Rumbling Lankan

Get 50$ from Rev Response

Nishadha — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:03:05 +0000

Want 50$ from Rev Response ? Have a blog ? If the answer to both questions are yes then you definitely have to read this post.The contest is called the July Challenge and as mentioned in the Rev Response blog its hardly a challenge.All you have to do is write a 200 word review of RevResponse and you get paid. Payment can be credited to your account or you can get a gift certificate worth 50$ to an online shop of your choice. Even if you don’t have a blog you can promote their services through e-mails and best of all they even provide you e-mail templates.

What is RevResponse ?

Simply put RevResponse gives you your very own website where users can download e-books , reports for free and subscribe to magazines. And everytime someone downloads something you get paid. So all you have to do is offer the free resources and you get paid when someone downloads that free report.Check out my site , http://rumblinglankan.tradepub.com/ , that RevResponse gave me for free and download some free e-books for yourself. The magazines and reports are mostly related to technology so if your blog is technology related your earning potential is much higher. As you can see the site has the search capability and information about the service and also your referral link as well , so you have to do nothing but promote the site.

The following and more are provided to help you get started ,

Your very own website , checkout my free e-book website.
Resources to create your own ads , banners , flash widgets and e-mail templates.
Reports to track your earnings , they recently introduced channels to make tracking more easier.

What you have to do ? Nothing but promote the website through your blog and e-mails.So what are you waiting for ? Join RevResponse now.

I’m tagged

Nishadha — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:49:09 +0000

I was tagged by Behrad of BioTeck.net , tagging is a good way to build friends and those all important back links that big G loves. So here we go.

Four Jobs I’ve Had

Shop Assistant
Wood Carpenter
Private Tutor
Software Engineer

Four movies I can watch over and over

Lord of the Rings
Shrek
Gladiator
Top Gun

Four Places I’ve lived

Only Sri Lanka up to now

Four TV shows I love

House M.D.
Friends
Tour of Duty
CIS

Four of my favorite Dishses

Rice and Curry
Chinese food
Submarines
Big Mac

Four sites I visit daily

GMail
Google Reader
Entrecard
Digg

Four Place I would rather be right now

Kandy
Galle
Negombo
Kandana

People I tag

Orange Links - for continuously introducing great new software that I have found very useful.
Rockfuse - for sharing great blog improvement and money making tips
Addsense Addict - for some great tips and tools to improve your Adsense earnings and introducing me to the thirty day challenge
Nice2All - for some great tips to improve your blog and how to make it accessible to all

Hope you guys don’t mind me tagging your :).

Keywords and Geography

Nishadha — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:05:06 +0000

To get a good search enging ranking for highly competitive keywords is not easy , but if you achieve it it can bring you a lot of profit in ruturn and thats the reason why some companies pays heavily for SEO companies to rank better in search engines. This is true for adsense bids and similar bidding services as well because everybody usually bids for highly searched keywords. English is a bit tricky language for who use it as there secondary languaege and there are people who are making good money taking advantage of that fact.

online poker , online gambling , casino poker are very popular search terms and what are the chances of someone typing “online kasino” when he actually meant online casino , well in some countries the chances are quite high and marketers are taking advantage of this fact through geographic targetting enabled through different ad networks. Although the number is less than the correct search term because of its uniqueness he marketers can get super cheap deal for words like that. So if you can think of some tricky words like that this could be good time to start that geographic targetting.

Where would bloggers be without Entrecard

Nishadha — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:09:18 +0000

I don’t know whether to love or hate the Entrecard team , they always seem to introduce the best things when I’m away , After introducing great things like comment rush and the entre-digg community now they are introducing another great thing,Entrecard-SezWho partnership , which will hopefully increase the bounce rate of your blog and get you more comments.

What is SezWho ?

I guess the explanation in your web site best describes SezWho ,

SezWho enables contributors to build portable reputation. Without SezWho user reputations are confined to a single site. With SezWho participants carry their reputation with them across the web.

The portable reputation part is highlighted for good reason , because the “Red Carpet” plug-in provided by SezWho show your reputation to others , so people who leaves nice post comments are ignored automatically. All you have to do is leave meaningful comments in other posts and SezWho will take care of the rest.

Advantages of using SezWho ?

Visitors will be more inclined to leave comments since they are rewarded with EC credits. And if you comment often enough I will give you a PR2 back link as well
Visitors will leave more meaningful and useful comments since it will effect there ratings now
Problem with things like do follow enabling and top commentators plug-in is they reward everyone the same way.meaningful comment and a nice post comment both get the same reward. With SezWho blog owners can reward meaningful commentators more.
If a blog has SezWho installed a “who am I” link is added next to you name so the others can see the comments you have left around the blog sphere. Whats more if they like your comments they provide a RSS feed to follow your comments as well. How cool is that
Provides you with your very own account so you can track who rated your comments and how they rated it. At the moment nobody has rated any of my comments , come on people, I leave useful comment right ?

With so many great features , EC credit rewards and the oppurtunity to get some great traffice there is simply no reason not to try this. So now start commenting , so I can rate you and get your some credits

Get Three awesome softwares for free

Nishadha — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:00:52 +0000

Want a licensed copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 , Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade or VMWare workstation for Windows for free ? If the answer is yes then keep reading if the answer is no you must be crazy . Nothing in the internet is free right ? so what do I really have to do to get one of these awesome softwares. The steps are pretty simple and and most importantly it doesn’t cost you a dime. Another great thing about this is you don’t need to have a blog to enter this contest , although having a blog helps and makes it much more easier .

Bloggers , Webmasters

Write an article about the offer linking to BAS in the article.
Subscribe to the blog using e-mail ( highly recommended since they give away software regularly )
Stumble the July Special Offer post.

For others

Write a minimum of five quality reviews for five distinct softwares
Subscribe to the blog using e-mail
Stumble the post with a comment.

After completing any of the above steps send them an e-mail and you’ll get an e-mail within 48 hours. I’m getting Photoshop , what are you getting ?

Biggest Entrecard Contest Ever

Nishadha — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:33:31 +0000

Without a doubt the most overused contest prize of them all is Entrecards and with lots of crazy contests out there with prizes worth thousands of dollars people are less likely to enter a contest where the main prizes are Entrecard credits , but with the first prize being 10000 EC credits and and lots of prizes to be won I thought I just might enter this contest.

Why you should Enter ?

The first thing is its pretty easy to enter , mention about the contest in your blog ( like I have done ) and go comment in the Biggest Entrecard contest ever post and you get one entry. If you copy all the sponsors in your post you get an additional entry. Well giving out 25-30 links for one entry is a bit too much for me since I do worry about my page rank. Also since there are around 25 prizes to be won chances of you winning something is pretty good. Well you are suppose to write which prize you want to win as well and of course I want to win the grand prize of 10000 EC.

Placing your Adsense code

Nishadha — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:57:09 +0000

In my last post I pointed out the importance of tracking the performance of your Adsense blocks through channels.This is very important because you might be losing lots of money because of bad ad block placement or because of too much ad blocks. If you are thinking what the hell ? How can I earn less from more blocks let me explain it for you.

You see Google places the highest paying Adsense ads in the top most ad block and that is the logical thing to do as well according to me , but the thing is Google places them in the first block that they find in your themes HTML not the first block you see in your theme , let me explain further with a diagram.

Below is a typical layout of a theme with Adsense

Header

Navigation

Posts ( Adsense code just after post )

Sidebar ( Adsense code added as a widget )

Footer

Now Google goes through your HTML and places the highest paying clicks just under the posts because that’s where they found the first Adsense block. But if you look at the theme you will find that the best displayed Adsense unit is the one in the sidebar with less value for clicks. Keep displaying this theme for a while and you could be losing lots of money. The theme would look something like below with the Adsense code in red. So the people who click on your top most block are actually earning you less .

Be Careful with the Google Heat Map

Now some of you will argue that if you place a leaderboard ad block according to the Google heat map none of this would happen , because the leaderboard block is normally defined first in the HTML as well , But you must remember that leaderboard channel doesn’t always perform best for blogs. If you are getting lost of traffic from sites like Entrecard , Digg , Stumbleupon ,leaderboard unit might be the lowest performing block since social media users are normally blind to the leaderboard ads. So remember to test your blocks till you find the perfect combination.

Placing and aligning Adsense blocks

After my previous post about tracking Adsense with channels I got some mails asking me how to place Adsense code in different places. You can check this article about how to to place Adsense code in different places, where I have shown with examples how to

Add them easily in blogger
Add them inside your blog posts so your users cannot miss them
how to align them center , left using the div tag

Got any great Adsense tricks to share with us ? Be sure to share them in the comment section.If you comment often enough you get a PR2 link back

Are you losing money with Adsense ?

Nishadha — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:06:45 +0000

For many small websites and blogs Adsense is there main and sometimes there only source of income , so its important to figure out how to get the most out of your Adsense blocks.There are many ways to improve your earnings but to improve your earning first you must track your earnings and Big G kindly provides a way to track the performance of your ad blocks through channels. I checked with few of my friends who were running Adsense and some haven’t heard about them , some have heard about them but never used them and only a few used them ,which is strange and since without tracking your clicks you don’t know which ones are performing best .

What is a channel ?

Simply put its a easy efficient way to get a detailed report of the performance of a particular ad block or a page. Google provides two kinds of channels making it even more easier to track your performance.

URL Channel - Used to track the performance of an particular web page. You can enter a top level domain to track the performance througout the site or you can drill down to specific pages as well.
Custom Channel - Can be used to track the performance of a particular ad block or a set of ad blocks , all this are pretty easy to customize so you want have much trouble setting them up.

Adding and setting up a channel

Adding a channel is very easy , log into your Adsense account and and go to the Adsense setup tab. There you will find another tab called channels. Click the Add new custom channels link and you are ready to go , its importand to give a meaningful name to the channel , otherwise you might find yourself in trouble with lots of channels to track and no idea what they represent.myFirstChannel is a bad while RumblingLeaderBoard or RumblingSingleBottom gives more meaning since by simply looking at it I know the site and the ad block im checking out.

Now that you added channels when you creating ad block be sure to track there performance through appropriate channels.When you are adding a ad block you will come across the place to add a channel so add the best suited one start tracking and improve your earnings.Got any trips and tricks to share about using channels ? Be sure to share them in the comments section.

Earn money with Bidvertiser

Nishadha — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:30:27 +0000

If you are spend a considerable amount of time trying to make money online I’m sure you have heard that it is important to find different ways to monetize your web site or blog. If you are heavily relying on Adsense then you might consider another great alternative PPC ( Pay Per Click ) service like BidVertiser.

Pros

Biggest Advantage for small publishers is the low payout level of 10$. And the payment is done instantly via Paypal. For publishers with small traffic who are waiting for that magic 100$ mark in Adsense this can be a really big benefit.
Highest Bidders always displayed first in your web site. The great thing about this is you are bound to make the most for your clicks and site targeted ads are not so common in Bidvertiser , but its a big headache in Adsense.
Ad filtering - Well this is available in Adsense as well but as far as I know its limited to 200 sites. I didn’t see such a limit in Bidvertiser and the ads were listed in the order of max bid so you can reject the ads easily.
Color Palettes - Bidvertiser had more default color palettes available than Adsense and the changing the colors and etc was pretty easy.
If you are an advertiser and bit reluctant to try the new service there giving a small incentive for you to try out the service , $20 in FREE Clicks for everyone from BidVertiser - Click Here! , well if something is free its always good to give it a try

Cons

One problem is they don’t have the big number of advertisers as Google ,so in some niches ads can be bit hart to find

Because of the lower pay out level and the max bidders getting displayed alwasy this could be a great way to monetize your web site especilly if you are not making much from Adsense. As every monetization method testing is the best way to go about it.Join BidVertiser now to start making money from your blog. If you are already using Bidvertiser feel free to share your thought about the service and the earnings :).

Blogger in draft features continued

Nishadha — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:01:01 +0000

In my last post I talked about the new and improved features in Blogspot like better comment form and star ratings and now its time to look at the rest of the features. All these features are cool but they are called in draft for a reason. So before you try out any new feature be sure to check out the limitation of each of this new functions. Best place to do that is the Blogger in Draft blog.

New Post Editor

Post editor has seing some significant improvements in blogger in draft. There are several new features added but the best of them all is the improved handling of images.Below are the few of the features

You can upload all the images you want for a post at once and keep them as a gallery.This is very helpful if you are not sure about where to place the images in the beginning of the post.A great time saver
Immediate resizing of images with just a click
Much better drag and drop facilities

Other than that following features are added.

Much improve raw html for exprience users who uses tables and other tags
easy linking ( Very helpful )
A much better preview window where you can see it exactly as how its displayed in your blog. If you have tried the preview in the current blogger you will know that it sucks big time.This is another great improvement by the blogger team.

Webmaster Tools for Blogger

Need to track your sites statistics and how Google sees it ? Before this new introduction you needed to add it through Google webmaster tools and get it verified. Now all you need to do is go to your new dash board , go to the tools and resource at the end click the Webmaster tools link. Blogger will automatically do the verification for your. Don’t you just love the Blogspot team

The above two features and the the two features mentioned in my previous post are the ones I liked most in the new features. There are some more features that you might find interesting so I listed them below.

New Posting gadget where you can post to any of your blogs through your Google home page
A new page element - Search Box
Ability to export your posts to a single file and of course the ability to import them

If you are using this new features be sure to comment about there usefulness