Probably one of the most infamous (or famous, depends on your perspective) uses of the Googlebomb was linking “miserable failure” to the Whitehouse.gov page about George Bush. Guess what? Google has removed the ability to Googlebomb.

I’ve had a lot of fun reading up on what people think of this one. Lots of people loved Googlebombs, others loathed them.

The think to remember is that this is not intended to damage appropriate link building efforts. This is to impact linking campaigns that are designed to make a site come up for unwelcome results. Theoretically, this should not harm your regular SEO efforts.

If you want to read some good analyses of this, I would suggest taking a look at The Googlebomb Conspiracy: The Truth is Out There and Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs. Read the rest of this entry »

Just have to be amused by the different terminologies, such as Web 2.0. Who decides when this stuff gets named anyhow?

Just as with the original web bubble, many Web 2.0 companies are starting to realize that they need to bring in some real money if they want to grow, according to a report in BusinessWeek.

No, really??

I guess some people didn’t learn the first time around. There are sites out there offering services of all sorts, but just don’t have the funding to grow as they’d like. Many of them really need to be of a much larger scale to turn a decent profit, but can’t grow fast enough because they don’t have the money.

As a home business, I sympathize. I know if I had the money to hire people to help, I could get through all the ideas I have for my sites. Without that I have to rely on my ability to work on a broad range of topics, promoting my sites and working hard, while taking care of my home and family. It’s tough. Read the rest of this entry »

I just spotted a news article on YouTube starting revenue sharing. That should really interest some of their users, although I don’t know that all of them will understand the idea. By the same token, there will be plenty to jump on the idea.

Since they’ve been acquired by Google, the idea doesn’t surprise me.

It should be interesting to see how this one develops. How the revenue share will be managed. How this will impact the quality of videos. How long it takes for the first ebooks on making money from revenue sharing on YouTube to come out.

Technorati Tags: YouTube, revenue share

I’ve been updating one of my sites. It’s been a while, so one of the things I needed to do was check to make sure that all Clickbank links still worked.

Wow.

I ended up dropping about half of them. About 4-5 sites had gone out of business, and at least 3-4 had switched from Clickbank to Paypal, so I wasn’t getting paid on anything I sent them.

No wonder I was earning so little from some of those products! I hadn’t thought much of it because they were on a relatively obscure part of my site, but still!

Yes, I am updating and trying to expand my use of Clickbank products on that site. It’s tricky, but I want to be recommending products whenever possible that are relevant to the articles. There’s more out there even for primarily informational sites than just AdSense, after all.

I want to do similarly for each of my sites. It’s very time consuming but I think it will be worth it in the long run.

Technorati Tags: clickbank, paypal, dropping affiliate programs, updating websites

One of the biggest hazards of running a home business is overworking. Believe me I know and I’ve done it many a time. But would you believe I’ve found myself more productive when I have deliberately taken time away from working?

I’m probably a fairly typical home business owner. Married, two kids. I work a lot at home and my husband works outside the home.

I do spend a lot of my day working on the computer. Since I do best at article writing I spend quite a bit of time each day on that task and probably not enough time on marketing or figuring out more ways to earn money. As I said, probably pretty typical, at least in the sense that I work most on my favorite parts and not enough in other areas.

My kids obviously pull me away from the desk quite regularly. My basic rule is that stories can be demanded at just about any time, as can playtime. Some exceptions, but mostly I’m pretty available.

But that’s not really much of a break, especially if I keep thinking about work. Read the rest of this entry »

When I watch many internet marketers at work I wonder what the real point of their business is. So many seem to be geared strictly toward buying and reviewing internet marketing products so that they can tell their list to buy and market that product so that… you get the idea.

Is there really a point to all that?

You may have noticed that I don’t review a lot of products. For that matter, I don’t buy that many. That’s because I know that all too often I will forget to use said products, so why waste the money?

This leaves me in a great condition to watch what other marketers do without falling into that cycle.

The launch of this product or that is always a big deal. There’s the hype, the talk of the great new secrets, and of course, anyone who doesn’t buy is going to be way, way behind on the curve, lose their business, go bankrupt… well, maybe I’m exaggerating just a little. Read the rest of this entry »

The rules of AdSense use have been changing lately. Make sure you’re up to date.

The changes mostly make a lot of sense. No more lining up pictures with the ads, for example. Yes, I know many publishers loved doing that, but the advertisers definitely weren’t so fond of the practice. Remember, AdSense is nothing without willing publishers. Losing the pictures means losing a major tactic for improving your clickthrough rate, but it’s not too bad a thing.

One to be very careful about is the use of competitive ads. You aren’t allowed to use the same colors on competitive ads and your AdSense ads if they appear on the same website. This appears to be a per site policy, not by the page, a very important difference.

A tough one to enforce but one that should really make things interesting for scraper sites is that ads are not to be published on sites with copyrighted information that you don’t have the right to publish. I like this rule, since scraper sites are a major problem, but the enforcement should get interesting. Don’t quite know how it will all work. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve recently learned of an interesting trick that can allow you to insert your customer’s names into a page if they click through from an email or a page where they have entered their name.

This is a trick many do with software, but it’s not too hard to do on your own. Mostly it’s just knowing how to put in the PHP to add in the names. And you know what? It’s not all that difficult.

You will want to create a page in PHP. Name it as you want, but you will want it to end in.php.

If you name the variable “name” (without quotes), you can insert the name into the page with:

< ?php echo "$name"; ? > (take the space between ? and > or < out).

You can use this over and over again in the page.

Of course, there is the question: How does the page know the name? Read the rest of this entry »