You Tube problem

To get a youtube video to actually play in your page rather than opening a link in a new window you have to close the tag like this .

It seems to be a glitch in youtube because the html they give you to copy and paste into your site doesn't close the tag.

Or maybe it's a trick so that you'll send people to their page rather than have them stay on yours.

This is something I figured out through trial and error, recently.

Google's hidden payroll | csmonitor.com

Google's hidden payroll | csmonitor.com: "WASHINGTON – Jayant Kumar Gandhi, a former software engineer in New Delhi, is one of hundreds of thousands around the world on Google's shadow payroll.

In his spare time, Mr. Gandhi runs a free computer help website and recently began running ads by Google on his homepage as part of Google Adsense, a program that pays website publishers for advertising space. When visitors click on the ads on Gandhi's site, Google makes a small profit from the advertiser, and in turn, pays a percentage of that profit to Gandhi.
(Photograph)
WEB PUBLISHER: Jayant Gandhi of New Delhi earns $1,000 a month by running ads from Google on his website.
COURTESY OF JAYANT GANDHI






Such clicks can translate into pennies - or dollars - a day for a Web publisher. 'I had no intentions of using it fo"

Highest paying google search terms

A lot of webmasters make money from google adsense. For those of you who do here are the highest paying search terms.

You could actually make a lot of money from some of these. 54 bucks for one click would be great.

CyberWyre » Updated: Highest Paying AdSense Keywords: $54.33 mesothelioma lawyers
$47.79 what is mesothelioma
$47.72 peritoneal mesothelioma
$47.25 consolidate loans
$47.16 refinancing mortgage
$45.55 tax attorney
$41.22 mesothelioma
$38.86 car accident lawyer
$38.68 ameriquest mortgage
$38.03 mortgage refinance
$37.55 refinancing
$35.99 auto accident attorney
$35.52 equity mortgage
$34.34 mesothelioma texas
$34.05 mortgages
$33.80 criminal defense attorney
$33.54 epocrates
$32.95 mesothelioma
$32.08 car accident attorney
$31.60 mortgage refinance rate
$31.38 loan refinance
$31.29 personal injury attorney
$31.24 best refinance
$30.14 register domain names
$29.86 medical malpractice lawyer
$29.68 incorporate
$29.68 malignant mesothelioma
$29.49 mortgage refinance
$29.45 freecreditreport
$29.41 fargo refinance
$28.53 mortgage loans
$28.15 125 refinance
$28.05 los angeles lawyer
$27.96 re mortgage
$27.38 how to register a domain name
$27.31 mortgage refinance rate
$26.86 personal injury
$26.48 refinance
$26.17 refinance
$25.43 mortgage loan
$25.35 texas refinance
$25.33 medical malpractice attorneys
$25.33 mortgage application
$24.46 mortgage companies
$24.33 countrywide
$23.92 low mortgage rate
$23.26 va refinance
$22.83 gmac mortgage
$22.17 california mortgage rates
$21.86 ameriquest
$21.68 florida lawyer
$21.41 dui
$21.29 refinance leads
$21.16 domain register
$21.07 refinance new york
$20.62 refinance rental property
$20.46 utah mortgage
$20.38 mortgage lenders
$20.35 find a lawyer
$20.20 mortgage note
$20.17 wrongful death

Reciprocal Linking vs. Mutual Linking

Mainstream Webmasters - Reciprocal Linking vs. Mutual Linking

Some of the advice floating around regarding linking for your site can be pretty confusing, especially when it comes to reciprocal linking. Is it something you have to do? Can your site succeed without reciprocal links? Will you be penalized for reciprocal linking? There are so many conflicting theories. Let's try to clear the subject up a little.

Link Popularity

The founders of Google worked off a premise that has been active in academic papers for years: citation authority. They found that the more academic papers cited another's work, the more likely that cited work was to be an authority on the subject. Similarly, when a lot of sites link to one site, it's likely that site is an authority for the topic. The "topic" is whatever those links say it is. If 25 sites link to another site with the term "oak shelving," it's likely that page is an important page for oak shelving.

Manipulation of Links

It didn't take long for people who wanted to rank well for certain terms to figure out that they needed a lot of links with their chosen keyword phrases to improve their rankings in the search engines. Many schemes were born, including mini-sites, site networks, link farms, and reciprocal linking.

Reciprocal Linking

At the most basic level, reciprocal links are links you trade with other sites (you add their link, they add yours) in order to build link popularity. There are online services, group exchanges, and software available to help you link up with more like-minded webmasters, fast. As a result, many sites have grown sizeable directories on topics that have nothing to do with their area of expertise, simply because those other sites were willing to trade links with them.

Does this work? At the moment, it does seem to work. The engines (except for Teoma, which analyzes link communities) tend to count a link as a link, regardless of the subject matter of the originating site.

Will it continue to work? Who knows? As the engines look for more ways to determine which sites are truly expert and which ones are simply manipulating their way to the top, link relevance is sure to come into play. Some say it's already starting to affect rankings.

Mutual Linking

I like to separate mutual linking from reciprocal linking. Mutual linking is where the content of each site actually benefits each other's sites. If you sell shoes, you may want to recommend other sites for replacement shoelaces and still other sites for shoe cleaning supplies. You may even maintain a directory of regional shoe repair service shops. This is useful information for your visitors, who are likely to need these services as well. It makes sense for these sites to also recommend your shoes and link to your site. While it's technically still a reciprocal link, it has a mutual benefit for both sites.

While you can make a case that visitors to your shoe site might actually need weight loss formulas, like to gamble, or are concerned about the size of certain body parts, it really isn't likely that links to these sites will be clicked and followed by your visitors. They only make your site look unprofessional. The links you trade with these sites may or may not actually be helping you in the engines, but they're definitely not helping you to make more sales.

Will I Be Penalized for Reciprocal Linking?

You might. I don't say that to send you into a panic, but the truth is if you link to a site that is considered a "bad neighborhood" by the engines, it could negatively affect your site. That innocent-looking pet accessories site may be cloaking, hiding links or text, or participating in other linking schemes and just hasn't been caught yet. Why risk it for a link that probably won't even bring you traffic? Sure, people who wear shoes often have dogs, but if you're just linking to them for the link, it's probably not a good idea.

Be very aware of whom you link to. You control where your site links to and that could come back to haunt you. Link only to the sites that will help improve your credibility and your sales!

Should I Hide All My Outgoing Links?

Absolutely not. There have been many people who feel that since Google's Florida update (in Nov. 2003), adding relevant outgoing links seems to have a positive effect on rankings. Besides, if you hide or block their links, and they hide or block yours, what's the point of participating in a reciprocal linking program at all?

So. What Will Happen if I Do Reciprocal Linking?

While no one knows for sure what the future of link relationships will be with each search engine, I tend to think that as soon as they can figure out how to do it most effectively, off-topic links simply won't count anymore.

If you pin ALL your link popularity on trading links with whoever will trade with you, you could find yourself starting over from scratch at some point. If you are looking to build long-term rankings (and real business links that can attract customers), it takes more work and creativity than just sending out automated emails or joining a linking program.

Give your site an advantage by giving people a reason to link to it -- a helpful tool, a guide, an industry-specific directory, or some other useful content that people will feel good about recommending on their site. If your site is worth linking to, you won't have to rely as much on swapping links as a promotion strategy.

» Exclusive Interview with PlentyOfFish.com creator and owner, Markus Frind - Web Publishing Blog

» Exclusive Interview with PlentyOfFish.com creator and owner, Markus Frind - Web Publishing Blog: "Markus Frind, the owner of the free dating site PlentyOfFish.com has been pulling in $10,000 a day from Adsense. What is even more remarkable is that he is single handedly (with a little help from his wife) running one of the largest dating sites on the internet. I asked him if he would like to do an interview for the blog, and he agreed.

—-

In 2003 you made a post on WebmasterWorld where you said you were making $40 a day. At what point, either before or after this, did you recognize that you could generate a livable income, and beyond, through your own websites?

I knew the day adsense came out that i would be able to make a lot of money, suddenly here was this revenue stream i could actually build a business on. My site at that point only had a few hundred visitors a day and it was only a few months old. But my growth was steady and I could plot on a graph exactly how much traffic i’d have in 4 or 5 months in the future. This was the same time where i started doing mass anti competitive intelligence, i blocked anyone with the alexa toolbar from signing up and anyone using comscore. I figured if i was to have any chance i would need to stay completely under the radar, if no one knows you exist then no one is going to counter you or clone it.

What was the biggest obstacle you have faced since starting PlentyOfFish.com and how did you overcome it?

I wouldn’t say I had any real obstacles, growth is steady and you have a good 2 or 3 months lead time on when things will start to become an issue. I spent a good 3 months of the last 12 months on vacation. I suppose that the biggest issue has always been performance, In order handle 14-15 million pageviews a day on 4 servers you have to constantly tweak the database, as execution paths etc change as the database grows and load increases.

You started PlentyOfFish to learn and expand your skills. When did you begin treating the site as a business?

I was making around 4k a month off the site and i quit my job to do it full time. At the same time i learned how to do PPC, affiliate marketing , SEO etc. Basically i tried to learn as much as possible, adapt it to my needs and move on.

You appear to be an advocate of simple, quick loading designs. Do you think that there are any other elements of web site development that developers are looking at wrong and may be counter-productive to their success?

Function over form to build an emotional connection with the user. Blend ads into content, No flashing crap, make the site useful. Basically all those things that everyone knows you are supposed to do, but very few people actually do. There is no magic bullet, but you should always test new designs or new text etc to get the result that you want. You will never have the worst design and never the best, but through testing you can always improve.

I’ve noticed some resentment by promotors and owners of paid dating sites. They fear that once a customer gets a taste of free dating they will never pay a monthly fee, thus destroying the online dating industry as it exists today. Do you think they should be threatened by PlentyOfFish.com?

Many of the owners/promoters of these niche sites basically are people who had no clue about the internet and got in the market during the .com boom and lucked out onto a viable business model. Since then they have lived in a bubble with relatively little competition. The large sites are worried, but they have always faced stiff competition. For the most part the industry wants to ignore the fact i exist and they are just hoping that I will go away, so they don’t have to explain to investors why profits are vanishing.

I think in the future paid dating will account for 5 to 20% of the over all online dating market, currently 68% of my membership in the United states has paid for a dating site in the past, draw what conclusions you will.

Do you have a vision of what the internet will look like 5 years from now, and if so, can you describe it?

Adsense and YPN will be standard components of any business models. There will eventually be a massive market place where you just select a age range, city gender etc and your ads will be shown to people matching your demographics. More tools will be developed to track users intentions and monetize them. If you own a site about horses and someone was thinking about buying a car a week ago while searching the net, your horse site may display car ads. We will eventually see online ads approach the ROI of offline ads or even exceed them as monetization of intentions\preferences takes hold.

If you have an affiliate program...

A really good idea is whenever one of your affliates make a sale, email them. I'm in several affiliate programs that do this and I end up selling them more. It's encouraging to get an email when you make a sale. It lets me know that the program works. And I go out of my way to sell a program that I know works.

If the only way I know I've made a sell is when I get a check months later I'm not as likely to sell that program. Especially if I have to do a search on google to figure out who the check is from. I don't know how many times I've gotten checks from some vague company and had to do a search on that name to even figure out what program it is.

So let your affiliates know right away that they have made a sale and what program it's from. If something sells then they'll start selling more of that.

Yahoo Ads are for idiots

Yahoo: if you use our ads, you have to block non-US visitors
LDM sez,

I joined the Yahoo Publisher Network, a beta program through which Yahoo provides text ads in much the same way that Google does. I started running the Yahoo text ads on many of my web sites.

A couple of days ago Yahoo sent me a notice stating they'd revised their Publisher Policy. Item '11.l' stated that I will not "display all or part of the Ad Unit to any user located outside the US". In other words, I can't allow users outside of the United States to view my pages if there is a Yahoo ad on the page!

This seemed insanely limiting, to say the least, and I wrote Yahoo to clarify this. Here is their reply:
------------------------------------------------
Mar 21 2006 16:18 PT

In regards to your inquiry, as per section 11.l of the Terms and Conditions, you are in violation if your ads receive traffic from sources outside the United States. However, there are scripts and programs which you can initiate to block international users from viewing or encountering your Yahoo! Publisher Network ads. We do not recommend or support these methods, but we do suggest finding a method to block this kind of traffic so you remain in compliance with the Terms and Conditions.

If you have further questions, please feel free to contact us again via email, or by calling our Support Team at (866) 785-2636, Monday to Friday from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. PDT, and from Saturday 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. PDT.

Sincerely,

Ray Devlin
Customer Solutions
Yahoo! Publisher Network
------------------------------------------------

So...Yahoo tells me to deliberately keep a large number of users from seeing my pages, but won't even *suggest* a way to do this. Clever, huh? Now I've got to spend a considerable amount of time removing the *&$%! Yahoo ads from my sites, lest they come to me later and accuse me of fraud or worse. If I didn't know better I would think Yahoo had no clue whatsoever of what this intarweb thing is all about. Who knew that people from *other* parts of the world use the internet?

When I spoke with a Yahoo rep on their Publisher Support line, they said I could block either the ads or the pages, but said over and over again that they "couldn't and wouldn't" give me any information on how to accomplish such a task. The rep finally told me that I should just firewall or block off "everything but the US" to keep the Yahoo ads from being seen by anyone outside the US. I'm sure their intent is to block only the ads, but they wouldn't hazard even a suggestion as to the best way to do this. Their "solution" was basically to block off the rest of the world.

The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites

The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites: "Ugliness has never looked better. I have spent the last few days examining a surprising trend in web design that has made ugly websites look absolutely irresistible. No, its not the bolded, 18 point Times New Roman font shouting at me as I access the page that has me excited, nor is it the harsh colors that have actually managed to make my eyes hurt and distort my vision. In fact, its not even that logo which is so pixelated from being processed, resized, saved, and edited so many times that it appears to be blurred to protect the identity of the company who owns the website that has me singing the praises of ugly websites. What is it?

Ugly sells.

That's right – ugly websites are surprisingly effective in making money. As a person who puts business before technology, a profitable website is a website is an unbelievably attractive website to me."

Mainstream Webmasters - Things a Website Newbie Should Know to Save Money

Mainstream Webmasters - Things a Website Newbie Should Know to Save Money: Don’t subscribe to get rich quick schemes.

There are thousands of sites out there trying to get you to part with your money, and inferring that you will immediately start reaping the rewards. Don’t be fooled by compelling one page sales letters, often with copies of bank statements, and invariably concluding with free gifts worth hundreds of dollars. Often the letters are sprinkled with testimonials and attempt to close the sale by offering only a limited number left remaining for sale, or you are warned of an imminent price increase. Check some of them out. Make a note of the price and the suggested uplift date. Does it really happen. Check out some of the reference sites. Are they really sites of substance, in which you would place the utmost faith in their recommendations. Yes, you can make money, but is usually after the passage of time, and not without a good deal of effort.

Don’t pay for information on How-to.

There are thousands of publications offering, at a cost, to teach you how to bring about search engine optimization, rank highly with search engines or become an affiliate guru.

Keep your money in your pocket and seek similar advice for free. Let me start you off by pointing you at some free publications which will get you on your way, and all of which are available to download from our web site. Brad Callen’s “Search Engine Optimization Made Easy” is a useful read. To emphasise my point about rogue web traders, I did a Google Advanced Search for exact matches to the title. At the top of the first page, ranking No1 out of 26,400 was a site offering to sell you this free book for $29.95.

Ken Evoy’s Affiliate Masters Course is an excellent free read. Whilst one of its aims is to educate the reader about affiliate schemes, much of the content relates to pretty much any web site.

You might also want to download another good free read, “The Netwriting Masters Course.”

Don’t pay over the odds for domain registration.

There are thousands of sites offering to register domain names. Do find a site that not only provides search facilities to see if your chosen domain name is already registered, but also provides alternative suggestions if it is. Don’t pay more than $10.00 as an annual registration fee. Let me stress that we are not affiliates of the company we use. We last paid $8.95 for a dot com at Godaddy.com. We liked the access to nameservers so that we could activate the transfer of the domain name to a host of our choice. Do not subscribe to hosting at this site.

Do get yourself a suitable domain host.

There are some very important points here. To ensure minimum of downtime from your host do not join any of the free hosting sites. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Choose a site that offers to host an unlimited number of web sites for you. The fist host we selected still has a maximum of two sites before they start to increase the annual fee. You should possibly consider one that offers an unlimited number of autoresponders, if you feel that you may need this facility in the future. Although not the site we have recommended on our web site, you might find that Hostgator.com compares favourably with anything else. Make sure that you are comparing like with like when it comes to number of domains, web space, band width etc.

Don’t buy links or email addresses.

Don’t buy links and more importantly do not purchase from web sites offering you tens of thousands of email addresses. Whilst it can be a pain, you must build up your own links, and your own opt-in list of email addresses. To assist with link building, particularly with keeping track of where you are in a link relationship we use a truly excellent piece of software, outlined on our web site. Not only does it generate the link pages but it handles the sending of emails from templates.

Do carry out search engine optimization.

Your site will go nowhere unless you have carried out the basics. By this I mean searching for and using keywords, developing a link strategy, writing and submitting articles, and promoting your site in other ways. For keywords use the “Tour” at wordtracker .com and then try it for free. For SEO read Brad Cullen’s free e-book available on our web site. For tuition on how to write articles, go to Joe Robson's site at adcopywriting.com. Joe has had many years of copywriting experience, and his advice is free.

Do get good article submission software.

For our experiences do a Google Advanced Search for the exact phrase “Articles to Directories in the Newbie World” and select a site to read about our experiences. We found disappointing submission companies, mediocre software and again came across the heavy sell, one pagers with free gifts. This prompted us to design our own. We have now made the decision to share it with others, and we are currently preparing it for commercial use.

Get easy-to-use web design software.

Nearly all web design software writes the HTML code for you. Some packages are very cheap with, reflecting functionality. Others are very expensive, but with considerably longer learning curves. Nearly all require the purchase of some extra software for search engine optimization. We have recently carried out an in-depth review of a web design package which led us gently by the hand through SEO, and optimized each page for us. Feel free to visit the review at the web site shown below.

How much money?

I just want to warn all the newbies and people just starting to monetize their blogs that you probably won't make all that much money at first. I think it might have been as long as a year before I made anything.

One day, when I wasn't even thinking about making money, I got a check from RK Netmedia. I didn't even know who that was. I had to do a web search to figure out who the sponsor was. It was for nasty dollars. I still make a good bit of money from them.
When I figured out who they were I started putting up more banners and links for them, which increasd sales. The tax forms say I made about 4000 from them last year.

You hear a lot of people flaunting how much they make without ever being specific. Who knows if they're lying or not? Some of them claim to have made thousands in their first month of adult webmastering. Maybe they did, but I don't think so. That's not the way it happened for me. You probably won't make shit your first month, or your second, or third.

If you keep your expenses low you might make enough to cover what you've spent by the sixth month. It may take a year or more to really know what's working.

And when weill you be able to quit your day job? Well, I'll let you know as soon as it happens....

Want to make money from your rss feeds?

Rss feeds have been the big thing for awhile. Most blogs have them. But a lot of people don't like them because they think they are stealing traffic from their ads.

But that's only if you do it the wrong way.

You have to put ads in the feeds. The easiest way to do this is just to make blog posts that are actually ads. Ok, some people might bitch about this. But tv and radio does it all the time. Movies have product placement so why shouldn't blogs? Chances are blogging costs you some money, or at least your time. You should get paid for it. You should at least get back the money you pay for hosting, if nothing else.

If you review cds, movies or anything else that amazon sells you should at sign up for their associate program. Everytime you mention that you liked last weeks Battlestar Galatica you should put a link in the post so people can buy it. The only problem is that you don't make much money from amazon sales. Over the past 5 years I think I've made about 100 dollars from them.

The advantage making blog posts with sales links is that it goes into your rss feed and people will see it however they might read your feed.

Another one that I use is feedburner.com. You can run your feed through them and it will ad links to amazon products to your rss, atom or whatever feed you use. You can also sign up for google ads for feeds, which will put google ads in the feed for you. You don't need any coding ability to do this.

There's another trick I use with feedburner, that's to put links to affiliate programs in my del.icio.us tags and then have feed burner add those to my feed.