Saturday, 25 May 2013

Web Development Tutorials on Firefox


Whether you are a professional web developer or a blogger trying to customize a website you probably know how painful it can be to memorize all those CSS attributes, HTML elements and the like.
Devboi is a Firefox extension that will solve just that problem. The extension will add a sidebar containing an extensive list of documentation related to CSS, HTML, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and more.
The interesting thing is that you can download two versions of the extension, an online and an offline one. The online version links to the pages where you will find the tutorials while the offline version already comes with the package of documentation, meaning that you will be able to access it even without an Internet connection.

Internet Explorer inside Firefox


Even the hardcore Firefox users need to use Internet Explorer once in a while. There are two reasons for that:
1. Sometimes you need to perform cross-browser testing to make sure that your website is being displayed correctly in both browsers
2. Certain sites, like the Microsoft Windows Update homepage, require the user to be using Internet Explorer
In order to avoid having to switch between browsers you can use a Firefox extension called IE View. The extension allow the user to load pages under Internet Explorer with a single right-click, and it also makes possible to make some sites load under IE by default.

Notepad on steroids


Although most of the publishing platforms today offer friendly user interfaces and simple graphic layouts sooner or later you will need to get your hands on some code.
Tweaking the Html or the CSS directly is the only way to have complete control over the look of your blog. It also enables you to add more functionalities such as social bookmarking buttons, advertising and the like.
The easiest (and perhaps the most efficient) way to change the code is through a simple text editor like the Windows Notepad. Instead of using Notepad, though, I recommend that you download an open source text editor called Notepad++.
Notepad++ is as simple as the traditional Notepad, but it comes packed with many useful features, including:
  • syntax and html tags highlighting
  • auto-completion
  • drag ‘n’ drop
  • macros
You can download Notepad++ here.

3 Ad Server Options for Bloggers


Advertising is a major revenue source for many blogs (and the only revenue source for some). If you sell ad space on your blog, I’m sure you have realized that it can be a time-consuming activity. Keeping your ad slots filled, changing the links and images each month, and communicating with advertisers are all necessary functions if you are monetizing your blog by selling direct ads.
There are a number of different tools that can help you to streamline this process. Some are free and some are not. Even those that cost money may prove to be extremely affordable if they can help you to save time and make the process more efficient. In this article will take a look at 3 options for bloggers.
Open Ads
Openads is a free open source ad server that can be used by website owners and bloggers. Over 20,000 publishers have downloaded Openads for use on their own projects, so it has a large and active community surrounding the product.
Openads is an attractive option because it is free and very powerful, as it handles any type of advertisement, including banners, text links, video, flash, popups, etc. For users, Openads features a simple administrative interface to control all aspects of the advertising, and it shows an impressive amount of statistics in real time that many users will appreciate (advertisers can also access this data).
With Openads you can prioritize campaigns (for example, paid advertisers being prioritized over affiliate ads) to control when, where, and how often ads appear. Other features and controls include geo targeting, page-specific controls, times of the day or week, by browser or operating system, referral targeting, frequency capping (only shows ads to a viewer a certain number of times per day or per session).
OIO Publisher
For WordPress users, OIO Publisher is another viable option. As a premium plugin, OIO Publisher comes with a $37 price tag, which is extremely reasonable for bloggers who make money with advertisements. Because it is a plugin, users can access everything they need within the WordPress dashboard.
Once you have purchased the plugin you will keep 100% of the advertising revenue, there is nothing taken out by OIO Publisher. It offers many of the same features and functionality as Openads, such as control of banner ads, text links, and even paid reviews. OIO Publisher works with PayPal to make the process of accepting advertisers and their payment easier and less time consuming.
OIO Publisher also provides some benefit for the advertisers. As the blogger, you can choose to have statistics automatically emailed to advertisers at specific intervals.
There is also a marketplace that is part of OIO Publisher where bloggers and advertisers can get matched up. The stats are provided can also be included in the marketplace if you want to show potential advertisers more about the experience of your current advertisers.
If you are hesitant to purchase the plugin there is also a free version, although it does not include the functionality to manage banner ad campaigns.
Show Your Ad Here
Show Your Ad Here is the latest project from Mark Wielgus of 45n5. This ad server will not cost you anything (for sites with less than 250,000 page views per month), but you will only receive 75% of the ad revenue (they cover PayPal fees). Show Your Ad Here offers some of the features of Openads and OIO Publisher, such as ad rotating and geo targeting, however, there are no statistics provided.
With Show Your Ad Here you can easily manage multiple ad zones and multiple sites from one place (although there is no functionality for text links). They also have an ad marketplace like OIO Publisher. Their marketplace includes some social features such as ratings and feedback.

Why You Should Be Careful with Ads on Your Site


There is nothing wrong with trying to make money from a website. You put hard work into it, you provide value to other people, so you should get compensated for it.
The mistake many website owners and bloggers do, however, is to get greedy once they see real bucks coming in. That is when they put one of the following factors on the site:
  • too many ads
  • ads heavily blended with the content
  • ads with flashy colors
  • unrelated ads
  • animated ads that are distracting
While in the short run these “methods” might increase your revenues, over the long term they will actually hurt your profitability. Having too many ads or intrusive ones will hurt the user experience and make you lose readers along the way.
And you don’t need to trust my advice here. Recently I came across a very short post from a Digg user where he was basically asking Digg to remove the video ads on the front page. Not only these ads were distracting because they played video, but they were also not relevant since they linked to a dating site.
Guess what, the little post created a huge buzz within the Digg community, and it received almost 4,000 diggs.
Now, if digg users, who are loyal and very attached to their site, would not stand some intrusive ads on the site, what makes you think that your readers will?

Making Money Online Report: Teaching Sells


The ideas contained in the 22 pages are surprisingly solid and knit together. Do you think that giving your content away for free while charging for advertising space is the best model? Maybe not. Here is a quotation:
If you’re blogging or otherwise creating content online in the hopes of making money, there’s a good chance you’re following a fairly complicated and time-consuming strategy. You’ve got to publish every day and attract lots of links, so that after a year or so, the Google Gods will bless you with plenty of long-tail search results that will bring you traffic.
Once that happens, you’ll have to keep blogging for another year, and hope to build page views, so that you can make money from AdSense or some other form of advertising. The money is pretty meager, but if you work hard, maybe one day it will add up to enough—if you just keep at it and never ever quit producing more and more free content. Or you could simply create content once and sell it over and over.
While I think that the “free content-paid advertising” model still works on some situations, the strategy illustrated in the report can be equally, if not more, efficient. Anyway I am pretty sure you will get some good insights out of it, here is the link to the report (referral link).

Case Study: How a 120-Word Post Increased AdSense Profits by 550%


The post itself is only 120 words, little more than a blurb about a car parking game meant to kill five minutes for a bored visitor. More importantly, it has no external link juice or buzz of any kind (not counting this post). Yet it helped to boost its site’s profits by over 500% because it ranked well in Google.

Traffic Data

According to Google Analytics, two-and-a-half months after it was initially published, the post suddenly started ranking well in Google. Traffic to the page jumped nearly 550%.
increasedadsenseprofits.gif

AdSense Data

I asked Google if I could disclose the bits of information that make this case study particularly juicy, like the post’s CTR or the estimated earnings. Their answer, unsurprisingly, was that I couldn’t. Thankfully, I am allowed to talk about gross payments, and a little creative math helps reveal the rest of the story.
The site in question received its very first AdSense payment in June 2006 for $110.92. It’s next payment in the amount of $106.36 didn’t occur until six months later in December 2006. From this, we can extrapolate that the site was earning about $17.73 per month at the time. Not stellar by any measure, but the site is personal rather than commercial in nature.
The next payment that was received was for $218.64 in April 2007, after the post had been running hot for a month. Given that AdSense payments are only assessed at the end of a month in which the account exceeds $100, the site’s total earnings for that month were at least ($218.64 – $99.99 =) $117.29. Comparing this to our baseline of $17.73, we come up with a 561.5% increase in monthly profits.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, there’s no way to infer causality with this data. After all, many other factors influence the profitability of a website. Suffice to say, though, that confidential data supports the implied conclusion. This one post did manage to vastly increase the profitability of the site.

Lessons

Obviously, there’s a lot to be learned from the success of a post like this. Here are a few lessons.
1. External links aren’t everything. This post had no external link love. It gained a PageRank of 3 by virtue of its internal links alone, which goes to show how a solid internal link structure can give any post a chance to rank well.
2. On-page SEO can really make the difference. Using your main keyword in the title and H1 tags, as well as several times in the body, is a solid way to rank. Tweaking your template to keep the heading and content near the top of the source code also helps. As with all SEO tips, though, be sure not to overdo it.
3. Even oddball terms can be monetized. This post was never expected to generate revenue. It was just a “Here’s a cool link if you’re bored” post. However, it goes to show how even an oddball term can have decent search frequency. More importantly, nobody optimizes for oddball terms, so ranking for them is generally quite easy.
4. Long-tail terms often out-perform short-tail terms. That is, you’ll get more traffic from terms you never thought up than from the specific terms for which you optimize. This post was targeted at the keyword “car parking game,” but more than half of the traffic resulted from unexpected variations on that term. This isn’t anything that SEO professionals haven’t been saying for years, but it’s worth reiterating.
5. Ad placement is crucial to clickthrough rate. Depending on your site, achieving a high conversion rate may be a monumental feat. This post achieved so much success due in large part to the placement of an AdSense unit within the body. If you’re not sure what works best, review the AdSense help center and, above all, never stop testing.
6. Money isn’t everything. A successful blog isn’t necessarily one that makes the most money, especially in the short term. AdSense profits come and go, but readership and credibility in a niche will result in more lasting and varied profitability. This post contributed to neither, and so its overall value to the blog will diminish with its rankings.

Stay Away from In-Text Advertising


This is going to be a polemic topic given the wide spread in the usage of such advertising networks. In-Text advertising refers to networks like Vibrant Media or Kontera that place advertising links on your content. The links are placed inside your text (hence the name), and they come with a double underline to differentiate them from normal links. Once the user rolls the mouse over the link the advertising will pop. Should the user click on it the site owner will make some money.
At a first sight this advertising method represents a good way for online publishers to generate some money from their websites. Why should you stay away from it then? Simple, because it is one of the most intrusive forms of advertising and it also goes against the principles of web usability.
The hyperlink navigation structure is one of the most basic and most important features of the Internet. You should think twice before messing up with it. Check out the words of Jacob Nielsen, a web usability guru:
One of misery design’s most insidious recent examples is the idea of embedding links to advertising on the actual words of an article using a service like IntelliTxt. By sullying the very concept of navigation, such ads not only damage the user experience on the host site, they poison the well for all websites. Such links make users even less likely to navigate sites, and more likely to turn to trusted search engines to guide them to the next page.
It is not a surprise, therefore, the fact that virtually no mainstream website is using this advertising approach. Sure if you are a small blogger it could generate some extra money at the end of the month, but are you willing to put your credibility at the stake for it?

Avoid tricks when placing ads


When placing ads on your site do not try to trick the reader. By trick I mean any technique that will deceive the reader into thinking that a link or image is not an advertising when it actually is.
Examples of such tactics include making Adsense unit links look like a navigation bar or text link ads that are placed under a “Recommended Links” header. While those techniques might increase your profits on the short run over the long term they will damage your readership base since a deceived visitor will probably be reluctant to return to your site.
If you are providing quality content with non-intrusive and relevant ads there is no need to trick people. Readers will click on advertisings if they find it interesting or useful, and they will do it consciously which is a good thing both for you and for the advertiser.

Adsense positioning


So far we have already covered how to improve the Adsense targeting (read here) and how to optimize the Adsense units (read here). The next step to increase your overall earnings is to find the best spots on your sites to place the ads.
The first thing to consider is to what extent the Adsense units will complement your content with relevant links without annoying your readers. Placing some ad units right on the top of your website will certainly generate many clicks, but over the long term it could hurt your traffic if readers stop visiting your site due to the advertising intrusiveness.

The smooth way
In order to decide what is the optimal Adsense positioning for your blog you need to define your priorities. If Adsense is not your main source of income or if you are concerned that intrusive ads might disturb your readers you probably should place the units separated from the main content.
A good place to insert Adsense units without affecting the user experience is at the end of single posts. You can use either the large rectangle (336×280) or the banner (468×60). Alternatively you can also try adding a Skyscraper to your sidebar or a Leaderboard to the footer.
Maximum click-through
People looking to maximize their Adsense earning will find that ad units close to the header or blended with the content usually perform better. On single post pages you can add a large rectangle right below the post title, either above the content or floating next to it.
On the Homepage you can add the Adsense units between posts and leverage link units. Link units look very similar to menus or navigation bars, therefore if you place those units on the right spot you could generate a very high click-through rate.
Every blog is unique
Understanding that your blog is unique is quite vital for placing ads successfully. You should always analyze what kind of responses you get from your visitors by placing the ads on different spots.

Write reviews for money


ReviewMe is service that connects companies or websites looking for buzz with bloggers who want to generate some cash from their blog.
“ReviewMe’s marketplace of web authors will review your product or service on their Web site sending your site traffic, viral buzz, and invaluable feedback.”
The process is simple: you register up, submit a blog (the blog needs to have enough traffic and authority to be eligible) and select a review among the listed ones. ReviewMe claims that each review will pay from $20 to $200. Sincerely,though, I think the figure will be closer to the lower number.
You can check the site here.