The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the twenty-first century.
The ninetieth anniversary of the Royal British Legion.
Wear your poppy with pride.
Friday, 11 November 2011
Thursday, 10 November 2011
Google, Bing and a song
I am not a happy person right now, after finding one of my articles pushed to the third page of search results - by stolen copies of itself.
Now I have already had problems with the massively inappropriate ad content google have served on my blogs, so my patience was stretched. My current feelings towards Google are difficult to sum up - but after their last set of Adsense tokens arrived right after they failed to act on copyright over this, I've got MacAlmont and Butler's "Yes" playing in the background.
Yes I do feel better
After all, Google may have asked me to publicly disclose my name, address and all those details that identity thieves love so Google can put them online(?!) before they will act on copyright. This seems rather like if your wallet is stolen, the police insisting that you have to hand the thief your name and address and display them on a billboard in the town square before the authorities will take action and return your goods.
Yes I do, I feel alright
And it's not as if Bing took a look at the comparable article dates and licence, and nuked the offending sites from their search results - oh wait... Well it would have been nice if Google did the same, since they are making so much noise about their new algorhythm being able to detect content freshness, which would logically let it detect the earliest occurrance of an article and therefore a have good idea of its originating source...
Anyway excuse me, I hear a refrain.
I feel well enough to tell you what you can do with what you've got to offer...
*Lyrics from McAlmont and Butler's Yes (Full Version)
which I have on repeat right now. It's soothing.
Monday, 7 November 2011
Redgage - an update, earnings and backlinks
Anyone who follows me on redgage might have noticed that I am currently putting all my lenses up. This is because of a change of approach, because of some information I received at the weekend that does change the site's value to me.
Initially I was spacing these out to ensure I got decent earnings and exposure to each. After I got my first Redgage card (and all the fun with that) I kept doing this because I thought it was a problem that could be solved. In summary: it can't. Visa US doesn't recognise my UK address so the card can't validate, unless I want to make a fifteen minute phone call to the US at about $5 per minute, every time I withdrew money...
The earnings just became worthless. The backlinks aren't, so I'm putting all my lenses on there now to get the boost before Christmas.
Initially I was spacing these out to ensure I got decent earnings and exposure to each. After I got my first Redgage card (and all the fun with that) I kept doing this because I thought it was a problem that could be solved. In summary: it can't. Visa US doesn't recognise my UK address so the card can't validate, unless I want to make a fifteen minute phone call to the US at about $5 per minute, every time I withdrew money...
The earnings just became worthless. The backlinks aren't, so I'm putting all my lenses on there now to get the boost before Christmas.
Thursday, 3 November 2011
More thoughts on Wizzley
A second Wizzley page, this time about a certain set of free non-fiction ebooks:
My general thoughts are that the interface is easy to use. It reminds me more of hubpages than squidoo, particularly with positioning. The modules are not as flexible as the squidoo versions, but it has a better range of options than hubpages. It takes European affiliates as well as US, which is a big advantage to me since I'm UK-based.
That said, the Ciamar Price page is up mainly for backlinks. If you have a site that pays you credit for some of your affiliate sales against a site that pays 50% of all sales and a percentage for traffic, it is basic business sense to put the serious content on the latter.
The other good reason to put Wizzley pages up? There's one thing squidoo can't do: spread your risk. If Squidoo goes down or is bought out, you could lose your sites. It's as well to have an established presence on another site as a fallback.
However for now I'm back working on Squidoo. It turns out that Google no longer reads the "About me" module, which means a lot of my backlinks have vanished. I built a handcoded alternative, put it live on 70+ lenses this morning, and republished them. Now I have to do the rest. This is the problem with having a lot of lenses: the time it takes to do manual updates to all of them.
Other things done since yesterday? Added a Magistream Image-free Mine to the Cat Blog. Although the charity mine works well, some users can't deal with issues squidoo throws up so after discovering I can't really fix them, I mirrored the mine on a page where I had more control. I've got a few ideas for converting my "Translate Lens" module into a real module, which are underway.
And I'm still planning events, writing new stuff and other tings, including a new project in the planning stages since last night. The only problem with the idea is whether our servers could handle the potential load, or if we'd have to move to a larger dedicated server. The technie in me likes the idea of new hardware anyway, it's just my business sense that objects.
My general thoughts are that the interface is easy to use. It reminds me more of hubpages than squidoo, particularly with positioning. The modules are not as flexible as the squidoo versions, but it has a better range of options than hubpages. It takes European affiliates as well as US, which is a big advantage to me since I'm UK-based.
That said, the Ciamar Price page is up mainly for backlinks. If you have a site that pays you credit for some of your affiliate sales against a site that pays 50% of all sales and a percentage for traffic, it is basic business sense to put the serious content on the latter.
The other good reason to put Wizzley pages up? There's one thing squidoo can't do: spread your risk. If Squidoo goes down or is bought out, you could lose your sites. It's as well to have an established presence on another site as a fallback.
However for now I'm back working on Squidoo. It turns out that Google no longer reads the "About me" module, which means a lot of my backlinks have vanished. I built a handcoded alternative, put it live on 70+ lenses this morning, and republished them. Now I have to do the rest. This is the problem with having a lot of lenses: the time it takes to do manual updates to all of them.
Other things done since yesterday? Added a Magistream Image-free Mine to the Cat Blog. Although the charity mine works well, some users can't deal with issues squidoo throws up so after discovering I can't really fix them, I mirrored the mine on a page where I had more control. I've got a few ideas for converting my "Translate Lens" module into a real module, which are underway.
And I'm still planning events, writing new stuff and other tings, including a new project in the planning stages since last night. The only problem with the idea is whether our servers could handle the potential load, or if we'd have to move to a larger dedicated server. The technie in me likes the idea of new hardware anyway, it's just my business sense that objects.
Wednesday, 2 November 2011
Wizzley - an alternative to squidoo?
I've been looking at this for a while. Squidoo provides a regular income, while Hubpages has fallen straight down the ranks and has no traffic. Bukisa no longer works for users outside the US, so I need to find an alternative. At first site, Wizzley, another "write articles and share the revenue" site looks ideal. It's easy to use, has multiple affiliate set ups and can be picked up in no time. I even have an account on there.
However there is one reason I am doubtful about Wizzley, and it is their revenue share model. You input your afiliate codes and 40-50% of the time Wizzley subsitutes their own. If, like me, probability tends to work against you you can probably understand why I won't use sites that use this model.
This isn't to say this model is a scam. However it can easily be broken in the hosting site's favour - if it's a 50% share on time and their codes are put in at periods of high traffic, if there's a glitch that means their affiliate overrides yours (e.g. if they've used a HTTP_Referrer model for an affiliate site it wouldn't matter whose code was showing, they get the sale), if it's not a random 50% and they take the customers most likely to purchase...
My main reason however is more personal. Chance does not work in my favour e.g. I don't win raffles, lotteries or even tombolas. It's something of a talking point among friends. It even stretches to affiliate marketing.
I tried this model before and, being cynical, used products where I could access click and sales records. What happened was interesting, specifically that I did not get a single clickthru in the entire 3 month period. However, there were nine clickthrus from the link and seven purchases - all credited to the site in question. With another example, the Amazon.co.uk solution I used was supposed to swap my links out 25% of the time - in practice the sales and clicks I got were credited solely to them. When I switched to my own links I suddenly got a healthy amount of traffic and sales. There was no fraud in either case, and believe me I looked!
Given all this, I will happily work with sites that split revenue 50/50. That gives us both an incentive to maximise revenue. Splitting views 50/50? I'm less keen.
Now I could put the Bukisa articles up without affiliate links, for backlinks and traffic. However there are more popular sites for both at the moment. I'm moving away from a site that offers 100% revenue to the author, and I don't think Wizzley's 60% of clicks is a reasonable alternative. Other sites I should be looking at include Helium and others, but at this point I'm more tempted to move the Bukisa articles to Associated Content with links to my other pages embedded in them. The articles might be syndicated for free, but the traffic boost and the backlinks would help, and Associated Content still gets the most hits on the web for that.
Even allowing for all this, there is one other way to use sites with this model that does work, and can provide revenue, and that is for promotion of your other sites. If it is your product you are discussing or linking to, then whoever gets the affiliate sale, you still benefit. And, of course, these articles are all worth backlinks and hopefully traffic.
This is why I've just put my first Wizzley article up, and will be watching its performance carefully. Depending on how well it does, I'll put up an assessment of how easy it was to use (definitely more like Hubpages than Squidoo), but my initial thoughts so far sum up roughly as: Squidoo for revenue, Wizzley for adverts.
However there is one reason I am doubtful about Wizzley, and it is their revenue share model. You input your afiliate codes and 40-50% of the time Wizzley subsitutes their own. If, like me, probability tends to work against you you can probably understand why I won't use sites that use this model.
This isn't to say this model is a scam. However it can easily be broken in the hosting site's favour - if it's a 50% share on time and their codes are put in at periods of high traffic, if there's a glitch that means their affiliate overrides yours (e.g. if they've used a HTTP_Referrer model for an affiliate site it wouldn't matter whose code was showing, they get the sale), if it's not a random 50% and they take the customers most likely to purchase...
My main reason however is more personal. Chance does not work in my favour e.g. I don't win raffles, lotteries or even tombolas. It's something of a talking point among friends. It even stretches to affiliate marketing.
I tried this model before and, being cynical, used products where I could access click and sales records. What happened was interesting, specifically that I did not get a single clickthru in the entire 3 month period. However, there were nine clickthrus from the link and seven purchases - all credited to the site in question. With another example, the Amazon.co.uk solution I used was supposed to swap my links out 25% of the time - in practice the sales and clicks I got were credited solely to them. When I switched to my own links I suddenly got a healthy amount of traffic and sales. There was no fraud in either case, and believe me I looked!
Given all this, I will happily work with sites that split revenue 50/50. That gives us both an incentive to maximise revenue. Splitting views 50/50? I'm less keen.
Now I could put the Bukisa articles up without affiliate links, for backlinks and traffic. However there are more popular sites for both at the moment. I'm moving away from a site that offers 100% revenue to the author, and I don't think Wizzley's 60% of clicks is a reasonable alternative. Other sites I should be looking at include Helium and others, but at this point I'm more tempted to move the Bukisa articles to Associated Content with links to my other pages embedded in them. The articles might be syndicated for free, but the traffic boost and the backlinks would help, and Associated Content still gets the most hits on the web for that.
Even allowing for all this, there is one other way to use sites with this model that does work, and can provide revenue, and that is for promotion of your other sites. If it is your product you are discussing or linking to, then whoever gets the affiliate sale, you still benefit. And, of course, these articles are all worth backlinks and hopefully traffic.
This is why I've just put my first Wizzley article up, and will be watching its performance carefully. Depending on how well it does, I'll put up an assessment of how easy it was to use (definitely more like Hubpages than Squidoo), but my initial thoughts so far sum up roughly as: Squidoo for revenue, Wizzley for adverts.
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