Nov 11

Text Link Ads (TLA) is an Internet marketing company which acts as an intermediary for websites to sell text links to companies, a form of search engine marketing.


Buying text links is simply the purchase of a link on another site for a set period of time, usually cycles of one month.

Why Advertiser Buy Text Links

  1. Boost link popularity – this will help the advertiser to rank higher in search engine result in certain keywords

  2. Gain traffic directly from your blog – Most blog readers can;t distinguish between a paid link and a natural link and will see it as a recommendation

 

How Text Link Ads works

  1. You register a publisher account with TLA

  2. Insert TLA ad code on your blog

  3. TLA will list your site in its marketplace and notify you once advertiser purchases a link on your blog

  4. You can choose to approve or deny any TLA sold prior to the links being published.

  5. Payment will be made to you via Paypal at the end of the month

 

You receive 50% of the sale price for each text link ad sold off your website through their system. You can incorporate TLA on the same page with any other contextual ad such as AdSense.

 

Beside selling text link, you can also make money via

  1. Affiliate program by referring more publisher or advertiser to sign up with TLA - $25 will be paid for successful referal.

  2. RSS advertising – use Feedvertising to expand your income by displaying ad in your feed

  3. Post-level links – you can sell separate links on every single post of your blog

 

Pros

  1. Unlike other Ads, text links ad appear as a normal text link that links out to advertiser. It won’t annoy your readers

  2. TLA has a huge marketplace. It already has a great amount of advertisers and publishers.

  3. Once a link is sold, it is normally renewed automatically by advertisers. It is almost a perpetual income to the bloggers.

Cons

  1. When your site isn’t big enough, it is hard to even get approval into their publishers network.

  2. Even if you merely get in, there are so many publisher to choose from. If you niche is a everybody’s niche (such as Make Money Online), it is even harder for your blog to get noticed by advertisers.

  3. Google penalized bloggers who sell links in October 2007 with the anti sell links act. For the full story, you can take a look at the report by Andy Beard.

google-love-problogger.jpg

  1. Sometimes the advertisers who buy links seem to be a little off topic to what the bloggers write about.

  2. 50% commission cut is quite high from many bloggers’ opinion.

Sign Up for Text Link Ads

Recommended Qualification before you apply for TLA

  1. Traffic – more than 200 unique visitors per day

  2. PageRank 3

  3. Alexa below 1 million

How to Optimized TLA revenue

  1. Use the Text Link Ads calculator to see how much a link is worth on your site
  2. Link is more expensive on the left
  3. Link worth are calculated by Google Pagerank and Alexa ranking. Increase your PageRank and Alexa score will give you more income from TLA.
  4. Be careful when you are deciding on the number of text link to be sold. Selling more links means the link will be cheaper, but the potential income is higher if you can sell all of the links.
  5. It is better to initially choose to sell only a few links. Because once the advertiser had locked in the low link price, they can renew it with the same price. After some times building your blog, it might grow with higher PageRank and better Alexa ranking. Your link worth will appreciate as well. Only include more links when there are no links available anymore.

 

More Reviews

Text-link-Ads.com Review by Michael Gray

Text Link Ads Review by John TP

Text Link Ads Review by Blogging Blog

Review of Post Level TLA by Virtual Marketing

 

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Nov 11

WordPress is probably the most popular blogging software used. It is a blog publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. WordPress is the official successor of b2\cafelog, developed by Michel Valdrighi. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of lead developer Matt Mullenweg.

The latest release of WordPress is version 2.3.1, released on 26 October 2007. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

History

b2\cafelog, more commonly known as simply b2 or cafelog was the precursor to WordPress. b2\cafelog was estimated to have been employed on approximately 2000 blogs as of May 2003. It was also written in PHP for use with MySQL by Michel Valdrighi, who is now a contributing developer to WordPress. Though WordPress is the official successor, another project, b2evolution, is also in active development.

WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little to create a fork of b2.

In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package was changed by Six Apart, and many of its users migrated to WordPress – causing a marked, and continuing, growth in WordPress’s popularity.

Features

  • Integrated link management
  • Search engine-friendly permalink structure
  • Extensible plugin support
  • Nested categories and multiple categories for articles
  • TrackBack and Pingback
  • Typographic filters for proper formatting and styling of text
  • Static Pages
  • Multiple Authors
  • Can store a list of users that visit your blog
  • Can block a person’s IP address
  • Tag support

Pros

  1. You can select your own domain name. Just buy a domain name of your choice and renew it as long as you want to keep it your own.

  2. You can leverage a huge amount of plugins that will add functionality to your site. There are tons of plugins, being designed and supported whenever there are new release of WordPress. Most of the functionality you are searching for, it can be done with one of the plugin out there designed by other WordPress user, ranging from shopping cart, to high level affiliate integration.

  3. You can run advertising program, affiliate links etc and thus monetize your blog. If you want to make money from you blog, self-hosted WordPress is definitely your first choice.

  4. You have a myriad of blog themes to choose from, or customize your own theme, or even employ professional designer to make you a unique blog theme

  5. Easy to install and setup. Supposedly called a 5 minute installation, WordPress can either be installed with Fantastico (takes about 1-2 minutes) and the manual way (uploading via ftp, and creating a database), which is somewhat longer than 1-2 minutes, AFTER you have finished uploading the WordPress files. Please note that your hosting account needs to run mysql, Linux or Windows, and of course PHP, in order for WordPress to work.

  6. By being involved in your blog, with the back-end code of php, there is greater opportunity for learning
  7. Expand beyond just having a blog when you own & operate your own domain, you can add gallerys, forums and other avenues to your site
  8. Hosting your own blog can be more personalized in terms of choosing a domain name, that can even further enchance your SEO oppurtunities
  9. Total control over how your site looks, by way of being able to edit the CSS & PHP files

Cons

  1. Hosting and the domain name can cost you money (Hosting: normally up to $4-10/month for a new blog and Domain: $2-$8/year) .
  2. You’ll need some technical knowledge to install the software and its plugins.
  3. You are responsible for backing up your blog.
  4. You are responsible for upgrading whenever there are new version release.
  5. If you are using shared hosting package (most of you will start with this type of package because it is the cheapest) , your blog might be unavailable during spikes (Slashdot effect, Digg effect etc)
  6. Hosting issues – sometimes your blog will be down because of some technical issue or error at the hosting company.
  7. Users need some understanding of php and databases in order to get started and progress with their own blog
  8. You don’t get a highly skilled & dedicated team of people at the back of your blog, ensuring that it’s updated for you and includes fully functional working & valid back-end code
  9. You need to find quality web hosts so you don’t suffer downtime and eventually put off readers from visiting your blog
  10. Requires a learning curve which may be daunting enough for non technical folks. Rest assured, the developers are constantly trying to make WordPress more user friendly with every update. But still, it’s not uncommon for newbies to face a lot of frustration, but it does get better.

How to Install WordPress

List of Online Guide:

Guide from WordPress.org:

Download WordPress.

WordPress Installed for Free

Before you read much further, if you, for whatever reason, aren’t inclined to do this type of software installation on your web server/host, you can still use WordPress by requesting the WordPress Install4Free (http://install4free.wordpress.net) team do the installation for you for free!

How to Upgrade your WordPress software at server

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Or follow this official guide by WordPress.org

WordPress Plugins List

WordPress Themes List

Developers

WordPress development is led by Ryan Boren and Matt Mullenweg. Mullenweg and Mike Little were co-founders of the project.

The contributing developers include:

  • Dougal Campbell

  • Mark Jaquith

  • Donncha O’Caoimh

  • Andy Skelton

  • Michel Valdrighi

  • Peter Westwood

Though developed much by the community surrounding it, WordPress is closely associated with Automattic, where some of WordPress’s main contributing developers are employees.

WordPress is also in part developed by its community, among which are the WP testers, a group of people that volunteer time and effort to testing each release. They have early access to nightly builds, Beta versions and Release Candidates. Upgrading to these versions, they can find and report errors to a special mailing list, or the project’s Trac tool.

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Nov 10

WordPress.com is a free WordPress-powered weblog hosting from company Automattic. It opened to beta testers on August 8, 2005 and opened to the public on November 21, 2005. It runs WordPress MU, a version of the original software that allows people to create and manage their own weblogs without requiring the time, money and technical knowledge involved in setting up WordPress on an ordinary hosting account.

The site was initially launched as an invitation-only service, although at one stage, accounts were also available to users of the Flock web browser. However, accounts can now be registered by anyone, and there are over 1,115,004 accounts with the service. Registration is not required to read or comment on weblogs hosted on the site, except if the blog owner wanted to do so; but registration is required to own or post in a weblog. All the basic and original features (current as of May 2006) of the site are free-to-use, and will remain so in future. However, some new features (such as a CSS editor, domain mapping, and storage upgrades) are available only to users who pay for them.

 

 

Features

  1. Support public blog and private blog (viewer by invitation only)

  2. offer paid upgrade including features of domain mapping, increase storage and CSS editor function

  3. About 60 attractive themes to choose from

  4. support sidebar widget, where you can customize and arrange some themes let you upload your own photo for the header bar

  5. support global tagging and tag surfer

  6. built in stats

  7. easily integrate images from Flickr and Photobucket

  8. include an inline spell-checker

  9. provide preview feature that shows you exactly what your post or page will look like before you publish them for the world to see.

  10. Automatic save feature (it saves your post every minute while you are writing it)

  11. Got the “page” feature which is not available at Blogger.com. Because of the simple page features, WordPress can be used to manage and built a regular website.

  12. Automatic Spam protection

  13. Provide import and export feature, which allows you to import posts from Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, and others.

  14. Support multiple blogs and multiple authors

 

More about the features of WordPress.com

Learn more about the features which are loved the most by user

Pros

  1. It’s free

  2. They take care of blog setup, backup, security and upgrades, so you don’t need any technical knowledge.

  3. Your posts will be included in the global tag system, where other WordPress.com user can use the same tag to find your blog post. This means extra traffic within a big community.

Cons

  1. They won’t let you monetize your blog. Although there are news about the future upgrade option that let you display your own ads, but it is yet implemented.

  2. The number of themes to choose from for your blog are limited.

  3. Your blog url contains the *.wordpress.com suffix.

 

If you don’t intend to monetize your blog, WordPress.com is probably the best free hosted platform available now. If making money is one of your goal of active blogging, you should learn how to host your own blog at paid server.

 

I’ve used Wordpress.com and Blogger.com to blog. My vote is for WordPress.

 

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Nov 8

AdSense is an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis. Google is also currently beta-testing a cost-per-action based service.

How AdSense works

Each time a visitor visits a page with an AdSense tag, a piece of JavaScript writes an iframe tag, whose “src” attribute includes the URL of the page.

For contextual advertisements, Google’s servers use a cache of the page for the URL or the keywords in the URL itself to determine a set of high-value keywords. If keywords have been cached already, ads are served for those keywords based on the AdWords bidding system.

The Google Adsense program compensates the affiliate in a pay-per-click basis. The advertisers would pay Google a certain amount each time their ad on your site is clicked and Google would then forward this amount to you through checks, although only after Google have deducted their share of the amount.

Pros

  1. AdSense is great for content rich website, especially blog.
  2. Because of Google AdSense, webmasters can now concentrate on publishing quality content. Quality content makes the internet better for the users.
  3. It is easy to integrate AdSense. You just need to copy and paste the code, and Google will do the rest. The advertisements displayed are highly relevant to your content most of the time.
  4. You can use one AdSense account for unlimited multiple websites.

Cons

  1. Google can ban your account anytime. There are cases of webmasters’ account being closed suddenly and the reason is never clearly stated. Usually, one of the reasons that makes Google close an account is click fraud. The problem is that the click fraud might not be committed by the webmaster.
  2. It might not be very profitable if most of your readers are internet savvy. People seldom click on ad when they know that it is ad.
  3. Traffic sent to your blog via search engines is the easiest to monetize using AdSense. Most content websites depend on search engines for traffic. When the search engines shuffle their ranking algorithms, the traffic may drop. Less traffic results in less income.
  4. Your keywords attract ads from you competitors.
  5. Some Firefox user use Adblock. This is an add-on plugin of Firefox browser that stop your AdSense box from displaying ads. It will appear blank to them.

How to Use Section Targeting to Improve Ad Targeting

Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text content that Google use when matching ads to your site’s content.

To implement section targeting, you’ll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you’d like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting.

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can also designate sections you’d like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

With these tags added to your HTML code, your final code may look like the following:

<html><head><title>Section targeting</title></head>
<body>
<!– google_ad_section_start –>

This is the text of your web page. Most of your content resides here.

<!– google_ad_section_end –>
</body>
</html>

How to Optimize AdSense for the Maximum Revenue

  1. Positioning – the best Adsense position for blog is at the post level 300×250 square box. Use this code to blend it with your text <div style=”float: right; margin: 5px;”><your adsense code></div>.
  2. Link Units: Link unit looks like the page menu of a website. You can put it at the top just below your header banner.
  3. Remove non-related ads - Within your Adsense manager, you have the option of using the “Competition Filter” which allows you to remove certain websites from the ads being displayed regularly. Study the ads being displayed on your blog and filter those you think are not appropriate for your readers
  4. Blue link on White backgound – Visitors are used to link being blue. The best Adsense ads being click is normally with blue link and white background. But it might not suits your blog theme. If your blog template is not in blue and white, it is better to blend Adsense nicely into your current blog theme.

AdSense for search

A companion to the regular AdSense program, AdSense for search lets you place Google search boxes on their pages. When a user searches the web or the site with the search box, Google shares any ad revenue it makes from those searches with the site owner. However, only if the ads on the page are clicked, the publisher is paid. Adsense does not pay publishers for mere searches.

Register an AdSense Account


 

 

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Nov 8

Blogger is a blog publishing system. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003.

History

  • On August 23, 1999, Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs. As one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools, it is credited for helping popularize the format.

  • In February 2003, Pyra Labs was acquired by Google under undisclosed terms. The acquisition allowed premium features that Pyra charged for to be free. About a year later, Pyra Labs’ co-founder, Evan Williams, left Google.

  • In 2004, Google purchased Picasa; it integrated Picasa and its photo sharing utility Hello into Blogger, allowing users to post photos to their blogs.

  • On May 9, 2004, Blogger introduced a major redesign, adding features including CSS-compliant templates, individual archive pages for posts, comments, and posting by email.

  • On 14 August 2006, Blogger launched its latest version in beta, codenamed Invader, alongside the gold release. This migrated users to Google servers, as well including some new features.

  • In December 2006, this new version of Blogger was taken out of beta.

  • As of May 2007, Blogger has completely moved over to Google operated servers.

 

 

Features

Blogs can either be hosted internally by Blogger on the

  • blogspot.com Internet domain, (i.e. http://yourblog.blogspot.com)

  • on a user’s own domain, or

  • externally on the user’s own server (through FTP or SFTP).

Once a blog name has been reserved, the name assignment and any contents are retained for an indefinite time—there is no need to login periodically or take any action to keep the blog active. Blogger’s blogs also support HTML, so Youtube videos can be posted.

 

Redesign

As part of the Blogger redesign in 2006, all blogs associated with a user’s Google Account are located on Google servers. The service is now claimed to be more reliable, due to the quality of the servers.

Along with the migration to Google servers, several new features were introduced, including label organization, a drag-and-drop template editing interface, reading permissions (to create private blogs) and new Web feed options. Furthermore, blogs are updated dynamically, as opposed to rewriting HTML files.

Integration

  • The Google Toolbar has a feature called “BlogThis!” which allows toolbar users with Blogger accounts to post links directly to their blogs.

  • “Blogger for Word” is a free add-in for Microsoft Word. This add-in allows users to save a Microsoft Word Document directly to a Blogger blog, as well as edit their posts both on- and offline. As of January 2007, Google says “Blogger for Word is not currently compatible with the new version of Blogger”, and they state no decision has been made about supporting it with the new Blogger. However, Microsoft Office 2007 adds native support for a variety of blogging systems, including Blogger.

  • Blogger supports Google’s AdSense service as a simple way of generating revenue from running a blog.

  • Blogger offers multiple author support, making it possible to establish group blogs.

 

 

Pros

  1. It’s free
  2. Hundreds of free templates
  3. Can modify your blog using html and CSS
  4. Can insert other parties widgets which is in html code (visitor counters etc)
  5. easy indexing – it ranks high on Google Blog Search
  6. even though it is free, you can still monetize it with advertisement. The easiest to integrate is Google Adsense.
  7. You don’t have to learn a lot of coding stuff to use Blogger

Cons

  1. Even though it has lots of features, but there are other platform that provides even better flexibility, such as Wordpress
  2. Less configurable
  3. default design limitation
  4. less control
  5. generic url
  6. upgrading to standalone blog can be tricky

 

Criticisms

In order to upgrade to the new Blogger service (which has new features and more reliability), a user would have to create a Google Account. There is also a petition to change the abandoned blog policy, which does not allow blogspot.com addresses to expire, preventing new users from taking abandoned addresses.Even though Blogger is owned by Google, which is primarily a search engine, the contents of the blogs are mostly not indexed by the main search engine, but only by the more specialized “Blog Search” feature.

 

How to Create a Blog Using Blogger

  1. Visit Blogger.com homepage
  2. You need a Google account to register a blog.
  3. Choose a name for your blog
  4. Choose the template
  5. Done! Start blogging!

You won’t be lost. Don’t worry.

 

 

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