The Official Google blog has made a post about their payment processor that they will release at some point in the future. Although vague, there are a couple conclusions that we can draw from the post.

First of all, we can conclude that its not too terribly far off. Possibly even eminant. However, there are two ways of looking at it. Either this blog post was hinting that it will be released very soon, or it was a tease—just trying to get us hyped up over it. Either way it is probably a good strategy.

Finally, I’m going to guess from their description of what it will do, that its not going to do everything that many are hoping it will do. Many, webmasters especially, are already hailing it as a the payment processor that will kill Paypal—a permanent fix to all the evils of paypal’s transaction charges. However, since none of this functionality was mentioned, it suggests to me that Google isn’t interested in moving into that market, and so won’t include those features. If you’ve noticed, the only toes that Google has ever stepped on are those of the US government, and other search engines.

Bookmark to

Well, I’ve gone just about as long as I dare to go without mentioning the pagerank update that we are in the middle of. Let’s just say that its obvious that its not going the way it is supposed to. Either Google has made major changes to their algorithm and they’re in the middle of playing with it, or they’ve broken something and are trying to fix it.

Google has been dancing for more than a month now, but before Saturday it was dancing to Jagger’s tune. On Saturday it started showing new results for *some* sites. This has left many webmasters disappointed because it seems that for the most part only new sites or sites that previously had no pr are gaining anything. This is especially frustrating to the many webmasters who have put many hours into improving pr since the last update.

Some of the webmasters who have sites that have attained pr’s that they like will try to tell you that pr doesn’t really matter and that you are better off worrying about other things, but theirs no real doubt that pr does add value to your websites, plus it is a nice indication of how you are doing.

If the update is finalized the way things are showing right now: MLinkz would stay a 3, Proxert would remain a 0, MasterTheWeb would become a 2, StudentProxy would be a 4, and Display-Ip would become a 3. These results, if finalized, will completely disapoint me. I fully expect Mlinkz, Proxert, and StudentProxy to be 5s, and I expected MasterTheWeb and Display-Ip to be 4s. However, although this is completely inconclusive and just a general observation, my Adsense revenue has actually gone up since the PR dance started on Saturday.

Bookmark to

Elursrebmem-v7ndotcom is reporting in an interesting article—that includes an interview with John Scott and some reported “insider info” from anonymous Google sources—that the TBPR export, that has been long awaited and long overdue, is being held off because of v7n’s SEO contest.

The insider states that Google is using the delay to study the way that SEO’s are working and that is what “Big Daddy” is really all about. He says that the idea for “Big Daddy” came from “Big Brother”. How’s that for privacy?

It may or may not be true, but if Google can be this fickle and actually uses their search engine technology to spy on people, it might be time for Google to fall off their pedestal.

Bookmark to

I’ve been posting to MasterTheWeb for a month and a half now. But up until this point I have never made a single cent from this website. Until yesterday, that is, when I got my first adsense click from here. It was a small amount, certainly nothing to call home about, but I’ve been wondering for a while now why I wasn’t getting any clicks. Well I’ve finally got one and I hope this is the start of many more to come.

Another thing that I want to address is the apparent almost complete shutdown of Adsense on the weekends. I didn’t make anything on Saturday or Sunday or Monday and almost nothing Tuesday—despite having almost a combined 1000 impressions between them—and I only made $.40 yesterday, but I awoke early this morning to $1.25 already for today. Certainly I enjoy these times when I get good paying clicks within a small amount of time and early in the day, but it doesn’t always extend into latter in the day, which is always a little disapointing. This leads me to another interesting observation. Looking at my adsense logs, almost half of my earnings this month have come from clicks on Thursdays.

In other news, due to the poor performance of my Ads over the weekend I’ve fallen below my desired average of $1 per day for this month. Also, I applied and was rejected from BannerConnect.net. They looked promising, but I gave a very conservative estimate of how many impressions I could serve each month on the application and I was blankly rejected because I hadn’t put enough. This annoys me severely because I know that the site I was applying for gets well over 100,000 page views, and should therefore have 100,000 impressions per day. But I’m a realist, I know that it doesn’t actually get that many ad impressions because no program I’ve tried has been able to deliver that many. The most disapointing thing of all of this is that I still haven’t been able to monetize this site(and another like it) that I’m getting so much traffic to because no very good advertising program(Adsense and YPN don’t allow their ads on these sites) will accept it despite there being nothing really wrong with the content. There is only a perceived/opinionated/close-minded way of rejecting it and all the ad networks I’ve contacted are looking through these close-minded goggles.

Bookmark to

Welcome to the newest category on MasterTheWeb: Contests! From time to time people have cool contest for webmasters so we might as well spread the love.

Here’s the first contest that I’ve found (description copied straight from website).

Make a blog post and win $250

BlogParty is a new network of sites that help leverage your blog, but we need help getting the message out there. How about some motivation? How about the chance to win $250 for writting an entry in your blog about BlogParty with a link back to www.blogparty.net?

Easy enough?
First, make a post to your blog about BlogParty with a link back to www.BlogParty.net. Verbose or short - sweet or critical - wordy or terse - it makes no difference - it is your blog and you post with your normal style. Only one entry per blog! However, as many entries as you have blogs - as long as it is only one entry per blog.

Second, go to the Blog Party Blog and enter your post’s PermaLink with your email at. Don’t forget to opt-in to the BlogParty newsletter here on this page.- Of course you are not obligated, but heck - we are here to help you and your blog, so why not?

Third, wait till March 15, 2006. On that date, we will select ONE blog that still has the link active and that we are able to contact via email (If you give us a bad email - how are we going to let you know you won??). The selected blog’s owner will be the winner of $250 paid via PayPal.

Bookmark to

I know I’ve mentioned in passing that I’m addicted to forums. Well here’s a good joke for you. You know you’re addicted to forums when on your birthday you get 20 happy birthday emails from forums alone. Whats even worse is when you don’t even recognize all the forums…

Bookmark to

PR6, tons of webmaster traffic, craze that is sweeping the internet—all phrases that describe Digg.com—yet somehow they fail to properly sum it all up. Digg has quickly become one of the fastest growing websites on the net and has developed a cult-like following. It is not uncommon for sites that have news stories featured on Digg’s homepage to receive massive boosts in traffic. Many sites report 5000+ uniques from Digg within hours of making the homepage. Fabio, owner of TotalWebTalk, confesses that he is “amazed at the traffic” that he has recieved to his forum after a valued member ranted about the possibility of a registrar taking a great domain name that he had searched for and found to be avalaible but later appeared to be registered to the registrar. It was set to be one of the normal community discussions that TotalWebTalk is becoming well known for when an unknown visitor or member posted it to Digg. (Digg It). Five hours later Fabio says that he, “had to upgrade [his] hosting package to deal with the traffic” because “we’ve gotten 6000 visitors since the link has been up”

You might be asking yourself, “What is digg and can I get that kind of traffic too?” The answer to both questions is simple, but hardly easy. Digg is a revolutionary community news site where the users provide the news and decide which news articles are worth the time fo other users to read. (Digg FAQ here) So first of all, to get traffic, you need a news story that others will find interesting. Then you or someone else needs to submit it to Digg; you have to be registered to both post and digg stories, but like the best things in life, registration is free. The way you get the most exposure is of course making it to the homepage. To make it to the homepage readers have to dig your story. Rankings are based on the number of diggs in a period of time.

So if you have something interesting to share, then digg it. Its free advertising with the potential to generate huge amounts of traffic. Just don’t become a diggspammer!

Bookmark to

I am very happy that today is my highest grossing Adsense day in my short career. Today I made nearly $4 which isn’t much to some webmasters, but is quite a lot to me. When I first started I wasn’t making this much in a month. For February my Adsense goal is $1 per day for a total of $28 which is a modest increase in January’s earnings and almost pays for my VPS from Slhost. Today’s earnings put me on a little ahead of that goal with an average of a dollar and a quarter per day.

However, ecstatic as I am, I am also a little dissapointed that my highest click today has slipped through my adsense channels. Despite having all of my websites on URL channels and channels for all the Revenue-Sharing-forums that I am a part of, it seems that every time I have a high click, it doesn’t get reported as being part of one of my channels. IMHO Adsense reports should be expanded to give the url that a click came from if it is determined to be outside of a channel.

In other news, I applied to Fastclick today with one of my proxies. The good news is that they processed my application in just under 12 hours, which is half of their minimum estimated review time. The bad news is that they rejected it. I guess I’ll just have to keep looking for a good source of revenue that can be derived from a proxified page. I have heard good things about TrafficMP, but with them I’m making about a penny per day off of 10,000 page views which is really ridiculous. If anyone knows of an advertising program(cpm banner, cpm popup, or ppc banner) that accepts proxies and allows them to be displayed on proxified pages then please let me know.

Bookmark to

After seeing a general decrease in earnings from Adsense across the board over the last week or two, Adsense performed well for me yesterday. In fact, it was one of my highest paying days to date. I believe that my lowest click was $.09 which still isn’t what it used to be, but is much more acceptable than the $.01 that I was earning earlier this week.

Hopefully this is a positive trend with the low paying clicks earlier in the month being explained by a flood of new advertisors who are only paying small amounts per click.

Bookmark to

A few days ago I started using Firefox a little bit because I decided that it was easier to install a plugin to show me pr of pages then to use websites that may or may not give accurate results.

So I go to my gmail inbox and I find that it has a whopping PR of 8. Not to bad for a page that has no backlinks. I open up one of my emails and it has a PR7.

Now, I know that Google crawls my email so that they can show me ads. So if someone were to email me a link to their website, might they get a PR7 backlink? Its certainly something to think about. Try it out. Have someone send you an email promoting one of your websites and see if it does any good.

Bookmark to