatives to Google Adsense

I came across this very goood and informative article on online advertising revenue streams and hence copied and paste the whole thing here for personal references

Google AdSense is the most popular contextual advertising network currently available on the internet. Many webmasters and bloggers earn money through this service. It’s available for anyone completely for free, AdSense is supported internationally – wherever you are!

Six Good Google AdSense Alternatives and Replacements

But, unfortunately, many users simply can’t join this service – since Google don’t want to approve their requests. Also, many bloggers and webmasters are banned from Google AdSense, because they have broke Google’s terms. Once you get banned from Google AdSense – it’s very hard to re-enable your request!

Fortunately, there are many similar contextual advertising networks available for free. Of course, all of them allows you to earn money per click, like Google AdSense do.

6 Google AdSense Alternatives

1.) Clicksor – Clicksor is very good and quality Google AdSense alternative. Allowing you many advertisement types at good click-through-rate. Allowing you to use Contextual and many other ad types that are not supported by Google. (read review)

2.) AdBrite – One of the oldest and most popular advertising networks on the net. Advertising through AdBrite gives your visitors opportunity to buy advertisements on your sites easily. In other way, giving you related contextual ads to earn money through. (read review)

3.) Bidvertiser – Bidvertiser is professional contextual advertising network. Offers you only contextual and feed advertisements. Very similar to Google AdSense. Giving you opportunity to earn money by displaying related textual ads on your site. (read review)

4.) Chitika – Chitika is founded in 2003. It is the leading blog advertising company with a network of thousands of blogs and websites and hundreds of name brand advertisers and merchants. Offers you to earn money by using many ad techniques and options. (read review)

5.) Text Link Ads – This service is not actually contextual advertising service. TLA allows you to earn money by selling text and inline text advertisements on your site or blog. Choose price and sell textual advertisements on your site with this service. (read review)

6.) Yahoo! Publisher Network – Yahoo are currently playing catch up to Google and are trying to release their own context sensitive advertising service. This promises to be an excellent alternative to Google Adsense but in reality is likely to be a simple copy with the same restrictive terms and conditions as Google, including $100 minimums on payouts. Right now it’s not available internationally.

Related posts:

  1. Ways to Make Money through Google AdSense
  2. Chitika vs. Google AdSense
  3. Clicksor – Online Contextual Ad Network
  4. Google AdSense for Domains is Available
  5. Where to Place Google AdSense Ads
Posted on

Network effects on the internet.

I bought myself the book the long tail by Chris Anderson the other day and started experimenting with the web all over again this time using the paradigm he presented in his book.

I was amazed suddenly how powerful the web could be again. These past few days I am slowly beginning to realize the power of blogs, something which I relegate to the realms of pointless online diaries and gossips.

Big news agencies broadcast news that is important to a broad base of people in various categories. Due to the economic restrictions of traditional news agency structure, what they can provide is but information that is broad and lack depth to the general audience. This is because as they drill down into more detailed levels, it gradually becomes less profitable for them to provide these information, due to the decreasing level of viewership. Information that warrants more detailed and indepth report are normally Black Swan events (unforeseeable but high impact occurances, eg. Obama becomes president, H1N1 flu comes into existence).

So in summary what we get on the news is meant for the general public but does not always serve specific needs. This is the economics of the top down approach.

We next look at blogs. Blogging is fast becoming a prevalent phenomena. The network effect of blogs (aka linking between blogs via rss) means that one can easily navigate from one blog of one topic to similiar blog of the same topic. This is similiar to what one does when watching one video on youttube and navigating to the next video that is closely related to the current one.

While Google search engine is good in the fact that it allows the retrieval of information that is highly relevant to certain keywords, the limitation of Google mainly resides with the users. Some topics are just too hard to define in words. It is hard to summarize some topics into specific keywords. This thus has to do with the problem of filters.

The problem with Google search is semi alleviated by the network elements found on social networks where likes tend to link together and are found in closer proximity than unlikes. (Traditionally known as birds of the same feather flock together.)

Of course we should not forget to take into consideration the piles of crap and garbage found on some blogs. But wait, what some perceives as garbage are usually perceive as treasure by others.

So in short do not dismiss the relevance of blogs on the internet.

Here is the relationship that I have thought about:

YouTube is to video, as is
Facebook is to Friends, as is
Blog is to information

The future it seems is fast becoming dominanted by network effects. Like it or not it is here to stay.

Posted on

Schemes to make money from home

Recently I have been coming across site or email referring to sites that provide schemes for making money from home. Curioused at first I read through some of them but after a while I grew really tired to them.

The real ironic part is how they could attempt to slap themselves in the face by contradicting themselves within the same page of content.

In the first part of the page they talked about how easy it was for them to make money on line some claiming to be even making up to USD$13K per week. However it you looked closely at the chunk of words just above the personal details submission form you will see this

*INCOME DISCLAIMER: Even though CarbonCopyPRO has notarized affidavits on hand for every one of the income claims on this site, these income examples are representative of some of the most successful participants in the program. Some members may make little or NO MONEY AT ALL with this program. These claims are not a guarantee of your income, nor are they typical of average participants. Individual results will vary greatly and in accordance to your input, determination, hard work, and ability to follow directions. By using this website you are agreeing to our Legal Income Disclaimer

If you are observation enough you will notice this specific sentence

these income examples are representative of some of the most successful participants in the program. Some members may make little or NO MONEY AT ALL with this program.

So basically they are trying to convince you to spend time working on their program but saying “Hey you are on your own buddy.” What kind of contradictory crap is this?