Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

GoDaddy hosting has just gone straight to the top of my list of hosts to avoid at all costs. It is the biggest pile of crap I’ve ever had the misfortune to try.

I’ve been building on this idea for a little while to try extending one of my most popular websites. I want to build a long term sustainable community around it. So in order to facilitate this I needed a domain name and some cheapo hosting, just to get it up and running. The thing is that timing was critical, in order to get the best impact possible I needed to have this ready by the weekend. It is absolutely critical to the early success of the project. I’ve got the content, all I need now is the website to post it to.

So yesterday I registered my chosen domain and went to Google, entered a search for “cheap domain host” and hit return. I got a GoDaddy advert clicked on it, researched some (possibly fake) testimonials and setup a hosting account with them. Why oh why did I search for cheap, school boy error?!

The first thing that pissed me of was the amount of upsell. They tried to flog me everything, including the kitchen sink. Bigger e-mail, secure e-mail, SSL certs, extra domains (I didn’t even register the domain through them), a larger cock and cuddly toys (the last 2 are fake but you get the gist). My scrolly wheel finger was worn out just getting to the bottom of the page where I eventually found the very small “no thanks” link.

Like some mentalist explorer I decided to battle on head first into the blizzard, if I had any sense I would have turned around and gone home to a warm cup of coco. After setting up 2 sets of account details and passwords (1 as my GoDaddy account and 1 for my hosting) I was almost at the point where I could login to the control panel and actually start working, or so I thought. My next problem was actually finding somewhere that I could login, amongst possibly the most jumbly text ridden page I’ve come across there was a small login box hidden in the corner. I put in my hosting account details, failure. I put in my GoDaddy account details, success, woo hoo! Now where is my control panel? The answer of course was nowhere in obvious site. Instead it was more random clicking until I hit the right combination My Account, My Products, Hosting and then eventually clicking my domain name brought me to the control panel. I’m very sorry GoDaddy but at the point where I’ve paid for a service and logged in this is where I expect to see the clean interface. I don’t expect to see dozens of adverts. I want a nice clean intuitive interface that I can use not to know that you are offering 50% of bulk domain registration.

At this point all I wanted was to set the nameservers at my domain registrar and go to bed. Thus started the “Search For The Missing Name Servers”. With EVERY other shared host I’ve ever used, part of the welcome e-mail includes your username, password, ftp details and the nameservers. The GoDaddy welcome letter gives you your overall GoDaddy account details and yet more upsell offers. Fuck Off!!!!!!!!!! I spent 8 hours crawling the web trying to find out what nameservers I needed to use. Every secureserver.net combo I tried got rejected as being old.

I resorted to checking every option in the control panel, eventually throwing a random click at something that filled the screen with “You’re Domain Isn’t Registered With Us, How Dare You, Don’t you Know Who We Are? You’d better contact customer “, or something similar.

I’ve never had any of these problems with any hosts. Even the worst resellers, resellers, reseller hosting setup has at least been able to provide some nice straight forward straight to control panel login details and a couple of nameservers. With GoDaddy I’ve submitted my support ticket but in the meantime setup with another host. It took minutes, there were no problems at all. Everything I need e-mailed to me within an hour of creating an account.

The only trouble is that I’ve lost that time messing around with GoDaddy hosting, it’s put me behind in what was a very time dependent launch. This is going to end up costing me a chunk of money, cheap hosting with GoDaddy? From my experience that is the biggest false economy I’ve managed to date. The lesson here is never do a search with “cheap” in it and never to host with GoDaddy. Who would I recommend? BlueHost or MidPhase every single time!

Now this was supposed to be a post where I write about that no matter how good I think Chrome is or isn’t it is something that will only be adopted by the techy “I own my own website” types. And that how for a lot of users Internet Explorer still IS the internet, Firefox, never heard of it mate.

That’s how it was supposed to be, working from guessing based on my own personal experiences with friends and family. Then I looked at the stats of 2 of my websites for the last 4 days. The top one is very much webmaster based (this blog in fact). The bottom figures are those from a much more general website aimed at a very broad demographic of visitors, the vast majority I expect would have no tech experience at all (look at those IE figures!):-

It just goes to prove that you should never second guess people. On both sites Chrome usage is around 2%. If I look at a day to day comparison I can see it growing steadily. After about 1 week with only Windows support I think that’s pretty good and I’m sure that Google will be happy with it. On the other hand it now means of course that I’d better go and fix my JavaScript problems (Damn you stats)

Disclaimer: – This may not work for you, it is dependent on your website layout (please see the bottom explanation) and your audience, basically if you target visitors that don’t click ads this isn’t going to help!

As I hinted at last week I’ve spent a lot of time playing around with Adsense recently. It is just so easy to get to a point where you are earning what you want and then stop trying. This is the road to ruin, in this business if you’re not going forward then you are going backwards, there is no such thing as staying still.

So What Did I Do?
For each of my high traffic domains I did the same thing, for the home page I created 3 Adsense channels, one for the menu, one for a wide Adsense ad and one for a square. I then spent time rotating the positions, combinations and colours of each ad making sure that I made a note of everything in a spreadsheet. The reason for using the home page was simple, I needed enough traffic to make my results statistically significant. To achieve this I was working on 5,000+ ad impressions for each combination.

What Did I Find Out?
My favourite Adsense combination (that had been proved during some old experiments) was to have a blended style wide menu block about a blended banner at the top of the page. This was far and away my most common ad layout. However I soon discovered that I could double my CTR by altering this. Just removing the banner from underneath the menu made a significant difference to the menu CTR, from 2-3% to well over 6%.

I then experimented with where to put another ad block. I tried moving that banner but had little joy, then I implemented my square ad in the content. I tried a right hand position first (blended) and did ok. I then tried left (blended) and it increased significantly, I was averaging around 7% CTR from both ad units on that page. In terms of positioning that was my best combination, a menu unit just below the sites main navigation at the top of the page and then a 250×250 square in a floating div positioned left in the main content. Both ads were using the same link colour as the rest of the site.

Then I started messing with the colours. First of all I totally changed to something that really stood out, that only had a negative effect. Then I went for the old faithful, white blended background, standard blue link text. Straight away there was another 2-3% increase in the CTR of both ad units. This held out for the entire duration of that test. I did try several other combination (including adding a banner at the bottom of the page) but nothing topped the success of my blue ads. The end result of all this has been a significant increase in Adsense income. One I had my winning combination I rolled it out to every single page on that site. To take things even further I looked at my other sites that had a similar layout and implemented the same with almost identical “doubling up” results.

My Site Layout
What I must stress is that this has only worked on websites with a similar layout. You can see I’ve tried it on my blog and the results haven’t been the same. Where this has worked for me is on websites that have a single row top menu (under which goes the wide link unit) and a left hand sub/main menu. As far as colours are concerned it doesn’t seem to matter. The sites on which my blue ads are performing so well are of various colours, even the non advertising links featured range from black, orange, green all the way to red. On all tests it was the adverts as “normal link” blue that performed best.

As an overall rule I think the key to my success here has been to put some lovely blue links right where the average web user expects to find the navigation. Who knows, it may even help having my other links a non standard colour as well? I’m going to run with this ad combination here until I’ve got enough data to prove that it’s not working and then I’m going to spend a little time finding a winning combination for the “average” blog layout. I’ve got my Adsense combination nailed for content sites, not it’s time to improve my blogs Adsense performance.

It’s been another piss poor week in terms of my own performance. I have spent most of the week updating a clients site leaving all other projects to one side. However, it Friday now so I’d like to cheer myself up a bit by posting a couple of the good things that happened over the last 7 days.

Buying Market Samurai For A Discounted $69.99

This was the online marketing software that formed the back-bone of this years 30 Day Challenge. On downloading the free trial I was immediately impressed, so much so that I was keeping a close eye on when I could get the full Market Samurai software. The great news is that it’s now available and if you buy it after being part of the 30 Day Challenge you can get it for only $69.99 instead of $149.99 (Limited time only) It is still in Beta and having new features added all the time but I really do see this software as part of my long term strategy.

Getting Serious About Adsense

When you get enough traffic it’s oh so easy to bung up a bit of Adsense and you will make “some” money. You might even be tempted after a while to maybe try a few different colours but if you’re like 99% of webmasters you’ll eventually find a level of earning you are happy with and stop testing. I have a couple of websites like this and they’ve been sat like that for years. Well over the last 2 months I’ve started to get serious, rotating all aspects of my ads and surprise surprise I’ve hit on a little gem of an Adsense colour/layout combination that has given me consistent CTR’s above 9%! Not just on one website but on 3. I’ll be writing about it in some detail when I get more time early next week.

Picking The Right Day To Have A Break

I had my summer holidays yesterday, a whole one day off! Considering that we’ve had nothing but months of rain on the rock this summer I sure picked the right day. Glorious sunshine, warm enough temperatures and a nice family day out featuring a pub lunch and some quality ice cream. Made a decent wedge yesterday as well so it’s all good!

I was very fortunate over the weekend to get the chance to try out one of the new breed of electronic book readers, namely the Sony PRS eReader. They aren’t available in the UK yet but I got to play with one for a few hours.

I think everybody and there dog has heard of the Amazon Kindle, well the Sony is direct competition to that. The great thing about it though is that rather than being stuck with only reading what Amazon dream worthy enough to convert into their own format (Jane Austin anybody?) the Sony Reader allows you to read your own private documents as well such as MS Word and PDF docs after conversion.

Over the years I’ve amassed literally hundreds of PDF format e-books and when it comes to reading them there have always been 2 options, screen or print. I don’t know about you but after reading more than 800-900 words on a monitor my eyes start to wander and strain. A backlit screen no matter how great the refresh rate can cause damage, especially when you’re in this business and glued to one for anywhere between 8 and 16 hours a day. The other option is to print out the PDF onto paper. The problem I’ve got with this is that most PDF e-books tend to be the sort of thing you either only read once or maybe just refer back to every now and thin for a snippet of info. I hate lumping around great piles of loosely bound A4 as well. This is where the Sony 505PRS is going to come into its own. Upload your PDF’s (it will hold about 160) and read away without wasting ink/paper or straining your eyes. The screen is a revelation, I did read the techy specs on how it works but enough to say that it just looks….hmm….like paper really. There is no problem reading it in direct sun light (not that we ever get any sun over here) just as you would a normal book. It is scary just how well this thing works.

So after a few hours of playing I was convinced enough to go and pre-order one of the newer Sony PRS 505 models . They are due for release in the UK on the 20th of September and will set you back about £200. If it helps keep my 20/20 vision it will be money well spent in my opinion.

(You can tell just how good these things are because Amazon.co.uk aren’t stocking them, too much competition heh boys! I pre-ordered mine through Play.com)

This is my first post via Chrome, I’ve just discovered something I really like already, in line spell checking:) Other than that it is everything you’d expect from Google (Wow it highlights Google as a typo), clean, simple and very fast.

But more importantly, if you’ve got any sort of cross browser JavaScript functionality going on you might just be about to find out that it’s not working! I use some rather fancy image faders on a few sites and even though there is no obvious hard coding in there (they use some simple element checks to check compatibility) Chrome really doesn’t like it. I was looking if there was a way of changing the User Agent within Chrome but haven’t had any joy so far. I’ll have a mess around on the net for another hour or so but if nothing turns up I guess it’s going to be time to start hacking JavaScript. Oh joy of joys, this was my biggest worry when I heard about Chrome.

Wow, didn’t see that coming! In a move that seems to go against it’s complete and utter support of the Firefox browser platform Google will imminently (in the next day or two) release it’s own internet browser called Chrome. Whilst it’s not clear yet what sort of feature set will be available a few things have been confirmed, tabbed browsing (tabs above the address bar) and a new API for third party developers for a start. Expect it to also be very fast!

Creating an internet browser for the world’s biggest internet search provider is quite an obvious step really when you think about it. As a webmaster I can’t wait to have a go and see what they’ve bolted on, surely there has got to be some built in Analytics/Webmaster tools functionality available? Either way we’ll know for sure in the next couple of days.

You can keep up to date on the late breaking news about Chrome by checking out Google’s own blog.

Having a website design company design you a custom content management system is becoming quite the thing to do these days. Whilst the initial costs are much higher than that of a static website many small companies prefer to have the option of updating and creating new content at will, both major advantages of using a CMS over traditional static website development. The problem is though are you getting value for money, with even an average bespoke system costing upwards of £6000 it’s very important that your website performs. A lot of website designers and PHP programmers aren’t even aware of the impact a badly designed (in terms of SEO) content management system can have on their clients potential rankings. As you’re the customer it’s up to you to make yourself aware of the pit-falls and how to avoid a “bad” CMS.

3 SEO Checks To Make On Your Custom CMS

1. Search Friendly URLs – Most CMSs work by querying a database with a set of parameters and populating a templated page depending on that query. As a result the URL you see in the navigation bar will often look similar to http://www.yourwebsite.com/dopage.php?page=my-tools&show=all&makenice=true Search engines do not like long query strings and are quite partial to just knocking them off. You could end up severely limiting what pages get indexed by the search engines. A smaller list of indexed pages more likely will result in less “free” organic search traffic. The easiest way of fixing this problem is to have your web design company use the URL re-write rules that come with using a Linux/Apache platform to create search friendly URLs. For the example, the above could end up looking like http://www.yourwebsite.com/my-tools/all/makenice (just an example, in reality it wouldn’t be hard to make this http://www.yourwebsite.com/my-tools/) . No query string, nothing for the search engines to dislike. If you are going down the IIS and ASP/ASP.net route then there are workarounds, they are just a little bit more involved.

2. Duplicate Content – The search engines (well Google mainly) hate duplicate content, it’s in your interest to only ever feed them 1 copy (under 1 URL) of each unique page of your website. Luckily there is a ready made mechanism for making sure this happens, it’s called the robots.txt file. The file is read by the search spiders/robots and they use it to tell them what they can or can’t trawl from your website. When this matters with custom content management systems is that developers have a tendency to provide multiple paths to the same content (be it categories/ tag clouds or just a simple search function). Whilst this is great for visitors you have to make sure that the search engines only get 1 copy of your content.

3. Only Make Secure What Needs To Be Secure – When you are having your CMS written it’s always nice to have a secure area, maybe it’s for staff or registered users? The problem is that the search engines can’t spider anything that requires a login (99% use cookie authentication and the search robot can’t pass a cookie to authenticate itself). It’s very important then that when at the design stage that you make it clear that you want as much content as is possible in the open public part of your website. You’d be amazed what sort of content can draw organic search traffic, don’t limit yourself by hiding content away that doesn’t need securing.