Boy o’ boy am I sick of seeing blog posts titles with numbers in them, if I see one more 5 this, the top 10 that and 7 ways to the other I’ll crack up. The amount of blog posts that are churning out regurgitated and link baiting posts with lists are ever growing and it’s old and tiring.

Anyway, end rant.

Monday’s Post

I have a fair bit on today but I wanted to mention, on Monday I will be making a post on how you genuinly can turn £500 into £100,000, when you see huge domain sales and large deals being done it probably looks well out of your budget and league but it doesn’t have to be the case.

It’s not guaranteed, it’s not foolproof and it could take a year - if that lost your interest then you may as well stop reading, if it didn’t then subscribe or visit the site on Monday and I’ll tell you what I’m planning and you can do exactly the same. In fact I should probably put the details in an ebook and sell it for $$, it is a simple idea but the theory is good.

A couple of weeks ago I made a list of my goals for 2008, today I get to cross off number 2 on the list.

2/ I would like an off-line venture that can bring in income and show good growth, as with everything I look at now time is critical so I have to make sure anything I take on is low maintenance or short term effort for long term gains as there are only so many hours in a day.

Towards the end of 2007 my brother was voicing his doubts and concerns over his job (landscape gardener) and poor wage structure considering his experience and at times responsibilities. After discussing it for some time I suggested that he start up on his own. He has over 10 years experience with hard landscaping, dry stone walls, patios, fencing and decking. The main things stopping him were start up cash, tools, van and a leap of faith. (more…)

Anyone else noticing the change in Google today?
The Results 1-10 of about xxxxx has shrunk hugely for all the keywords I keep an eye on.
For example ‘tattoos’ used to bring up around 30-40 million pages

After this morning I only see around 5.5 million,

that is quite a drop, also seeing this whether I am signed in or out of Google and not only in Google.co.uk, I am seeing a drop in Google.com as well. Is this a clear out or just a massive adjustment?

The Rubicon Project looks to be a great leap for webmasters to fill and maximise advertising inventory in a more efficient manner.

I highly recommend you check out the 3 minute presentation which explains exactly what they intend to do.

Rubicon can optimise for and serve over 300 ad networks like Adsense, Chitika, Yahoo, Adbrite etc based on demographic, geographic and contextual information and matches each ad impression with the optimal advertiser, continually trying to find the best solution for your impressions. So instead of running adsense here and trying YPN over there you can use the one code and run your advertising inventory through Rubicon and let them do all the hard work.

You can click on any ad network and see their strengths and watch how their smart technology fills your inventory and see how the each ad network is performing.

As this code replaces what is on your website the obvious concerns are whether they have the infrastructure to serve all these ads as they grow, especially if there is a large uptake however I love the concept and if it works anywhere near it’s potential it could raise the bar for webmaster income to a new level.

How would Rubicon make money?
During our beta process, we are not charging anything for our services. We have not settled on our business model yet, but will likely be charging publishers a percentage of the overall revenue. based on the results from the sites we currently have live, even taking out our small cut, we will still be making our publishers a whole lot more money (and they have to do a whole lot less work!).

After applying for BETA there is a standard email that comes out.

We wish we could include everyone in our beta, but have to take some smaller steps towards our big launch to ensure our product is the best it can be. Our goal is to have a wide range of sites in the beta program, ranging from small blogs to the Internet’s largest sites. We’re working out a fair way to select websites for the beta and will be sending out invitations soon. You may even get a call from one of our team members. If you’re selected, we’ll be sending you a “secret” link to get you up and running. In the meantime, we’d like to learn a little more about you and the issues you deal with, so we launched an online forum to help you share your voice and give you access to our team. We want to hear what you have to say!

I have applied and will do an update if I use the program, there seems to be quite a rush for the beta, there is also a forum for news & info.

As the internet matures our use of it evolves, it doesn’t usually matter which you prefer the www or the non-www. Today we often tend to drop the www when typing in internet addresses into our browsers. In fact I have noticed the bbc.co.uk omitting the www part this year when mentioning their url which is a change from before.

So I think it may shock you when I list the sites below from my research who have not set up their hosting properly to forward or even show their website when omitting the www.

Giving a dead page suggests the following to the unsatisfied browser

• The hosting may be down
• The company may have ceased trading
• The person has already wasted too much time and may seek an alternative company, product or service.

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Running websites often starts out as a hobby for most of us and progresses into a career once you realise the potential income available if you devote more time & effort to build your portfolio.

One of the biggest misconceptions soon arises which I want to mention today as it is an easy mistake to make and can have dangerous consequences.

(more…)

Interesting study on how many times Blogs in the Technorati top 100 have hit the Digg homepage.

Google pagerank update, is it an update or isn’t it, doesn’t matter whether you love or loathe the PR updates they do make for some scary threads on DP. 63 day old thread with 3668 replies and 90,728 pageviews. All that and everyone is still undecided but it seem imminent for sure.

Staying on that topic, SEO Roundtable comments on the fact Google want feedback on removing pagerank and Adam Lasnik of Google was also quoted getting into the debate. Could we live without pagerank? It sure would put an end to a lot of directories.

Reading blogs can result in a time penalty, especially when you stumble across games like this which can take up far more time than you had initially planned, simple yet enjoyable.

Patrick talks about one of the most important points a webmaster has to tackle today, trustrank, how can you get your site trusted by Google. It’s not quantity it’s quality.

A bit Adsense heavy but if you can get past that a good article for those who are wanting to start out making money working from home and can’t decide which topic or niche to work in. How to run a small business. I will actually be doing a post next week which deals with how I chose my topic to develop in.

Well its been 4 months since this blog was created back in March, how are we doing? This would be a good time to ask if there are certain things you would like to see more of or less of, you can let us know.

That’s a wrap!.. Friday

• The golden jigsaw is an online treasure hunt of a sort, 1000 pieces of a jigsaw will be scattered across the internet and users can download a playing board to add the pieces they find to. Winner gets $1,000,000. Looks like they still have lots of pieces to sell but could it be the next viral thing if it takes off? I don’t know but it starts today. 
• Facebook overtakes MySpace in the UK for internet searches according to Hitwise.
• There are still some free (UK) domains you can claim if you wanted one for a mini site from Paul.
• Continuing the free idea Patrick posted that we can all expect a free boost in our Alexa traffic due a release of the toolbar for Firefox.
• Google released their second quarter results

The summary: Revenue up 58%, profits down from the previous quarter. Jordan comments over at Marketing Pilgrim, do we expect too much from Google?

Added: Just added seeing as we were putting the boot into .info domains the other day that Travel.info just sold for $116,000 making it the largest info sale to date.

Sometimes we see posts, news , tips and general info and I think to myself ’should I write about that on SMM’, usually the answer is no as we have made a conscious decision not to regurgitate information here and re-post other peoples work.

Therefore we have decided rather than not mention things we find interesting on a week to week basis, we will use Friday’s post for a general round up of stories, news and tips that we think may be of interest to other people so without further ado

Bust A Name - A snazzy tool to help you pick a new unregistered domain name, via ProBlogger.

It’s an old article but a great bookmark, Old Welsh Guy guy tell how to find relevance when link building. A nice and clear explanation so worth a read as well as a more recent article on what is a professional SEO?.

In domain news Virtual Network buy Dollars.com for $650,000 as reported by DN Journal, Cushion.com makes $75k which is a comfort for its seller & CZA.com makes $17860, a fairly nice price for low to middle of the range LLL.com and a good return for it’s owner I’m guessing.

A cool template and post on Shoe Money on how to write Press Releases.

Just a quick update rather than a post, a feature high up on the request list for some has now come to fruition. I received an email tonight to say that I was invited to test out Adsense for Mobile.

What is Adsense for mobile?
Well it kind of does what it says on the tin, Adsense for mobile allows publishers to place adsense contextual advertising on website designed for mobile (cell) phones to monetise that traffic.

We have successfully conducted initial testing on the product and today, we’d like to invite you to try AdSense for mobile on your mobile website.

As part of our efforts to develop new and improved AdSense products for our partners, we will begin a limited beta test for AdSense for mobile. AdSense for mobile allows publishers to monetize their mobile websites through the placement of targeted text ads. Publishers can take advantage of the fast-growing mobile advertising market and benefit from our targeting technology. 

So if you are wondering when we will get Adsense for mobile site, have a mobile website or a mobile version of your site, Adsense have created a new product in beta to cater for just that!