Some Blog Money

Bad In-Text Advertising Experience

2011-11-14T17:10:00.001-05:00

Few years ago, so-and-so in-text advertising company was very popular. During those old days, roughly 4 out of 10 blogs I had visited had both Adsense and so-and-so enabled. Bloggers all said that it's cool to have two money making programs on each blog page. They said that using both Adsense and so-and-so would just double your regular income! But in recent year, none of the blogs I visited have so-and-so installed. I did try using so-and-so in the past, for some reasons, I decided to put it aside.

The major reasons are: If you have so-and-so installed, your website or blog will load slower. Many users including myself notice that as soon as you are getting close to the required payout amount, your average pay per click will become a few cents. Most importantly, so-and-so doesn't seem to work well with Adsense.

After disabling so-and-so, I completely forgot about it. After about half a year, I found out that so-and-so had deleted my account with my remaining earnings, and I did not receive any warning email beforehand. I'm a bit shocked about that. For most of the online money making programs that I joined, most don't care if you are active or not, whenever you feel like using or promoting a service, you can always pick it up anytime at your convenience, and you can get paid whenever the minimum payout threshold is met. I consider those are basic and fair business practices. What so-and-so does is a bit mean and unfair. Well, maybe that's why less and less people are using so-and-so for in-text advertising nowadays.

To be fair, some day I would still want to try out other in-text advertising providers, maybe I will find a good provider with some decent service and reasonable user policy.

Adsense Blog Project, expecting $400-500+ per month

2011-10-06T16:09:00.000-04:00

Just saw this project on a freelancer website:

Project budget is $250-750 USD. Basic requirements are: an Adsense ready profitable blog in blogger to be developed that makes $400-$500+ per month, unique content with at least 50 unique posts, must earn $15-$20/day, Adsense optimized, content must be original and SEO optimized with keywords, the buyer will only pay after seeing constant income in the buyer's Adsense account.

Oh boy, is that even possible? A $250-750 USD budget with a potential earning return of $400-$500 per month, plus buyer will only pay after seeing result, that's quite a great deal for the buyer. However, if you are the bidder and you can setup such a blog, would you rather keep it for yourself?

Is Link Wheel Black Hat or White Hat?

2011-09-23T21:17:00.001-04:00

Is link wheel building a black hat or white hat technique? I bet many people, like myself, are looking for an answer for the above question. I have tried to search for a definite answer with no success. Probably link wheel building is a bit gray hat, all depends on how you are using it.

Many people prefer to create a link wheel in a pure white hat way, as it could be safe for your search engine ranking. Nothing funny, nothing fancy, just pure unique content for each article, and you believe your search engines will love your site a lot. That could be true. But some people also argue that, as long as you are building links for yourself, that's not natural, not completely white hat. They claim that backlinks should be built by your visitors naturally. As your visitors visited your website/blog, found your content interesting, they social bookmarked it or wrote about it in their own blogs - those are considered as good backlinks. Once I read something from an Adsense premium publisher, they did build their own backlinks at the beginning, and then at a later stage, their visitors are building backlinks for their site automatically. I bet many of us, website owners or bloggers, are waiting for that day.

On the other hand, it is easy to distinguish black hat link wheel from white hat ones. Many of the articles on the "spoke" sites could be poorly spun, or unreadable, or maybe the number of backlinks jump up tremendously overnight. Nowadays, search engines are getting smarter day by day, their algorithms are continuously improving to detect any abnormal linking pattern. If hundreds of backlinks show up in a short period of time, there is definitely something fishy going on. All of those could get search engines suspicious, and eventually your website might receive a drop in search ranking or even get deindexed.

So what is your preferred method of building a link wheel? Is it white hat? grey hat? or black hat?

Wordpress Image Uploading "Save all changes" isn't working

2011-09-16T15:38:00.000-04:00

A while back ago, I did a post about my favourite free minimalist Wordpress themes on my self-hosted Wordpress site. Initially, I thought it would be nice to embed the theme source links on each gallery thumbnail, so visitors can link and visit the source directly.

After uploading the screen shots and inputting all the theme links, I noticed that the "Save all changes" isn't working. Whenever I clicked one of the "Show" buttons, the Link URL always shows the path of the thumbnail image. So I thought if it isn't saving, could I get into the database and edit the links there? It doesn't seem to work that way, each image is stored as a post with post_type as attachment and post_mime_type as image/jpeg.

I guess this "Save all changes" is a bit misleading. It might not be a bug, it just has no intentions for the users to save all?! If you change the link URL and insert each image into the post, it works, your image will show whatever link URL you input. Only if you try to save the link URLs and "Save all changes", then it won't work. If Wordpress could fix this, that would be great.

Protect Wordpress wp-admin by limiting IP access

2011-09-09T15:34:00.000-04:00

One good way to protect your Wordpress blog is to limit the IP access to your admin area, i.e. your Wordpress wp-admin folder area. First, you need to know the IP address of your connection. If you don't, you can easily find out by searching "what is my ip" on Google, any one of those sites would happily display the IP you are using.

Open your favourite text editor, copy the following lines:

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Access Control"
AuthType Basic
<LIMIT GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist this IP address
allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
</LIMIT>

Replace xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with your actual IP address. If you want to whitelist more IPs, e.g. maybe the IP of your work computer, etc, add another line of "allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx". Save the filename as ".htaccess", without those ".

Upload the file to your wp-admin folder. Do not upload this file to your root folder, or you will overwrite Wordpress's own .htaccess file. Make sure you upload the above file to the wp-admin directory, by default, there isn't any .htaccess there.

Try to use an online proxy to access your blog wp-admin page, you should see the "page not found" page. On the other hand, without using any proxy, when you access the page yourdomainname/wp-admin, you should see the regular admin logon page, now you can tell that works.

Create Transparent Favicon using GIMP

2011-08-25T23:16:00.000-04:00

A favicon, also known as a website icon or URL icon, is a little file commonly in the size of 16x16 pixels. Usually it appears right next to the URL on your browser's address bar, and next to the webpage's name in your list of bookmarks. To create a transparent favicon, you can either use an online favicon creator, or you can use GIMP to get it done easily. GIMP is one of
my favourite free software. It is the most popular GNU image manipulation software.

First of all, open your image, erase any areas of the image that you would like to be transparent. Or if you have a white background, select the white background, select invert, copy visible, open a new file, paste the content. Resize the image to 16x16, save the file as a GIF file.

A dialog will pop up saying:

"Your image should be exported before it can be saved as GIF for the following reasons:

GIF plug-in can only handle layers as animation frames
X Flatten Image

GIF plug-in can only handle grayscale or indexed images
X Convert to Indexed using default settings"

The default setting is fine, just click Export. Then save a copy as Microsoft Windows icon (*.ico)

You will be given a number of options:

"1 bpp, 1-bit alpha, 2-slot palette
4 bpp, 1-bit alpha, 16-slot palette
8 bpp, 1-bit alpha, 256-slot palette
24 bpp, 1-bit alpha, no palette
32 bpp, 8-bit alpha, no palette"

For better quality, select a higher value of bpp. Upload your ico file to your website root directory. You might want to open your header file and add "<link href="favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon"></link>" right before the </header> tag. If your favicon doesn't show up, try to clean up your cache files, and reload.

How To Choose An Unlimited Web Hosting Company

2011-08-14T22:49:00.002-04:00

There are many web hosting providers offering unlimited web hosting services in the market. The truth is that there is no such thing as unlimited web hosting service. There are always certain criteria you need to follow. The basic restrictions are CPU usage, memory usage, and inode usage. If you consume more resources than you are allowed to, you might get a temporary ban on your account. Fortunately, for most reputable web hosting companies like Hostgator, their basic web hosting packages are already quite sufficient to the average users. If you aren't using any buggy script and you are running your site in a normal white hat way, you would seldom or most likely never overuse the allowed limits. The only thing you might have to check is the number of files you are storing. Each file requires one inode. If you are getting more websites or blogs, that means you will be having more files, then you might need to upgrade your web hosting package. For the best unlimited web hosting service, I would highly recommend Hostgator. I did try other web hosting companies in the past, here is a post about why I still use Hostgator.

Adding 336x280 Adsense Ad Below Blogspot Post Title

2011-07-19T17:37:00.000-04:00

Many bloggers suggest that the best place and format for an Adsense ad is to use a 336x280 ad box right below the post title on each post. Suppose you want your 336x280 Adsense ad to appear on your right hand side with your blog text wrapping around it, here is how you can do it:

First, get your Adsense code from your Adsense account.

And then sign in to your Blogspot account, click “layout”, click “edit html”, check “expand widget templates”, scroll all the way down to somewhere in the middle, right after the following:

<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'/>
</div>
<div class='post-body entry-content' expr:id='"post-body-" + data:post.id'>

paste the following:

<div style='float:right; margin-left:10px;'>

<script type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>

</div>

Remember to replace XXXXXXXXXX, YYYYYYYYYY, ZZ/ZZ/ZZ with your own Adsense ID, ad_slot ID, and date.