Archive - Internet Category

My Views on Traffic Programs

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Entrecard

First of all, many of the “top” Entrecard sites rely almost 100% on Entrecard traffic. Not all of them, just most of them. Entrecard traffic is so poor, it’s almost not worth having. This is the main reason you will see me drop off in the listings on Entrecard and then bounce back up every once in awhile. Sometimes I feel like I want to meet other bloggers out there and have them visit my site.

Over time, I have found a few people that do visit my blog even when I don’t drop. This is a very small number though. Most of my comments come from Entrecard as they are ready to drop them every once in awhile. My traffic from the search engines is pretty silent. I know they’re there because they make me money. Yea, they’re the ones clicking through my targeted ads you see here. I didn’t just throw them up for no reason, they’re targeted for the search phrases bringing this site traffic.

Back to Entrecard. They’re drop and go traffic mostly, and yea more active on the comment side. They view one page and leave. I have monitored my search engine traffic however and they generally explore a few pages before leaving.

So which one is higher quality? Obviously the search engine traffic is higher quality, and more interested in my site overall, even though they’re not comment happy like Entrecard. Most of the comments are just to get extra traffic to their site or free advertising. I’ve had a lot of requests from members of Entrecard to commit click fraud. Perhaps they don’t understand that the ads on my site are not click based. Except for the in-text advertising from InfoLinks. I don’t get why they would even want to do this since it’s only about $.02-$1 or something.

However, there is a plus side to Entrecard, you get to meet bloggers from all around. It’s kind of interesting, but most of them are after monetizing their blog and that doesn’t happen unless you have TARGETED traffic. Just throwing junk traffic at advertisements is not going to work. I don’t care how much traffic you throw at them, it’s not going to work. Targetted traffic is 1000X more valuable for monetization even if you only have say 10unique a day from a keyword. However, Entrecard is a bloggers paradise so perhaps you could try to advertise something related to blogging. The issue is that 80% or so don’t even stop to look at your site to even notice the advertisement since they’re in “drop mode”.

Adgitize

A possible monetization strategy, however I have made barely anything from this program, and to tell you the truth if I could rank for another “money” keyword I’d make 100X the amount I make from Adgitize. It’s almost worthless as far as monetization goes. Why do I keep it up? I know a lot of bloggers use this service so I’m being nice :) It’s another generator of basically “garbage” traffic. Not targeted, just someone thinks your logo looks neat, clicks it and then leaves most likely. It’s a waste of time and effort to bother with this too much, unless you’re just looking for a few comments here and there.

ProjectWonderful

Again, by me running this advertisement service I’m just being nice. It costs $.10 cents a day to advertise on my blog is that too much? It seems so. Every once in awhile I see an advertisement show up, but not very often. The Internet marketing side of me thinks this could be a cheap way to get clicks to offers by sneaking around the sites Alexa page to see what keywords it’s ranking for and what kind of offer/landing page I could promote on these websites :) Haven’t tried it yet, but I’ll get to it eventually. Lot cheaper than Adwords, but then again I have to figure out the targeting/keywords by hand and come up with an appropriate advertisement for the offer/landing page.

I haven’t seen anyone do this yet which is surprising, maybe I’m letting out a secret by mentioning this.

Conclusion

If you want to make money with your blog, you have to rank for keywords and insert appropriate advertisements. For this blog, I only promote products I support fully. I’m not even specifically targeting keywords, I just look to see what comes up and what is possible to monetize, what’s more I’m directing them to what they want anyway so I’m helping them while they help me. Nothing bad about that at all.

If you want just random comments from other people that own blogs or possibly some readership by all means use Entrecard, Adgitize, and ProjectWonderful. It’s also somewhat useful for link building to be part of the Entrecard community. Sort of an easy “fast start” to get your site indexed and grab some backlinks. I fully support EC in that nature. It’s very good for that. I think this site still needs more backlinks but I have too many projects to focus soley on SEO for this website.

Most of this is from an Internet Marketers point of view, and maybe not towards someone that just enjoys blogging and comments. So it’s not really “junk” traffic if you’re just looking for that. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy blogging obviously or else I wouldn’t be posting here all the time. I also enjoy having contact with some of my readers.

Screw Google?

Saturday, May 16th, 2009

Well, you would never say anything like that UNTIL you become a webmaster. At that point, you begin to realize what Google really is. Google is an advertising company at heart. They want total control of all advertising on the Internet. I read something at nukeit.org not long ago about Google that started to change my views: http://nukeit.org/burning-the-bridge-to-nowhere/ This type of thing is NOT uncommon. Google is known for just running off with adsense earnings at their discretion.

I still wasn’t completely convinced that Google was doing evil. I mean I had used Google for years back when I wasn’t a webmaster or affiliate marketer. No complaints. It seems like when you start to get involved working with Google that things go down hill. I mean, the user base thinks everything is great, because they don’t have to talk to Google or associate with them in any way.

Note: All of the following are owned by Google if you didn’t know already.

YouTube

Doing a little poking around, there are massive complaints from people that actually upload videos to YouTube now that it’s owned by Google. They have some issues with randomly deleting accounts and not giving warnings, also leaving the user no easy way to contact them besides phone or snail mail. You had better not bother, because they are known to just ignore you :)

Whether your videos are copyrighted or not, if they don’t like you, you’ll be purged.

Blogger

You want to know why I will never blog or have a website based off of blogger? They will delete your entire blog and all your work if they don’t like you :) A lot of the time it is related to violation of their TOS but I’ve found instances where there was no violation of TOS and the blog was deleted. Myself, I will never ever run a blog on a “free” blogging account. I like to have confidence that it will always be there. I might be even more extreme though since I don’t even trust shared hosts. I run my websites off of my VPS.

Google ranked WORST in privacy

http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070612/google-ranked-worst-in-privacy/

Conclusion

Maybe I’m just rambling here, and maybe Google actually does “no evil” however, the evidence suggests otherwise.

Do you trust Google? (I realize the irony in these videos being hosted on YouTube :) )


What’s your problem, YouTube?

Saturday, May 16th, 2009

Anyway, my account on youtube was suspended mysteriously without warning, I can’t access it, I can’t do anything with it, it’s just gone. All I had on that account was my GTA IV video, an e-cig video and some THPS4 videos. I don’t see what the problem was, many other users have the same exact kind of videos.

Well, whatever I did some research and found YouTube is going on a mass ban spree, banning users for no real reason. So whatever, I just won’t use them anymore now that I know they’re garbage, and like to ban users for the fun of it.

Anyone who currently uses YouTube I would advise you to be extremely careful about everything, because I’m not sure what the issue is but they are banning like mad men.

From now on all my videos go on a different video host. I don’t trust YouTube or Google now.

The Best Place To Buy Domains: Internet.bs

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

I went through GoDaddy at first, probably because they’re the most advertised and everyone knows about them. They charge an arm and a leg for domain privacy. Not only that, but registering the domain itself really isn’t that cheap.

Then I moved on to NameCheap where I have ExtremeTechie and a few others. I thought that was a great deal, only about $10 for a domain and free whoisguard. I was pretty satisfied with it. Yet again, after more research I found there was an even cheaper domain service. I’m speaking of Internet.bs. My first order I bought 3 domains for only $15! Two .com’s and one .net. They all came with whois protection for free.

I will now be using Internet.bs as my main place to buy domains. Everything went really smooth, and it works just as well as namecheap or GoDaddy. I actually can’t stand GoDaddy anymore, I’ll never buy another domain from them. I may use NameCheap again though. They are a good domain provider, no doubt about it. Internet.bs just goes above only charging $5 or less sometimes for domains WITH whois protection. I don’t think any provider can really beat those prices.

You may wonder why I need so many domains, I need them for landing pages in my PPC campaigns.