This is an update to my post earlier this month about the Google AdSense Referral Program. You may recall that in this article I mentioned the Firefox plus Google Toolbar referral program wasn’t an option for international publishers.

All that’s changed and International publishers now have the option to refer their visitors to the Firefox plus Google Toolbar through the AdSense Referral feature. You can earn up to $1 for every user who downloads and runs the product for the first time, which obviously excludes users who already have it installed.

What is FireFox plus Google Toolbar ?
As described by Google

Mozilla Firefox is a web browser with pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, and privacy and security features. We’ve integrated the Google Toolbar into the Firefox download to offer you even more features: Google search, SpellCheck, and Autofill.

You can access the Firefox referral code from your AdSense account Referral Tab.

Contrary to popular belief, not everyone running a blog can benefit from targeted advertising provided by Google AdSense or Chitika EminiMalls. Monetizing your personal blog for example wont necessarily get you that many clickthroughs, if any at all. In fact, unless your blog concentrates on at least one or more ‘niche subject’ areas I doubt it would make you much more than a few cents per week, at most.

I recently removed Google AdSense from one of my personal blogs because although it was displaying ads, these ads weren’t relevant to my journal entries and thus I decided weren’t of interest to my visitors. People weren’t regularly clicking my ads either, which was another indication that they just weren’t working.

Effectively monetizing your blog requires serious dedication, targeted content and a lot of research. If you find that your blog just isn’t niche enough and you’re getting irrelevant ads, then maybe monetizing your blog isn’t for you or to the benefit of your visitors.

I was chatting with a friend on MSN last night and we had the kicks showing each other our past websites. I gotta tell you some of my best works are burried in my archives, forever hidden to the outside world. Sometimes we work too hard to make things better only to derail ourselves from our original purpose. Sometimes we begin to lose our touch and trying too hard isn’t exactly the best we could do. We need to sit back from time to time and let things shape on its own. Looking back I see my work like audio spikes. There were times I was damn good and there were times I sucked.

This is for those of you web designers and developers out there who have been making websites since the dawn of time. I would like to encourage you to take a quick trip to the past. Put your past in a kaleidoscope and look through the tube. You might surprise yourself and you might learn something from your past to help improve your current and/or future work.

If you’re one of those people who trash everything after you’re done with something, you can use the Wayback Machine to retrieve some of your old sites.

But we live in a modern world, who cares about the past? Well history repeats itself baby!! So unless you make peace with your past you will eventually repeat your old mistakes again.

Learn from your past. Recycle your brilliant ideas and don’t repeat the same mistakes. And always remember to have fun!

iWEBTOOL is a FREE online internet tools resource. Some of the tools include gems like Backlink Checker that informs you who is linking to your site and gives you their page rank, Keyword Suggestion which displays the ten most popular keywords matching your suggested word or phrase and the Link Popularity Checker that finds out how many times you are listed on the three main search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.

The Google Rank Predictor is my favourite tool, but don’t take the results seriously as this is a just-for-fun tool. I also liked the Website Speed Test for testing the load time of your sites and the Spider View for seeing your web pages the way Spider Bots view them.

iWEBTOOL.com , FREE Online Internet Tools for Webmaster.

Do you watch you blog stats? Do you know how long your visitors stay on your pages? For most of us, it’s not a pretty picture. Most visitors come and go before the page even finishes loading. This happens the most when the majority of your traffic comes from search engines.

One thing I would suggest is to watch your exit pages. Check if you have too many link outs. You want to make your visitors feel welcomed and you want to get them comfortable surfing through your pages. You don’t want to show them out if you can help it. Here’s a few things you can do:

1. Keep your blogroll only on your main page
   You do want to exchange links with other people to give yourself some connectivity and exposure, but you don’t have to link them from all your pages.
2. Link to local entries/posts
   When you write about something and you need to refer to another thing, search your archives first. If you have supporting articles in your own domain why link out?
3. Keep your sidebar clean
   Clean up your clutter. Yes some of those blog directory buttons are useless unless they drive you some sort of traffic in the first place. The idea is to keep your doors closed until your visitors are ready to go, then they can show themselves out.

Ok that wasn’t rocket science, but you want to work on visitor relationship. The more they read you the more they will get somewhat attached to your writing or content and that could bring them back another day.

Iichii yaa yaa readers!!!! In this installment I will talk about how to understand your web statistics to increase revenue to your blog. In my safari hunt in the internet jungle, I came upon a word I’ve seen many times but didn’t understand what it meant. That word is Webtrends. I found out it is an advanced log analyzer. A more precise definition is:

WebTrends is specifically designed for mid-sized organizations featuring revolutionary visualization capabilities that transform historically complex reports into easy-to-interpret analysis and new Dashboard and Excel integration technologies that seamlessly build web analytics into your daily workflow. From the most granular examination of campaigns and merchandising performance, to the most complete navigation, conversion and search engine marketing analysis, WebTrends provides mid-sized companies comprehensive insight for easier decisions, smarter marketing and optimum results.

Now you don’t have to run out and purchase this expensive software for your blog, but some tips I’ve seen on how to use the data it provides will enable you readers out there to understand your own web analytical software no matter how minimal the features. The good thing is, you can use Google’s free Web Analytics to play with the information I have provided to you! As provided by Extremelee’s blog post *Numa Numa Dances* *Ahem* This website has in-depth knowledge on how to use what are called “Key Metrics”:

Key Metrics are usually a ratio of something measuring an action to visits and visitors of a website. An example is finding a ratio of which visitors to your blog stayed 20 minutes or more, and which categories of your blog did they view the most? This can help in determining the type of category content to focus on, and maybe focus your entire blog to it to generate ample amounts of revenue. In addition it can help on which type of ads to display. For instance if you have a cooking blog, and most of your visitors stayed 20 minutes or more to read recipes on quick breakfasts, it would be important to focus ads on say toaster ovens, a brand of egg or something of that nature.

To read more on this exciting new realm of analyzing your site data and increasing revenue, please visit “Using Webtrends” over at Jimnovo! Blog on!!

Since our launch earlier this year, digitalSURGERY.net has been experiencing a rapid growth in visitor traffic which is almost doubling each month. All kinds of people are visiting our site, from webmasters, designers and hosting providers to bloggers and industry professionals. So to celebrate this traffic explosion we decided to launch our Partner Link Exchange Programme, which aims to share this traffic with similar blogs and sites that meet the following conditions:

1. We can only provide the Link Exchange Programme to sites that provide articles, reviews or advice relating to the following - Blogging, Design, Google AdSense, Google Search and other Search Engines, Hosting, Web-Technology, Web-Software and other information relevant to Webmasters and Bloggers.
2. Partners of our Link Exchange Programme are required to display a link back to our site on their front page. Preferably on the main menu options. In return we will provide a link directly to your site under our Partners heading in the left-hand sidebar.
3. We currently only support text-only links under the Link Exchange Programme.
4. The management reserve the right to decline link exchange offers without notice.

These conditions may change without notice. E&OE

Contact us for more details.

Hellooo!! I’m new here to digitalSURGERY and I’d like to introduce you to the quirky, weird, yet intelligent man that I am, Blastafuzix!!!! Today we will be learning about, gasp… “The AdSense Million Dollar Man” Jason Calacanis! And his methods that boosted his revenue. This information was found from an interview he did over at JenSense.

One of the things Jason did was take the borders off his AdSense on all of his pages. The next step was making AdSense links the same color as those in his blogs. Clever move Jason! *High Fives*

Jason was asked why he placed his ad units the way he did, due to the fact it is not generally a high “Click Thru Rate” (CTR) position. His response was due to being sold out of leaderboards.

(A leaderboard is a popular type of banner advertisement. At standard dimensions of 780×90 pixels, a leaderboard is the width of the page and typically lies between the masthead (the title area at the top of a Web page) and content. Leaderboards are thought to offer advertisers a great deal of space in a prominent position without intruding on content.

Internet advertising borrows leaderboard from sports, where it refers to a sign board displaying the rankings of participants currently leading a competition.) on his big blogs, he figured he could slip the thin horizontal banner without it feeling like too much advertising.)

When asked on the best advice he has for a publisher brand new to AdSense, Jason states “I would run four ads per page, take off the borders, and make the links the same color as the links on the blog. I would also make channels

(Channels are a group of blogs focusing on distinct topics topics in a blog which is defined more in detail here

for each position and blog so I could track things better.” It seems to me theres a wealth of information here, pun intended! If your interested in more of this interview, continue on over to JenSense ASAP!!

What do you do when you build a niche blog and it just so happens that your niche isn’t so exclusive, like a thousand other blogs talk about it already? One, you can choose another niche with less competition. Two, you can give up. Three, you can keep going and find different marketing plan.

If you choose #3, consider word of mouth. This works best if you have a large network of friends and acquaintances. You can tell EVERYONE about your blog, and ask them to tell their friends, etc. However this won’t usually work UNLESS your niche is a popular niche, drawing a lot of interest from just about any individual out there. If you have a tech blog and you try to spread the word offline, good luck and have fun looking at people’s confused face, rejection, etc. But let’s say you have a fashion blog, and you’re a girl with lots of girlfriends who like shopping, you can tell all your girlfriends about your blog, and you can connect with local stores to offer discounts on your blog, etc. Word of mouth can and will work in this case.

One of the blogs in our network is urbanskaters.co.uk and this is a very good example where word of mouth can actually work in favor of online advertising. Our Chief Editor Lee talks about it all the time when he skates the streets of London and traffic is really picking up fast on that domain. We even got our first client lead through that blog.

So, what is your blog niche? If it’s popular to the offline world, try word of mouth, you’ll be surprised.

In the beginning Google acquired the San Diego based Urchin-Software Corporation, a company that offered enterprise-class Web Analytics, and then they lowered the monthly subscription cost from $495 to only $199. This alone caused the industry to get a little jumpy, to say the least. Well, now they’ve got good reason to be jumpy, because Google are now offering the newly branded Google Analytics to everyone for free.

So what exactly is Web Analytics and how can it help you?

Firstly, the term Analytics can be defined as: The process of gathering and analyzing information electronically then displaying it in a way which allows a company to track business trends (putting it simply of course). Web Analytics is a set of sophisticated tools that works on the same principle, they are used to analyse, report and track your web site visitors.

But how does Google Analytics differ from other competitors?

Not much really, except that this isn’t going to cost you thousands of pounds every year and it’s available to anyone with a web site, it also provides tightly intergrated AdWords support and remember this is enterprise-class Analytics, not your standard control panel weblog analysing software. This is the same product that companies up until now were paying thousands of dollars for each year.

Google Analytics -

Google Analytics offers a host of compelling features and benefits for everyone from senior executives and advertising and marketing professionals to site owners and content developers.

Learn how visitors interact with your website and identify the navigational bottlenecks that keep them from completing your conversion goals. Find out how profitable your keywords are across search engines and campaigns. Pinpoint where your best customers come from and which markets are most profitable to you. Google Analytics gives you this and more through easy-to-understand visually enhanced reports.

Learn how Google Analytics features can help you start increasing ROI and better understand your visitors.

Learn more. »