Google Page Rank Dropped

Google has dropped my Bosnia site’s page rank to 0. Zip! Understand zero! Because I have a couple of sold text links on my site. Geez! Am I supposed to spend countless hours researching for information, writing and editing my posts for nothing? Eh when I am rich, I will provide information for free.

Someone has to stop Google. Microsoft and Yahoo better catch up fast in the search engine competition, otherwise Google will monopolize the Internet just like Microsoft used to monopolize the computer industry way back.

Read Daren’s post about Google’s latest crusade on page rank.

Mind Mapping – Thinking and Organizing Creatively

Mind Map’s mastermind, Tony Buzan, developed the concept of Mind Mapping out of frustration for the ineffective traditional note-taking which was difficult create and review. Jotting down speaker’s words line by line or even summarizing keywords are done linearly and chronologically, meaning that notes relating to the speaker’s point X somewhere on page numbered Y can be on another page numbered Z. At the end of the lecture, we might not even remember the connection among related ideas. I have years of collection of useless college notes to backup this claim.
With Mind Mapping, a big-picture snapshot of your thinking process, your brainstorming session or your summary of a topic is laid out on one single piece of paper. Key points and important ideas are recorded in a way that show their ordered and connection to one another. The seen diagram is a summary of Michael Faraday.

I have applied this Mind Mapping technique to brainstorm my travel, to prioritize tasks for flat moving and to learn the grammar of a foreign language in addition to taking notes of horribly boring technical and procedural presentations at work. My work productivity increases as rehashing my knowledge and looking up forgotten points take only minutes.

I currently use are Concept Draw Mindmap, Mindjet Map Manager and free-version web-app MindMeister.

/>> See more samples of mind-map diagrams and view a list of mind-mapping software.

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Flickr – Show off Your Pictures and Get Paid

Up until now, Flickr was simply a photo-sharing site where I showed off my pictures until out of the blue, Pricelss.com contacted me and asked to use some of my photos taken in France.

Wow! Was that for real? For a while, I’d been searching for photo competition and submitted my pictures to a few sites and did not get any response from them. Then now, without any effort searching for buyers, I earn from those photos enough money to pay for my Flickr hosting around 20 years.

Many of my friends have better cameras and accessories than I do, cost up to thousands of dollars. They also have far more technical skills and knowledge. However, in this information era, skills and talent though important but do not matter as much as the ability to marketing oneself. My photos on Flickr have far more chance to be noticed by interested parties than my friends’ photos which sitting on their computers.

Not only Flickr is an exceptionally cool photo-sharing website, it is an increasingly popular internet marketing tool which you should definitely try out.

Google Click Click and Tick off MSN

Google’s newest 1 billion-plus acquisition has been splattered all over the news. On many blogs I regularly read, I saw variations of “Google Bought Doubleclick.” The speculation, analysis and sizzling discussions reminded me of Google’s buying Youtube not so long ago. I did not care about this news becase at the time, it wasn’t relevant to me. Then I recevied a newsletter from Performics, an affiliate network I have recently promoted, spreading the same news and disclosing that it was owned by Double Click. (No matter what you do, there is Google. ;-D)

MSN, like Yahoo!, is desperately trying to compete as if they can even catch up with Goole when it comes to online advertising. I occationally read news from MSN site and sometimes peek down to the bottom of the screen to behold their ads. These financial-oriented ads are nowhere irrelevant. The much-anticipated MSN’ Contextual Ad Program has not yet opened to public.

So what was MSN’s next step? Well, it brought an … antitrust case against Google. Ummm, do you see the irony of this action or want me to spell out to you?

For the moment Microsoft is being a sore loser. Along with AT&T, it was quick to cry antitrust wolf upon hearing that Google had won the bidding for DoubleClick-sweet irony, given that Microsoft and AT&T have both fallen foul of antitrust regulators in the past for abusing their monopolies. “Advertisers don’t want a Wal-Mart-isation of digital advertising,” where one firm (like Wal-Mart in retailing) becomes so big that it can dictate prices, says Tom Chavez, the boss of Rapt, a firm that analyses online-advertising data on behalf of publishers and advertisers.

You might think that if other software and hardware companies could plays (they did) the same antitrust card against Microsoft and won handsomely, why can’t the former defendant do the same thing now?

Of course, they can. However:

That said, Mr Chavez adds, Google is still far from becoming a Wal-Mart-and even Wal-Mart is not facing an antitrust investigation. Unlike AT&T and Microsoft, both of which exerted a strong technological “lock in” over their customers, Google operates in a more open market that is easier for competitors to contest. Regulators will scrutinise the Google-DoubleClick deal, as they should. But Google is not a monopolist-just a company that is, for the moment at least, ahead of its peers.

I am not sure about the non-monopolist statement, but a deserving winner, definitely.

[The Economist, Apr. 21 Edition]

How about a Revenue Stream from Ebay Auctions through AuctionAds?

I saw AuctionAds on Shoemoney’s blog for awhile and kept wondering if I could implement this new revenue stream on my web sites.

Surprise, surprise! About a week or so later, I received an email from Text Link Ads, another monetize source for websites, announcing AuctionAds venture and invited me to join. Without hesitating for even a split second, I jumped immediately at the opportunity.

A joint venture between TLA’s parent company, MediaWhiz and ShoeMoney Media, AuctionAds allows webmasters to monetize their websites from eBay auctions. When visitors click on the ad, they are redirected to the auctions on eBay. Publishers make money each time a user clicks on AuctionAds and then signs up for a new account on eBay, place winning bids or just perform an action.

Example – See an example of AuctionAds in action on PragueBuzz.com. This particular page promotes Bohemian crystals, rare works of art from the Czech Republic. At the bottom of the page, I include AuctionAds code showing Bohemian Crystal auctions from eBay. The ads have been displaying the right products most of the time. However, once in a while, you will see totally irrelevant ads, e.g. computer or electronic gadgets. This is one big issue with Contextual Ads in general though, not only AuctionAds. It is difficult to get the right ads all the time.

You probably know Google Adsense, don’t you? They are contextual link ads which match (or try to match) the website’s content. Similarly,AuctionAds are contextual image ads showing eBay auctions based on keywords associated with the code. The difference between Google Adsense and AuctionAds is that the former is pay-per-click advertising where you get paid from users’ clicking on the ads while the latter is an affiliate program which pays only when users make a purchase or perform some action after clicking.

Implement AuctionAds
1. Image ads – You choose a keyword, for example “Bohemian Crystal”, which best describes either the content of a particular page or the entire site or simply anything you want. Then you generate the code for the ads. Ads are available in many formats: leaderboard, skyscraper, banner, half banner, various sized rectangles and more.
2. Link ads – You target a page on eBay, supply the page’s URL and then generate the code.

I really appreciate the fact that pages from AuctionAds load very fast, which I can not say the say the same for many other affiliate-networks. Getting highly-targeted ads for my sites can be done very easily and quickly.

If you are small webmasters with niche site, you should check out AuctionAds. They most likely accept your sites as they do not reject based on the sites’ traffic. Click here to join.

Metacafe – Youtube’s Arrival?

I found out about Metacafe.com from a CNN’s article about 25 new startups to watch. I immediately visited Metacafe to search for new video on Bosnia and found a useful, fairly unique video for my site.
And this company offers something Youtube has not yet done: paying the authors for their works.

The auteurs get $100 after 20,000 viewings and $5 for every 1,000 subsequent views. Since September, Metacafe has paid a total of $250,000 to 200 contributors.

Wait! There is more. Metacafe even has an affiliate program which pays blog/site publishers to host a customized Metacafe player. Read what Metacafe says about its affiliate program:

You can become an affiliate partner of Metacafe simply by hosting a Metacafe video player on your site. The video player can be customized to fit the interests of your audience so that each day your visitors can watch fresh, high quality and engaging videos without ever leaving your site.

This sounds like a good idea, but Metacafe doesn’t have many videos to make this model effective. Those who publish unpopular topics won’t be benefited this method as there are few or even no video to customize for the player.

I’m anxious to know if the business model will succeed. I recommended Eefoof for those who want to make extra money from their creative works. However, I think Eefoof will sink due to its mediocre GUI and low quality submissions. I also suggested MSN’s Soapbox, which is currently available as beta version and does not include any monetizing program. On the other hand, Metacafe has a professional user-interface and sounds much more promising. It might not beat Youtube but can be a mighty competitor.

I will watch this company very carefully. Stay tuned.

[via cnn]

Why You Should Switch To or At Least Try MSN’s Soapbox

If you receive one of those emails asking you to try Soapbox Beta, you should.

And here is why?

1. Be an early adopter – The early birds get all the worms and the early adopters enjoy all the fun.
2. Share the ads’ revenue - Currently there is no ad. But expect to see a lot of contextual ads in the future. I bet I will be MSN’s own Adsense. Do you think MSN develops Soapbox just for fun? Google bought YouTube to exploit this website’s huge traffic for their Adsense/AdWords market. Sooner or later, MSN will use Soapbox as one of their advertising media for their Adsense to compete with Google. (I heard about MSN Adsense for a few months now but don’t know anything about its public availability.) Recently, Youtube announced its plan to share the advertising revenue with video content creators, owners and publishers. As the late commer and challenger, Soapbox has to the same if not more to compete for users and top users. Not convinced? How about Jason Calacanis offered to pay top Diggers to ditch Digg and jumboat to Netscape.
3. Uploading - Actually I didn’t tried out SoapBox because of reason #2. I’ve been annoyed for the past few days because I couln’t upload a video of type .mpg on youtube.

Some minor grievance about Soapbox

• It loads a bit slow compared to Youtube.
• The Menu bar on the left side is not very intuitive.

Uh, by the way, this is not a paid review by MSN. I like trying out new stuffs and ideas not yet popular with the mainstream as well as ocassionally admire Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates. I hope my last mention won’t get my blog attacked by other Interneters.

Ad: AGLOCO – Get Paid to Surf the Net!

Technorati Tags: Bohemian Biz, Social Sharing, Youtube, Soapbox

Note and Review: John Reese Interview with Jim Edward, “Traffic Master”

About John Reese: An online marketing guru, the traffic master, who can generate mass traffic to web sites in a short period of time using thousands of marketing methods he tried, tested and proved successful over the courses of ten years. He claimed to be an abundant thinker who wants everybody to get rich and enrich others in the process.

Early success and lesson

• Tried various of things and by the time he was 23 years old, he was hundreds of thoudsand dollars in debt and hospitalized for overworking.
• In 1996, he set up a free auction photos hosting for eBay users.
• Increased traffic to 10 millions of users per month within 90 days.
• Then made lots of money from advertising.
• This site became one of the top 100 sites in the world, got more traffic than Disney, CNN and coporation which spent tons of money on TV’s commercials. (To understand why TV’s commerical advertising might not work or not work affectively, read my note on Seth Godin’s Google Talk, the part about interrupt marketing. )

By giving away freebies or creating a product that people like, they will spread the products for free without even intentionally spreading it.

Viral Marketing

• Setup an affiliate program.
• Develop a useful product or service (1) for people to use and they will spread the news.
• Create good content (2) and people will talk about your website and link to you.
• Give them money and incentive (3) to spread your products and services.

The biggest incentive for having a lot of traffic

• Money is definitely a benefit, but not a biggest one.
• He doesn’t succeed all the time, but overtime reaps more success than failure because has more experience and always improves on a methods already working.

Huge traffic gives you the ability to improve whatever you’re doing at a much faster rate.

3 top myths about generating traffic

• Guaranteed hundreds of users per day for $X by loading your sites on popup (1). -> Most people enable popup blockers on their browsers by now. (Popup is a type of Interrupt Marketing which doesn’t work anymore. People hate junk; their time is valuable, and they don’t like to be interrupted. See this post for clarification.)
• Offers to submit your site to hundreds of search engines and web directories for a fee (2). -> Most people don’t know about the majority of these search engines and directories. You should pay attention to those big players like Google, Yahoo or Msn. (I manually submitted my first website close to a hundred of search engine and directory, but I don’t think this matters. From the second website, I care only about Google, Yahoo, MSN and a few more.)
• Guaranteed #1 search engine ranking for certain keywords (3). -> Nobody searches for these keywords. For example, I get the #1 Google ranking for the combination of my native first and last name (it’s unique). But who cares about my name.
• Nobody knows the best keywords otherwise he/she will dominate the search engine for those particular keywords.
• Getting the #1 ranking is not a sure thing as it will be gone the moment the ranking algorithm changes.
• Ranking is not consistent. You can rank high in Yahoo but low in Google.

Like lottery, the chance to win increases if you have more lottery tickets compared to one. So you should set up a bunch of websites with good content, get them to rank high and link to the main site. (Also I think by having many sites, you can try and test many different SEO and marketing techniques on these sites.)

What is the common mistake?

• You forgot to track your progress and focus only on developing the products and driving traffic.
• Whenever you start developing a product, the fastest way to get traffic is by buying some keywords with Adwords.

If you can’t get the people who look for your products to go to your site, then you can’t get the people who’s not looking.

Free traffic

• You don’t need to be technical to do all the work.
• Instead you should hire people to do the work, enabling yout to test things faster.
• Invest some money, ~200-300 dollars to see if this business works, else move on to something else.
• There’s no such thing as Free Traffic.
• If the traffic is free, you probably have spent a lot of time for it -> sweat equity.
• You can spend all this time doing the work and get little on ROI. Not worth it.
• (I have to agree with this one. I spent so much time dealing with technical issues and felt very frustrated that I can use the time and energy to create content. In a few months once I get a steady source of income, I will invest on hiring some temps. )

If you’re not willing to spend some money to build traffic, business is not for you.

Favorite way to generate traffic

• Create good products, services or content. Give people value. Help them to be rich. Help them to make money. Be an abundant thinker.
• Have people to market your products or services through affiliate programs.
• Have them link to you.
• Have them mention you in their emails, mailing list or newsletters.

Leverage website traffic from other sites’ owners. Internet is a snowball effect. People will send traffic to you.

Think and change fast

• The internet changes quickly.
• You might lose your traffic sources fast.
• You need more than one online business model.
• You can make money through affiliates (1).
• You can also make money through selling your own products (2).
• But you make more money by doing both .

If you should fail. Fail fast.

Develop products or drive traffic?: Affiliate Marketing

• You don’t have to invent the wheel by creating a new product.
• Go with existing products, join affiliate programs.
• If you don’t have too much time, then you should make money through affiliate marketing.
• Take ideas that work and make it better.
• Combine them with your own.

If you can’t make money by sending traffic to existing site with existing traffic, then you can’t make money on new products in that market.

How long to get traffic and money?

• Get rich quick scheme will not work.
• Concentrate on make the first dollar, on the first sale to gain momentum.

Ad: AGLOCO – Get Paid to Surf the Net!

Technorati Tags: Bohemian Biz, Ebay, Google Adsense, Internet Marketing, Online $$$ Experiments, John Reese

Seth Godin’s On Why Google A Success

I first knew about Seth Godin through a viral link hopping from blogs to blogs. I don’t remember what I read at the time except for the mention of his “Purple Cow” book. The central idea in Purple Cow is to create something which stands out of the pack. Think about it. Who will stop to look at a regular cow? But for sure, they will jump at the first sight of a purple one.

But this video is not about the Purple Cow effect, instead it’s about Google’s explosive growth and their ability to roll out buzzing products. (By the way, if you want to know how Czech takes care of their Milka Cow, check out this funny video .)

WHY GOOGLE A SUCCESS?

Create a product that changed how people do thing online

• Easy to use – Look at Google’s, Yahoo’s and MSN’s homepage. You know what to do upon landing on Google’s site. On the other two, you have to spend some time figuring out. This is the reason which gave Google the edge over Yahoo on the search engine competition.
• Mega phone or viral marketing – Ever wonder why Gmail was only available by invitation only? Why didn’t Google just let everyone who wanted a gmail account to have it? I suspect that by restricting the numbers of signups, they created a hype which wouldn’t have existed if gmail was “Like it? Here it is.” A bunch of my friends exchanged emails asking for and giving out Gmail invitations. They posted Gmail invitations on forums because first, they wanted to be nice and share with others and second, they wanted to look cool for being the early adopters. Did people really need another fat email account? Some might have but I doubt all did. Many of them did not ask for a Gmail invitation because they needed another email account, they did because they were caught up in the hype and wanted a share. You have Gmail? I want one too. Before you know it, Gmail became a big hit with little marketing effort from Google.

Google Adsense & Adwords

• Google has been dominating this online marketing scheme for years without a major competitor. I noticed Google Adsense ads while using Gmail for a while but didn’t pay too much attention to it until I got hooked with publising blogs and experimenting online money making methods that I discovered the secret of Adsense. The more I studied about Adsense, the lower my jaws dropped, and I couldn’t help thinking to myself “Oh my gosh, the google pack is a smart bunch.”
• It cost dimes and nickels, literally, to advertising online with Google’s Adwords program compared to traditional marketing campaigns which cost millions of dollars and include tons of sales people.
• Unlike the traditional interrupt advertising in the forms of TV’s commercial ads and browsers’ popup, Adsense (contextual ads) fit where and when people want see it, with their permissions, therefore the term permission marketing.

Charts comparing TV Industrial and Fashion Permission Marketing

 

Ad: AGLOCO – Get Paid to Surf the Net!

Technorati Tags: Bohemian Biz, Google Adsense, Seth Godin, Permission Marketing

And I’ve Just Got Started with Performancing

Performancing’s Partners Ad Network is closing down. Ironically, I’ve just managed to get the ad displayed on my side bar and planned to write a review about it.

I discovered Performancing last year while searching for and experimenting with many blog editors. For those who don’t know, “Performancing for Firefox” is a Firefox-adon blog editor which allow bloggers to mange multiple blogs, write and publish their posts right from Firefox. This is very cool consider that you don’t have to open a separate program just to blog. It loads very fast ’cause it’s already sitting there within your Firefox browser. I brought up the speed issue because if you used Qumana, you’ll know why the loading time is important. I considered switching to Performancing for Firefox because

1. I always like trying something new.
2. It’s fast.
3. It has many cool features.

However, I decided against it and continued using Qumana instead because one reason.

1. I couldn’t and can’t figure out how to archive my existing posts and drafts. Without this feature, a blog editor is not useful.

I also signed up for the metric system but never could track my blogs’ stats. Still, I don’t dismiss the possibility that I might have screwed something while setting up.

The last interaction I had with PfF was participating in their new Ad Network as a publisher, which didn’t work out either.

I will remove the code on my sidebar after the end of January instead of before since I’m curious to see what will be displayed there instead.