Da Gsense Codes

Sticky: "Kindly link to us and subscirbe our blog"

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:26:00 +0000

Dear visitors,

When you find your suitable answer for your questions, or benefit from the Adsense secrets and tips, I sincerely hope that you can kindly put a backlink to our blog in order to spead the word and the site to more people (and Adsense newbies) who seeks for Adsense tips to generate more income for them.

Your kind action for putting a backlink is a great motivation for us.

At the same time, you are recommened to subscribe our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DaGsenseCodes

Hope you all have a nice day with Adsense.

Best Regards,
Adsense Decoder

Make a Expandable Post Summary

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:00:00 +0000

As you can see from my blogs or other blogs, you may encounter that there maybe a little snipet showing "Read More", or "more...." at the end of a post summary. This is particularly good when you have a very long articles. You see a portion of the text at the beginning of each post as the teaser and then click on "Read More" for the full text. I'm going to attempt to make this sound a bit easier and show you how I accomplished this little trick.

You can read through bloggers explanation for Expandable Post Summaries, keep this window open to refer to for the portion of HTML code that will be needed to copy and paste for each section of your template mentioned. Your individual posts will also need a bit of code.

Are you ready to try this? It took me many times of reading this blogger help page over before I would attempt to go for it. Knowing I can always Clear Edits and start over I decided to give it a whirl. After great success, I now have expandable post summaries in all my blogs. I wanted to share this with other new bloggers, so here I am doing my best to make this sound a little easier to accomplish, especially for all those who don't understand all that HTML stuff.

Go to the blogger dashboard, click on your blog name, click on the the Setting Tab and then click on the Archiving Tab to make sure you have Enable Post Pages set to YES, don't forget to save any changes you make. Now click on the Template Tab, scroll down to the area you see in the image below (real close to the top of your template), copy and paste this portion of code from the blogger help page to this portion of your template.

Follow the example below:

Next you will need to add another bit of html code after the <$BodyItemBody$> tag:

This area will be located about half way down in your template, look for the "post-body" and the $BlogItemBody$ area.

Follow the example below:

I changed the Read more! to (Read more...!). This TEXT can be whatever you like. When finished adding the html code in these two areas, preview this and if you see (Read More...!) at the end of each of your posts, you have located the correct areas to copy and paste these two portions of code. If you don't see the "Read More" at the end of your posts, Clear Edits and start over. I'm sure everything will go just fine however, it is always a good idea to have your template backed up. You have now completed the first two steps, close that window and Save Template Changes.

Now go to the Edit Posts section, edit each individual post that you want to add this feature to. Decide where you want to stop the text for that post and insert this html code at that point and also at the end of post is a bit of HTML code that you need to paste.

View this image for an example:

New Features in Adsense for Search

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:24:00 +0000

Google has finally provided a solution to combine the Adsense for Search and the custom search. If you've used Custom Search Engine (CSE) before, you know that Custom Search offers advanced customization options to help improve the accuracy of your search results and tailor them to what users are looking for. With the new integration between the two search functions, you can earn more money without leaving your Adsense account.

Here are some of the new features in Adsense for Search:

* Improved indexing of your pages: Google has improved their indexing technology so that you can provide a more enhanced Site Search experience for your users. AdSense for search will now index even more pages of your site, as long as Google is able to crawl them, so that your users will see more results from your site in your AdSense for search results.

* Site Search: You've worked hard to attract users to your site, so it's understandable that you'd be concerned about those users leaving through web search. Now you can choose to provide just site search so users can find all the information they're looking for on your site, and you can host the search results on your own pages so that they can find that information without leaving your site.

* Selecting ad location: Do you want ads to appear at the top and bottom of your search results? Or along the right sidebar as well, just like the one you searched in Google.com? With this new feature, you can make the call on where ads are placed.

* Quick and easy updates: Just as you use our ad management feature to quickly change the settings for your ad and referral units, you'll be able to do the same for your search engine within your AdSense account. Your settings will be saved in your account, so you won't need to generate new search code for each change.

* Vertical search: You can also allow your users to search across multiple sites - this could be a network of sites that you own or other related sites that you think your users might find useful. If you write book reviews on your blog, for example, you can use vertical search to specify a list of online bookstores for users to search through. Other examples of vertical searches include computer forums, travel blogs, political sites you endorse, etc.

* Tuning search results and ads with keywords: Search terms can have different meanings in different contexts, so you can now configure your search engine with relevant keywords. Let's say you manage a site about yoga - you can enter keywords such as 'yoga,' 'exercise,' and 'meditation' so that when a user searches for 'mat,' the search results and ads will be more related to yoga mats and less to commercial floor mats. (You can see an example of this in the video below). In experiments, we've found that this tuning has led to an increase in earnings for publishers.

What are you waiting for? Go now, and check this new features inside your Adsense account now! Don't forget to leave your feedbacks and reviews by leaving comments here.

How to get your banned domains unbanned from Adsense

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:51:00 +0000

In Google Adsense, not only your Adsense account is vulnerable to be banned, but so as your domains/websites. After inputting so much effort to build a nice website, drive traffic to and enjoy the great revenue generated with it, how would you feel if you suddenly receive an email saying that your site has been disabled for serving the Adsense ads? It's a nightmare, right?

In that case, no matter how many Adsense codes you have put to your website, there will be still no Adsense ads displayed, even though your Adsense account still remains active. I'm sure many of you has experienced this before.

I have figured out a solution that has proved to work, and get unbanned by Google Adsense. Below are the little tips:

Change "whois" info of the domain that is banned from AdSense with some new info.

Send adsense@google.com a mail saying you're the new owner of the site (make sure you send this from the e-mail address given in the new whois info of the domain) and that you were unaware the domain was banned from AdSense and kindly request it to be unbanned. They'll do it. Make sure there is no TOS violation on the site before you send this e-mail though.

There are many publishers who tested this method and proved to be possible. So, go ahead and earn the great revenue again from those banned sites now.

New Arrows Under the Adsense Ads

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:52:00 +0000

You may notice that there is a new feature showing under the normal Adsense ad unit. There is a pair of arrow pointing left and right. If you click on that, all the ads within the entire ad unit will be rotated and show the next set of targeted ads. This may give your users greater control over the ads they see and click, and so theoretically, this will improve the CTR of the ad unit.

While the ads the user initially sees may be relevant and targeted to your content, they may not be precisely what the user is seeking. For example, a user may see ads about Mercedes-Benz cars and BMW cars but would prefer more information about Ferrari Sport cars. With the 'next' and 'previous' buttons, users can view more ads about cars until a Ferrari car ad appears.

No worry, clicking on the arrows yourself will not generate any revenue for you, and thus will not lead to any invalid click. So there will be no problem for you to test those arrows. When users click on the buttons, they begin interacting with the ads and are more likely to find the specific offering they're looking for, which can lead to higher earnings for you.

Never Buy any CDs or Packages for Adsense

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:48:00 +0000

I have received some enquiries on what should they do after buying a CD or packages for Adsense. I would then ask them where did they buy from, and the answer is the same - people they don' know. I know that when one comes across with Google Adsense for his first time, he will be attracted by the earning potential of it. But if he comes across this in a stranger site, and tells him that he only need to buy a cheap CD package, and he will then be the next success person in Adsense. But at the end, when he knows that he still need a set of Adsense code to function, he can do nothing. This is ridiculous.

As clarified in Adsense, "We'd like to take this opportunity to state that we're not affiliated with any third-parties that solicit payment to join the AdSense program or that sell CDs with money-back guarantee offers. AdSense is a free product offered to publishers by Google Inc., and there's no cost or obligation involved. As a result, we recommend that prospective publishers exercise caution when presented with such offers."

Hope this will be a clear post to you and other newbies in Adsense. If you think it is useful reminder to us, please forward this post to your friends too. Stumble or Digg it is equally welcome.

New Alexa Ranking Algorithms

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:24:00 +0000

Alexa ranking is a very useful indictor to see how much traffic flowed to the website I concerned, and the level of popularity. But it had its own deficiency is that it only count the visits from those who have installed Alexa Toolbar. To many people, like me, who are disgusted to install too many toolbars in browser, they will refuse to install the Alexa Toolbar, and hence the number of visits will never be counted.

To solve this problem, Alexa has made a great improvement to change its algorithms, and have taken multiple sources into consideration. Though it hasn�t mentioned what kinds of sources it has taken into account, it is always good to hear this great news. At least, all these have provided consistently accurate data to my websites/blogs.

In this update, the Alexa Ranking for DaGsenseCodes.com has increase to 200,000 level, which is not too far to my target of 100,000. I gotta keep on hard working to promote my blog. Of course, you mutual support is also highly appreciated.

Below are a few common questions we anticipate from the Alexa community, along with our answers.

My site's ranking has changed. Was it wrong before?

Your ranking wasn't wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users' interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites' rankings were unaffected by such differences, we've worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.

The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.

I liked the old rankings better. Are they still available somewhere?

We liked the old rankings as well. However, we developed the new system in response to the huge number of requests we got from users like you, and now that it's done we like it even better. We hope you will too.

We think that having more than one ranking system at a time would be confusing, so we have removed the old rankings.

Why are the long range graphs gone? I can only get 9 months of historical data.

We are recalculating historic traffic data and will continue to add it over the coming weeks. We apologize for the inconvenience, but should have several years of data back on line shortly.

New Clarification on Blending Adsense Ads

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:47:00 +0000

Maybe we earned too much from Adsense from well-blended ads, especially when you have read all the tips from my blog. Because of that, Google needs to take some measures to stop this kind of ads blending, and made some clarifications on this issue. So, webmasters, bear in mind of the following points, or your Adsense account will be at risk.

1. Ads shouldn't be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.
As the title implies, you should never place a ad block immediately below a post title/heading. For example, ads shouldn't be placed under titles such as "Dallas Business Opportunities" or "Today's Hot Deals". Placing ads directly below titles such as these implies to your users that the links in the ads are publisher-created content. The example below shows a placement that does not follow this guideline.

2. Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.
This is the most head-scratching policy I have ever seen in Adsense. We are trained to place ads that should looks similar to its surrounding. But then it is no longer allowed. Similarly, you should not place an ad unit by a group of links that has identical colors and line spacing. Doing so may cause users to think the ad unit is content created by you. In this situation, we recommend using a different color for the ad titles or indenting the ad unit to help distinguish the ads from your own content. This screenshot shows an implementation that does not follow this guideline:

Hope you guys will be more alert when you implementing Adsense ads into a new page. Otherwise, you will easily fall in to the trap set by Google, and lose your account forever. One more thing to notify you, remember to place your privacy policies for your visitors as soon as possible.

How to Filter an Unwanted Ad?

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:17:00 +0000

You may encounter some unwanted ads inside the Adsense units of your site. It may be a competitor ad, irrelevant ad, non-kids-friendly ad etc. In Google Adsense, you are allowed to filter them by entering the respective URL into the "Competitive Ad Filter" inside your Adsense account. The URL you enter should not be the one you see at the bottom of that ad. Also, there is no visible URL shown for certain ad formats like half banner. You must know that you are not allowed to click your ad, as it violates with the Google's TOS.

In this case, you need to use the Adsense Preview Tool, in order to correct the URL of the unwanted ads. Copy that URL shown in the preview tool, and enter it into the filter. However, there are still some occasions that the ads still can't be screened. What to do then? Here are some tips.

Tip 1: Don't believe the myth about blocking 'low-paying advertisers'

This is a very common mistake among most of the Adsense publishers. As you may know, Google's auction system automatically selects and displays the best performing (highest-paid) ads for each page to help you earn the most possible money. This is especially true with the expanded text ads too. By filtering ads you think are low paying, you could actually be cutting out the most optimized ads and decreasing your revenue potential. Each ad that is filtered is one less bid in the auction, lowering the price for the winning ad on your site. You benefit most when there is a larger pool of advertisers competing for a place on your site. Hence, with the highest-paid ad gone, the replacing ad couldn't be even higher-paid. That means you earn much less. Furthermore, when calculating the auction in Adwords, Google takes ad clickthrough rates (CTR) into account - an ad with a $0.25 cost-per-click (CPC) with a 5% CTR is more valuable than an ad with a $1.00 CPC but a 0.1% CTR.

Tip 2: Don't use "www" in your Ad Filters

Ads should be blocked at the domain level. Frequently, publishers append "www" to their filters, such as using 'www.example.com' instead of 'example.com'. If you filter 'www.example.com' and the ad points to landingpage.example.com, the ad will continue to appear on your page. However, filtering 'example.com' will block ads from 'landingpage.example.com', 'example.com/subdomain', and 'www.example.com'.

Tip 3: Don't go overboard with filters

Only filter URLs when absolutely necessary. As mentioned, each URL you add to your filter list may cut into your Adsense revenue potential, so it's important to think carefully before deciding what to block.

Some publishers worry that competitive ads will affect their bottom line and they may overuse filters, limiting the ad inventory available for their site. Some publishers don't use filters and sell at the same levels after adding Adsense to their pages. This might not be true for all publishers, but you should test first so that you know the actual effects before unintentionally reducing your Adsense revenue.

After earning your first $10 from Adsense...

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 02:20:00 +0000

There are quite a lot of publishers in Adsense Help Group asking why they cannot change their forms of payment, after reaching the first $10 threshold. No worry, you are not facing any technical problem. As you may know, the total number of publishers in Adsense around the world is huge, even for the new publishers that participate Adsense everyday. You can realize that there are also large number of publishers who have earned their respective $10 from Adsense. Hence, Google Adsense's system sometimes doesn't immediately pick up all qualifying accounts. These accounts should be identified after 48 hours, but in rare cases, it can take a bit longer.

If you still cannot alter the form of payment, enter your tax information, view the date your PIN was sent or remove the payment hold for one week, you should them contact Google for assistance.

How to Deal with Prolonged CTR Decline?

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:45:00 +0000

From time to time, it is normal for CTR to vary and fluctuate, within an acceptable range. If that is the case, there is no need to worry too much, since random drops of CTR always occur. Take my sites as an example, I have encountered a very low CTR that dropped to only 0.53%. But I wouldn't care too much on that, since this kind of nightmare-decline only appears very rarely, and most importantly, will be back to normal within a short period of time. However, situation is different if that kind of CTR drop lasts for a long time. In today's post, I am going to tell you how to deal with that.

First off, I have written a good post explaining how to get a good CTR for webmasters. Please refer to it for better foundation on maximizing CTR. Prolonged drop of CTR usually occurs when you have changed the layout and appearance of your website, and hence the user interface is also changed as well. This may results in lowering in the visibility of the ads, and in turn lowering the chance for visitors to click the ads.

Another main reason for a CTR drop is that you have recently add some new content that may be a bit deviate from the main topic of your site. Hence, the ads may no longer relevant to the main topic, and visitors have fewer tendencies to click on irrelevant ads. In order to combat this, you can either use section targeting that highlights the most suitable content in your website, and thus guide Adsense bot that section. This is the most effective way to get the targeted ads and I always suggest this method to other people in Adsense Help Group. Apart from section targeting, you can also check for crawl problems. If the Google's system can't crawl your webpage, you hardly get the relevant ads to your site.

Last but not least, you may suffer from the ad blindness of your visitors which can be reflected from a slow decline of CTR. I have also discussed on the issue of avoiding ad blindness. Simply put, you can avoid such blindness by using new ad formats, placements, or colors to stimulate the visual perception of your visitors.

If you like this post, please subscribe to my feed too. Thanks.

Where are you, my blog?

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:32:00 +0000

If you visit my blog today or days before, you may see a strange page there, right? Did you once think my blog has been acquired or my themes has been changed, or even I have given up Da Gsense Codes? No, no, no... All are wrong. I just made a very silly mistake there - forget to renew my domain.

My domain should expired on 8th, March 2008. But then, I just got notified when the domain was down in the afternoon of 9th of March. Since I was in my office, and cannot go to transfer the renewal fee to my hosting company immediately. I could only manage to pay after 6pm of that day. But unluckily, the hosting company also closes at the time. I need to wait till the next day.

The entire process is painful. After receiving the money, my hosting company will then update the record to the domain registar, and it takes even much more time for the domain registar to update the DNS record! So the whole process took me ages to get the domian becomes live again.

However, as told by the hosting guy, there maybe some instabilities on my DNS setting for the first one or two days. So if some of my readers still can't see the page, please clear your cache and restart the browser. If you are using a wireless router at home, please also restart it. Once again, I apologize for all the inconvenience caused.

Adsense Veteran Left Google and Joins Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:00:00 +0000

Another great impact to Google that may hinders the development of Adsense business. A veteran in Google has been poached and jumps into the top leader in the social networking industry � Facebook. She is Sheryl Sandberg, and was working in Google to lead the search giant�s advertising business and fully unleashed the earning potential of two programs � Adwords and Adsense. These two programs, before Ms. Sandberg left, contribute over 90% of the total income of Google. At the same time, Ms. Sandberg also realizes the importance of corporate image, and hence launches a charity organization www.google.or g and to cater the different charity needs.

But the day before yesterday, Ms. Sandberg was poached by the CEO as well as the founder of Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg, to be the Chief Operation Officer (COO), and she will be report directly to this 23-year-old CEO.

Ms. Sandberg's appointment comes as Mr. Zuckerberg is trying to adjust to being head of a company that is quickly outgrowing its position as one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups while preparing himself to be able to lead it to Google-like international heft. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Facebook is a social-networking site that allows users to create personal Web pages and communicate with one another.

What would happen after Ms. Sandberg�s left? Without a doubt, Adsense is in urgent need to find a leader that can continue its proliferation. Bu the problem is will the successor be equally capable as Ms. Sandberg? All these questions require time to answer and contribute to the heavy and negative impact to Google Adsense. There are already so many problems in this program that are waiting for improvement. I really doubt and hold a pessimistic point of view towards Adsense.

Sell Your Advertising Space Yourself

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:23:00 +0000

As you are old enough in this money-making industry, you will start to realize that relying on Google Adsense for monetization is quite risky. Not only because you may not get desirable earning from it, but also due to the fact that you will get banned without any reasons. I really mean it, as you may know, I have been disabled by Google several times. I swear I am an honest publisher than try my every best to follow strictly with the Adsense TOS, report all the invalid click activities to Google once I found them. But then, Google has still disabled for invalid clicks for several times! Gosh, how come an active poster in Adsense Help Group that always remind people not to click the ads himself will click my own ads! Never mind, I get used to it, and don�t misunderstand, I did not get banned yesterday.

The thing I want to show you is that Adsense is only one monetization stream, and in fact there are many more. I have been approached by a Webmaster that wants to rent a space in my site to provide link. Since the price for that is attractive, I accept it immediately. Of course, the price offered is directly proportional to the PR and the number of unique visits of your site. You will get a better offer if your blog is old and popular enough.

If you want to sell your adverting space proactively, I suggest you may go to the marketplaces like DigitalPoint and v7n, where there are hundreds of deal made everyday. Don�t waste all your time on Adsense now, try to sell the advertising space by yourself. In fact, one of my loyal readers, Neo, he also got offered from a webmaster who approached him through email. I sincerely hope he can get a nice offer.

New Privacy Policy in Updated Terms and Conditions

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 02:18:00 +0000

If you login your Adsense account is these few days, you must notice that there is a page showing the new Terms and Conditions (T&C) on the first page, and prompting you to read through and accept them. If you decide not to accept or forget to accept it by 5.3.2008, your account will then be terminated. That means if you want to continue to participate in this Adsense program like me, you have to accept it.

This time around, most of the changes to the Terms and Conditions fall into two broad categories: 1) future products and features and 2) privacy requirements. In addition to that, there are some specific requirements that make it necessary for publishers to post and abide by a transparent privacy policy that users see. According to this policy, publishers must notify their users of the use of cookies and/or web beacons to collect data in the ad serving process. This change relates to advertisers' use of innovative products and features like Gadget Ads and other offerings in the future.

Clear enough? You are required to show your visitors a "transparent privacy policy". Although there is no clear standard format of such privacy policy should look like, some publishers already put the policies in order to entertain Google. To me, I am planning to make a separate page to show it. Many publishers asked me how to make one in their sites. Luckily, I found one site that is useful to make the policy by filling the necessary information. If you cannot afford to lose your Adsense account, you may try to have your own privacy policy here.

But honestly, since this updated T&C is freshly released, Google should provide enough time for us to accommodate and fulfill it. No worry if you don't want to make such privacy policy at the moment, or you are out of town right now.

Since this is quite an important announcement by Google, I will post it to both Da Gsense Code and Blog For Money.

What is RSS Feed?

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:39:00 +0000

As I promised in my previous post yesterday, I would like to give you sime introduction for those who may not know RSS very much.

What is RSS?
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It is a way to easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, and sometimes content to a wide number of people. It is used by computer programs that organize those headlines and notices for easy reading.

What problem does RSS solve?
Most people are interested in many websites whose content changes on an unpredictable schedule. Examples of such websites are news sites, community and religious organization information pages, product information pages, medical websites, and weblogs. Repeatedly checking each website to see if there is any new content can be very tedious.

Email notification of changes was an early solution to this problem. Unfortunately, when you receive email notifications from multiple websites they are usually disorganized and can get overwhelming, and are often mistaken for spam.
RSS is a better way to be notified of new and changed content. Notifications of changes to multiple websites are handled easily, and the results are presented to you well organized and distinct from email.

How does RSS work?
RSS works by having the website author maintain a list of notifications on their website in a standard way. This list of notifications is called an "RSS Feed". People who are interested in finding out the latest headlines or changes can check this list. Special computer programs called "RSS aggregators" have been developed that automatically access the RSS feeds of websites you care about on your behalf and organize the results for you. (RSS feeds and aggregators are also sometimes called "RSS Channels" and "RSS Readers".)

Producing an RSS feed is very simple and hundreds of thousands of websites now provide this feature, including major news organizations like the New York Times, the BBC, and Reuters, as well as many weblogs.

What information does RSS provide?
RSS provides very basic information to do its notification. It is made up of a list of items presented in order from newest to oldest. Each item usually consists of a simple title describing the item along with a more complete description and a link to a web page with the actual information being described. Sometimes this description is the full information you want to read (such as the content of a weblog post) and sometimes it is just a summary.

The RSS information is placed into a single file on a website in a manner similar to normal web pages. However, the information is coded in the XML computer language for use by a program (the RSS aggregator) and not by a person like a normal web page.

How do I find out if a website has an RSS feed?
It is getting more and more common for websites to have RSS feeds. They usually indicate the existence of the feed on the home page or main news page with a link to "RSS", or sometimes by displaying an orange button with the letters "XML" or "RSS". RSS feeds are also often found via a "Syndicate This" link. Text "RSS" links sometimes (there are lots of variations) point to a web page explaining the nature of the RSS feeds provided and how to find them. The buttons are often linked directly to the RSS feed file itself.

Once you know the URL of an RSS feed, you can provide that address to an RSS aggregator program and have the aggregator monitor the feed for you. Many RSS aggregators come preconfigured with a list to choose from of RSS feed URLs for popular news websites.

How is the RSS feed file produced?
Unless you are maintaining a website or want to create your own RSS feed for some other purpose, how the RSS feed is produced should not be of concern and you may skip this section.

The special XML-format file that makes up an RSS feed is usually created in one of a variety of ways.

Most large news websites and most weblogs are maintained using special "content management" programs. Authors add their stories and postings to the website by interacting with those programs and then use the program's "publish" facility to create the HTML files that make up the website. Those programs often also can update the RSS feed XML file at the same time, adding an item referring to the new story or post, and removing less recent items. Blog creation tools like Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, and Radio automatically create feeds.

Websites that are produced in a more custom manner, such as with Macromedia Dreamweaver or a simple text editor, usually do not automatically create RSS feeds. Authors of such websites either maintain the XML files by hand, just as they do the website itself, or use a tool such as Software Garden, Inc.'s ListGarden program to maintain it. There are also services that periodically read requested websites themselves and try to automatically determine changes (this is most reliable for websites with a somewhat regular news-like format), or that let you create RSS feed XML files that are hosted by that service provider.

RSS readers come back!

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 17:29:00 +0000

Further to the post I made the day before yesterday talking about the sudden drop of RSS members in the Feedburner counter, I just want to make an update for the progress of maintence today. According to the announcement of Feedburner, the number of RSS readers will return to normal after the maintence of Feedfetcher.

As you can see from the counter in my blog, it is now 207, even more than before. This means the problem has been fixed, and you and me did not lose any RSS readers for no reasons. How much time do I need to make it to 300? I guess it won't take long...

Number of RSS Readers Drop Dramatically

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 03:40:00 +0000

If you have a blog, I am sure you must have your own feed and even get your feed burned in Feedburner.com. I have checked my blog here twice, and can't even find a post that talks about the advantages of burning your feed. How dare I miss that? I promise I will discuss this topic in the near future. But before I move on to the topic of burning a feed, I would like to tell you that the number of RSS readers in this blog has halved!

I always keep checking the number of RSS readers as well as the number of visitor reading my blog at that moment with the counters in my left bar. Yesterday, the counter told me that there was still 202 readers who have subscribed my blog. But, when I checked the counter again last night, it shows only 116 readers remaining. Where do the rest go? How come I lose 86 readers all of sudden? I immediately went to the forum of Feedburner, and realized that there are many bloggers facing the same problem.

We all got two official replies/answers and I quoted them below:

"We're following up with the appropriate team within Google to see about several reports we've gotten from publishers about missing/large drops in subscribers overnight. Of the cases we've examined so far, the drops appear to be coming from the "Feedfetcher" agent responsible for polling on behalf of Google Reader and iGoogle. Stay tuned!"

and the next one is,

"UPDATE: Feedfetcher's subscriber reporting is being restored; if your numbers are missing with yesterday's totals, specifically, you should see them start to return with Friday morning's (GMT -0500) reported totals. (It may take longer than one day for complete coverage to return.)"

So, my loyal readers, if you have the same problem with me, no worry. It is merely a technical error from Feedfetcher's system, and you will get the right number back on Friday or Saturday.

Dead with No Reason

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:42:00 +0000

What happen to Adsense recently? It seems that the system in Adsense is having serious error again. This time, when many Adsense publishers tried to login their Adsense account, they received an error message that their Adsense account has been disabled and can no longer login. Theoretically, if an publisher is banned by Google, he/she should also receive an email explaining why he/she was banned. But this time, they hardly get an notification email. This is definitely a nightmare to these people.

They are all dead with no reason. They cannot get a satisfactory answer on why their Adsense account were terminated. As a result of that, there are so many publishers rushing to the Adsense Help Group, and raising questions like why I was banned, account disabled, and please tell me why I was banned. And all the replies to those threads are those people who are facing the similar problems. Let me share some of the quotations from those people:

Irfan10:
"Why my account suddenly disable? I didn't do anything? I didn't
receive email or warning.
What happend?"

Mafer:
"Hey! I faced the same thing when I didn't receive any email. I never
done anything against policy... but why? I'm very nervous now...! Can
you tell me when you know what had happened?"

singsing1:
"I have a sane problem ar.. Why our account disable.? please explain it
ASAP!!"

Being banned by Google is already bad enough, and getting banned by Google with no reason is even harsher and more difficult to accept. I hope this is only the system error and restore the Adsense accounts to normal status. Anyway, I guess Google will soon announce the relevant news and solution in its Adsense Blog.

Happy Valentine's Day 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 08:35:00 +0000

Today is the Valentine's Day. It is a great day for couples to go out, watch movie, and have a nice (yet expensive) dinner. If you don't have a valentine, but have one that you love secretly, you should make use of this romantic day to tell her you love her. I am sure in such great day that romantic atmosphere is all around, the chance will be much much higher. Even if you don't have a target, you should also hang out with your family (or maybe go to the bar to get one immediately).

Last night, I dated my girl to have a nice dinner in Causeway Bay (a well-known CBD in Hong Kong), and both of us love that dinner very much. She like the dessert while I was impressed by the medium-well steak (M8 from Australia). After having the nice but slow meal, we then needed to rush to watch the movie � "P.S. I Love You". This movie is a lot better than I thought, and although the casting is not that attractive to us, it is really better than the movie we watched last year � �Music and Lyrics". It is simply heart-touching.

The message I want to bring is that you should not be too focused to your online business and money, and sit in front of the computer all day. There are still many things that you should treasure. Go and enjoy this great day with the one you love.

Application Delay in late January

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:18:00 +0000

Google announced that due to the system failure, the application made in the past few weeks would have some delay in review and approval. There are some people who raised their questions in such belated application in Adsense Help Group. For those who have applied in the past few weeks, no worry, your application is not rejected without reasons but is still under review. Luckily, the system failure has been fixed and the waiting time for Adsense application is still be 10 business days.

The recoveroing of Adsense system was also mentioned in the Adsense blog, "We'd like to let you know that everything is back to normal, and we're working hard to get the backlog processed. If you've been waiting to hear back about your application, please be assured that we'll get back to you soon. Thanks for your patience in the meantime".

Same in the past, if you have waited for more than 3 weeks, please send an email to adsense-support@google.com and enquire on the review progress.

Higher Bidding Price of Advertisers in Bidvertiser

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:14:00 +0000

One important point for choosing an Adsense alternative to make money is that that program should has high earning per click. In Google Adsense, there are many new publishers ask me how much they can earn for a click on their ads. Again, there is no definite answer, and a click normally worth about $0.1-$0.6 (Of course, in some occasions, you may be able to ear more than a dollar for click!). Undoubtedly, the best paying PPC program is Adsense at the moment, and that's why so many publishers stick to this.

As an alternative, it need to pay high as much as possible. Bidvertiser ads, in the past, only bid below one dollar (Remark, publishers in Bidvertiser are able to review all the bids of ads before displaying them, and I have mentioned it in introducing Bidvertiser). Since Bidvertiser will keep a certain percentage from the total earning of the click, so you can only get quite little from it. However, this disadvantage is getting improved. I have noticed that there are many ads in my category (I have chosen "Advertising and SEO" category) are bidding over $2. This is definitely a good news that we can get more from a click.

As making money on the internet is getting more popular in the recent years, Many publishers did join Adsense but get banned at the end. In order to monetize their sites, most of them have switched to Bidvertiser and other money-makers. With a bigger group of publishes serving ads for Bidvertiser, more advertisers will be attracted as well. This is reasonable that these advertisers will place a higher bid in order to display ads. As a result, publishers benefited greatly.

Unsatisfied Result with Oxado

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:54:00 +0000

I mentioned in the previous post that I was amazed with the new improvement made by Oxado. As I have said, there are more ads in its database of Oxado that allows the publishers of other countries and places, including Hong Kong, to display ads. I was really amazed and though that would be a good complementary choice of ads with Bidvertiser. I then decided to replace the Bidvertiser ad unit inside each post with Oxado ads, and sit back to wait for money to come. First day, no click; second day, no click; third day, no click ... I have waited for over a week and there's still no single click. And so, I need to insert my favorite ad network back - the Bidvertiser ad.

I have thought for a long time for my failure in Oxado, and I get several conclusions at the end. First, although more ads are now available in Traditional Chinese, there are only a few advertisers with ads that are related to Adsense or make money online. One of these advertisers is eBay which is not that popular in Hong Kong, and that ad itself is not attractive enough for people to click.

Second, Oxado ads are not available to the people viewing from South East Asia including India and Indonesia, for which the major flow of traffic to my blog is coming from this region. Therefore, the ad units were displayed as blank and thus it is not hard to understand why no click was received.

Anyway, I still look forward to the improvement work by Oxado, and hope it can do more promotion to the countries in Asia. But at the time being, it seems that Bidvertiser is still the best Adsense alternative at the moment.

How to Prevent Scam Monetization Programs?

noreply@blogger.com (Joe Li) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:28:00 +0000

How to test whether a new PPC or other monetization programs is good and not fraudulent? When you first come across a new monetization programs, what will you do to determine whether it is worth for you to join and participate? I often surf over the net and come across many forums to talk about new opportunities for generating income for your site(s). I can tell you there are so many different kinds of monetization programs available on the net that it almost comes up a new one every day. However, I can also tell you that some of them are in fact scams that will never pay you after you did a lot of things or work for them. That will be too late if you fail to receive to payments from these programs.

To avoid scams, I need to do something. The way I normally do is to first check the Page Rank of the website first. By using some free PR checker, it is very convenient to check it. One example is http://www.popuri.us/, and apart from Page Rank, you can also check the link popularity in Technorati, Alexa Ranking (a ranking to indicate the relative traffic flow of a site) and the number of backlinks in Google. All these are very valuable information to help you to determine. If the program is a scam, it is normally a new site. A new site probably can't has a good PR, Alexa ranking, and most importantly, the number of backlinks. Another good way to check is the Google Toolbar. I always install this little useful tool in all my laptops, since it show the PR of every site I visit and block the pop-up windows too.

After knowing it is not a new site, the next step to confirm is to know the user feedbacks from it. I normally do so by google the name of that site. If the program is a popular one, it is not too difficult to find the relevant review. Checking someone else's reviews is very important, because you can know not only the characteristics and the special points of that program, but also know the good and bad points of it. I particularly pay a lot more attention to the bad points which include the time of payout, and the response time from the site support etc.

There are so many monetization programs on the net. Besides PPC programs, product affiliates, sponsored reviews, paid to click programs and many others are good source of income for your website(s). You should always get yourself the best revenue by giving an eye on all of them from time to time.

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