Tuesday, September 26, 2006

The Death of AdSense

Over the last week, the Internet marketing community was abuzz over the report of "The Death of AdSense". Scott Boulch, who wrote the report, said in an email, that releasing the report was like hitting a hornets' nest with a baseball bat.

He said he had some interesting emails and seen some wild accusations on blog posts and forums regarding his report. He says the viral nature of the report, and the amazing amount of atttention it's getting is huge.

So was the follow-up report "Life After AdSense". During the promotion of the two reports, and due to the massive amount of traffic they were getting, they "completely fried a new Dell server!" Fortunately the system they were on had redundant back ups, so they didn't lose any data.

In the first 9-1/2 days they created over 27,500 opt-ins, and hit #424 on Alexa's rankings on the highest day! They instantly became the most talked about website in the entire internet marketing community. They just kept growing, and growing, and growing!

Scott said: "We also helped crash Direct Track, the system software that runs Modern Click! In addition my rep from Azoogle called and said they were swamped with applications and have 5 people working all day on approvals!"

Closer to home, he had personally been flooded with positive responses from the release of the second installment "Life After AdSense." He said it would be impossible for him to handle the volume of individual requests he was getting and hoped he will have a process developed shortly to get out more information more efficiently.

Scott says in the coming week he will have two surprises coming our way, and just like the first two reports, you can leave your wallet in your pocket. He will be releasing a recording of an exclusive interview with a former AdSense Guru that has moved on up the food chain and created some amazing results.

Also in the coming week, he will be coming out with a special report filled with "Hard Data" that the "Gurus" will not want you to see. And "The Numbers Don't Lie" says Scott.

Well, I'm sure all of us are eagerly waiting for the two surprises and will thank Scott for them.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

AdSense and Traffic Exchanges

Traffic Roundup owner, Stephen Ayer, in his September 5 address to his Traffic Roundup traffic exchange members, made an impassioned plea to them to safeguard their AdSense accounts. It is a fact that many traffic exchange users don’t know it’s against Google’s rules to put a page with AdSense ads on it for rotation in a traffic exchange.

I personally have come across three persons who unwittingly did so and received a warning email from Google about something regarding invalid impressions which they can’t understand or figure out. So they carried on until they read what Stephen Ayer had to say. I reproduce it here for everybody’s benefit:

The Traffic Roundup Cattle Call
By Stephen Ayer
Howdy Pardner - Thanks for moseyin' by!
Adsense Revisited

We have covered this in the past, but we have so many new members since that time, and it is so important, that we want to go over it again.

One of the greatest things to ever happen to netpreneurs is the opportunity to earn a very healthy income by placing Google Adsense ads on their websites. This is so real, so big and so achievable that it would be a disaster for anyone who has an Adsense account to lose it due to violating their terms of service, whether by accident or intentionally.

It seems that anyone who really had a grasp on the long term Adsense income possibilities could not purposely break their TOS, but some do. This is not directed at them. This is meant for those who are rightfully excited about the chance to have fun and make money with Adsense, and may not have taken the time to read their terms, or maybe didn't understand them (sometimes it's very difficult to sort out 'legalese'.)

THIS IS VERY VERY IMPORTANT IF YOU HAVE AN ADSENSE ACCOUNT!

You can not put your page into rotation on a traffic exchange if it has Adsense on it. It breaks their Terms of Service and you will likely get your account closed and never re-opened.

You can not put your page into rotation on a traffic exchange if it has Adsense on it. It breaks their Terms of Service and you will likely get your account closed and never re-opened.

That's not a typo. It's there twice because you need to understand how serious this is. Read it again. All of us involved in the Adsense program want traffic to our sites, but this is not the way to get it to a site with Adsense on it.

If you want to use a traffic exchange to promote your site that has Adsense on it, build a splash page to attract visitors and make sure there are no Adsense ads on it.

It's not worth it. You probably won't even make the money you think you earned during the time you promoted that site on traffic exchanges because Adsense will likely give the money back to the advertisers and close your account.

We are not going to stop you from adding your site if it has Adsense, but we sure hope that you will heed this warning. Sure, there are other sites similar and you might make a little money from them if you lose your account, but there are few or none as good as Adsense.

When you consider there are a lot of people making around $10,000 a month or more with Adsense, you might want to get very protective of your account. By the way, that dollar amount is not hype like most of the junk you read from other businesses, we personally know and have been in the company of some of these folks. Please don't lose your Adsense account.


So there you are, straight from the heart of Stephen Ayer, a man of integrity who doesn’t want business if it hurts others.

Nevertheless, remember if you have AdSense on your site you can still use the traffic exchanges if you submit one page of your site without AdSense on it but with all the links to your other pages that have AdSense. Or you can build a splash page (with no AdSense on it) to attract visitors to your AdSense-filled site.

Posted by Dale Ng, an Internet entrepreneur enthusiast who shares tips, info, news and articles on Internet marketing. Feel free to visit his website on Internet home business at: http://www.homewebbiz.com . You can also visit his other website at: http://tinyurl.com/jcsqs .

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Google's Writely set to beat Microsoft Word

Google now has a web-based word processor, in beta testing, called Writely which obviously challenges the extremely popular desktop word processor Microsoft Word. Writely, being web-based and online, allows you to access your documents from anywhere at all without having to be bound to the same computer. This means if you work on a document at home, you can retrieve it on the web in your office computer the next day or whenever.

It can also be used to do collaborative text editing whereby several people can work together on the same document at the same time from different computers. Writely's user interface is a WYSIWYG word processor, much like Microsoft Word, but appears within a web browser.

This online word processor is free. Also, there is no overall storage limit for files. However, individual text files cannot exceed 500KB each and images cannot exceed 2MB each.

Files made in Writely can be saved in MS Word (.doc) format and several other common formats like Postscript, Rich Text Format, and ODF that can be processed in many office suites. Writely's files can also be saved as basic HTML and PDF. However, there is the possibility that PDF could become a premium feature once the program comes out of beta testing.

Another interesting feature is its integration with blogging servers, including Google's own Blogger. After server configuration, users can simply press a button to upload their new post. However, there could be some teething problem at the moment. I tried it and the post went to be saved as draft in Blogger.

Writely is the product and Upstartle, which had four employees at that time, was the company that owned, developed and maintained it. On March 9, 2006, Writely was acquired by Google.

Immediately following the acquisition by Google, Writely stopped accepting new registrations to its services for about five months until the move to Google servers was complete.

When the service re-opened to the public on August 21, 2006 it had been completely relocated to Google's servers but surprisingly not yet integrated into Google's suite of web services and utilities. However, it is expected to figure well in Google's plans and may well overtake Microsoft Word in popularity.

Now for a comprehensive summary of the features of Writely:

Maintainer: Google

Required Operating System: Any web-based application

Use: Online word processor

Website: http://www.writely.com

With Writely, you can:

  • Use the online editor to format documents, spell-check and more.
  • Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text.
  • Download documents to your desktop as Word, PDF and more.
  • View your documents' revision history and roll back to any version.

Plus, since it's online, you can:

  • Invite others to share your documents by e-mail address.
  • Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
  • Publish documents online to the world, or to just who you choose.
  • Post your documents to your blog.

See, for a free program that is a lot to offer. So, if you have not signed up yet, I would urge you to do so soon at http://www.writely.com for something that is going to be very big in the months to come. Believe me, Writely is very practical and extremely useful. It is sure to become very popular in no time.

With the addition of Writely, Google now has email, calendar, spreadsheet and a web-based word processor, all being essential tools complementing each other.

About the author
The author is Dale Ng, an Internet entrepreneur enthusiast who shares tips, info, news and articles on Internet marketing. Feel free to visit his website on Internet home business at: http://www.homewebbiz.com . You can also visit his other website at: http://tinyurl.com/jcsqs .

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 7 RC1

The First Release Candidate for Internet Explorer 7 or IE7 RC1 has been released by Microsoft, squashing numerous bugs from the Beta 3 version and topping up with several improvements.

According to Microsoft, this release candidate is run mainly to help website developers ensure that their sites are compatible with the coming final release.

I was browsing using IE7 Beta 3 when it crashed and I opted to report that to Microsoft. Then I was directed to download IE7 RC1; that’s how I came to know about it. It is purported to be more stable, so I downloaded it straightaway.

IE7 has been completely rebuilt from IE6 which came out in 2001 and has not been significantly updated. This version 7 gives tabbed browsing to compete with Mozilla Firefox, together with anti-spoofing and anti-phishing protection, a search box with several search engines to choose from, and also support for RSS feeds.

Enhancements include a simpler user interface, customizable search box and an improvement in how favorites are organized.

Another big change is the addition of new Web technologies that have surfaced since five years ago, notably Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.1. Microsoft’s statement announcing the release said that more than 200 behavioral changes have been made to CSS between Beta 3 and RC 1.

Microsoft is offering the Internet Explorer Readiness Toolkit, which provides a developer checklist, testing guidance, and links to resources such as technical articles and helpful blog posts to website developers.

The other offering is the Internet Explorer Compatibility Evaluator, which analyzes the underlying code of various websites and highlights necessary changes to make the site fully compatible with the different versions of Internet Explorer.

With all these done, you can be almost sure of a pleasant and most comfortable experience in the use of Internet Explorer 7.


About the author
The author is Dale Ng, an Internet entrepreneur enthusiast who shares tips, info, news and articles on Internet marketing. Feel free to visit his website on Internet home business at: http://www.homewebbiz.com . You can also visit his other website at: http://tinyurl.com/jcsqs .