All about blogging - tips, tools, and musings
I thought I would do a nice round up of the posts that I have written over time on the blog on the topic of blogging (as a side effect I get to build some nice internal links). Overall, my posts about blogging lie in the following categories:
- Tools
- Tips
- Making Money
Let me round these up one by one.
Tools
I use WordPress to publish this blog; I host it on a shared hosting provider; and have my own domain name. If you are looking to upgrade to Wordpress, then you can look at the latest 2.3, or earlier 2.1, where I blog my experience with doing these upgrades.
I have used Word 2007 to publish to the blog in the past and now I am using Windows LiveWriter, which is better in some ways and not so much in other.
Then I have blogged various times about hosting problems and providers; what is it that I look for in web hosting and my experiences with the various providers that I have tried or evaluated.
Tips
It’s so easy to give tips. You just need to write down what you do to improve your blog and it becomes a tip.
I had my two words about Writer’s Block; and a shout out about some short term techniques to generate traffic for your blog. I wrote some tech tips on WordPress customization: How to exclude certain categories from your main page and how to change your permalink structure without breaking the old one.
I even came up with a step-by-step on how to move your blog between hosting providers. I also talked about burning feeds and tracking blog popularity.
Making Money
Finally, about a couple of months ago, I decided to experiment on how much I can monetize this blog. And that got me to crank out some posts about how to make money blogging. I wrote a couple about AdSense. And I wrote some about paid blogging.
I will continue to write about blogging from the amateur view point. There are a lot of ideas that I can still share with my readers.
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October 4th, 2007 at 11:18 am
I would like to add something in “Making Money” section.
http://www.widgetbucks.com/ (I haven’t review/use it personally)
Let me know if anyone found it useful.
October 4th, 2007 at 11:29 am
I have tried widget bucks. Currently I am not using it because it gives a Javascript error in IE whenever I insert their Widget Code in my template.
I sent an email to Support, but they haven’t replied yet…
October 5th, 2007 at 1:22 am
hi , just a thought. What if a “bad guy” , times ( 1/2/random second delay ) a JavaScript that kicks the current adsense links displayed on the blog page and load it in an IFRAME ( hidden ).
Its a bad bad thing to do, just wanted to share your views on this (theoretical).
October 5th, 2007 at 1:39 am
Well, theoretically, it would be VERY hard to fool Google. They have many more resources to detect click fraud than any amount of bad guys trying such stunts…
From a technical standpoint - sure, this could be done, but once again Google would find out and you would get banned… (first of all, I think that might involve tampering the Google AdSense code someway, so that the links open where you want the m to)… (not sure…)…
the point is that you will usually be caught and then your earnings go to zero…
If you could come up with something that users install in their firefox browsers (plugins, greasemonkey scripts, etc.) which does something similar, that might work a little more… (till Google catches you)…
October 5th, 2007 at 1:56 am
I would agree with you that. Google is Google its not easy to game them.
Thinking of which , how many ways google can find out. One guess by observing some kind of pattern\trend in the adsense hits that occur on a blog.
e.g If evertime a visitor comes to the blog and there is a adsense hit , its caught in no time… doom.
What can be done is to mock a genuin behaviour which works on some kinda pobablity\randomness function [ e.g fx(time) ] and does not every time generate a fake hit.
To make it even more robust, the iframe can by added dynamically at the client side and not be part of markup (source)… to avoid any guugle spider trace.
I do not know if this is work any discussion.. as I am kinda convinced by default that a jscript code would be funny to fool google down.
October 5th, 2007 at 2:01 am
what makes part of me believe that it could be possible is that…. there is no turing test (captcha,etc) thats there in between a visitor and an adsense click , which could distinguish a bot from a human action….. i m being too thick on this.. juat a late night thought.
October 5th, 2007 at 2:15 am
Well, if you put a Turing test on AdSense, it will kill it… why would i go through the trouble of typing a captcha just to go look at an ad… if i am really looking for something, then i will just Google..
Also, Google has tons of user behavior data and it would be hard to write a function that would mock it. Anything that is regular (though seemingly random) would probably stand out…
I am sure there are experts out there who have tried all this (and probably got burned)…
Anyway, do let me know your experiences if you try, it would make a nice topic for a post…
October 5th, 2007 at 11:18 am
Could anyone tell me the approximate revenue comparison b/w clicks and impression of Google Adsense?
e.g. N x impression revenue = 1 click revenue;
where N could be 100, 200..
If the value of N is very large then this idea may not be very profitable even if you can achieve this :). Of cource this could work if you have millions of page views per month but in that case you don’t want to spoil the image of your web sites.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:36 am
Hello Ramesh,
Actually, if you can get clicks then the revenue potential is the biggest. There is no comparison between clicks and impressions at all.
You can research topics which display high paying AdSense advertisements, and the revenue per click will be very high for such advertisements.
The impressions revenue is given on only certain ad types and not all. I think those ads are displayed based on how much traffic you are getting.
October 7th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Hello Vaibhav, just to share this info with you that I tried the widgetbucks on my web site’s blog
http://blog.openwinforms.com/. It seems working in both IE and firefox without any error. However I am not gonna to earn anything from it, because this blog has almost zero page views per day :).
October 7th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
Hmm… that’s strange then… let me try this myself. Maybe I will create another widget… it might be a problem with that particular widget format.
October 8th, 2007 at 12:11 am
Sorry for being so thick , but that’s exactly my point. They can possibly not put a turing kinda thingi on adsense and will need to detect genuinity by observing human behaviour , which makes it 99% fool proof. There is lot of potential out there (ofcourse excluding myself) to cater to the rest of 1%
Happy blogging!
October 8th, 2007 at 1:24 am
Well yes, you need to be extra careful flirting with the 1% area. Because there is a 99% chance of a mistake