Upon meditation of the ad publishing topic I posted, it occurred to me that….

• Google is trying to attract more advertisers because it has enough bloggers to publish the ads. And, google is trying to save its business by making sure the new scheme is more advertiser-friendly than blogger-friendly.
• Widgetbucks got the hype they needed through their lucrative referral program, and now they have enough buzz to keep them going. Whether the blogger earned from referrals/clicks/queries or not, their widgets were present everywhere, fueled by international bloggers’ hopes to get their hands on that referral cash. A 100% visibility was attained and now they have a name that could compete with bigger ad networks.

These are both logical and understandable reasons for the changes they made, as they are running businesses not charities, but other conspiratory-theory-like questions were gnawing at the edges of the situation:

Was this Widgetbucks’ plan all along? Were the high money-offers and the eventual ditching parts of a grand scheme to create hype? Did they use non-US/Canada bloggers to create hype, letting go of some cash to some of the more aggressive bloggers, but were not counting these as losses because of the imminent ditching?

Edit: I probably should still use widgetbucks ads, because an occasional valid click might come my way. But the chances are too slim, as the limitations (US and Canada origin only) are great. The main trend for widgetbucks to work is definitely the referral program. Without it, it’s difficult to earn much.

Again, I am not mad, unlike some of my counterparts. I am just appreciating the genius behind Widgetbucks’ decision. :D

I will not be a hypocrite and say “this doesn’t affect me” because I also started blogging with money making in my mind. In fact, ads can be seen in a myriad of places within this blog. It’s cool enough just to have a webbie and start writing about anything and everything. But to actually earn from that? Wow.

So, how does it work? Advertisers flock to adsites like google adsense and Widgetbucks, and these in turn recruit bloggers to show these ads in blogsites, with promises of commissions from referrals and/or sales. I know of people who have profited from these, and have been encouraged to follow suit.

There are a number of bloggers around who have centered their websites in the income-generation side of blogging. If you notice, a lot more blogs are sprouting with this income-aspect in mind. Now, it seems like google adsense and widgetbucks are taking notice of their rate per clicks and actual customer earnings… and things are not adding up.

I. Google

Some of these adsites that I know of, Google adsense in particular, can detect fraudulent clicks, but these don’t include valid clicks that are ‘accidental’ (i.e. the reader clicked on the link and viewed the advertiser’s page without real intent or interest, but just purely by accident). The reader might be curious about the site for a second, click some links, but then move along and buy nothing because that wasn’t his intended destination in the first place.

And voila, within this week, google announced that there will be no more accidental clicks on their ads on blogsites by implementing a new set of ad presentation changes.

II. Widgetbucks

I’ve been told by other blogger friends that this is one of the best ways to earn online because of their generous commission on referrals (25 dollar bonus on sign up, and a few more bucks when you refer others). This is allegedly one of the newer adsites and they need to build a high blogger base of advertising sites (apparently to compete with google adsense). However, this generosity obviously made their business suffer because they are putting out more than their customers are paying them. No sales conversions, just plain outpour of revenue for the bloggers who hustled well in the initial phase of Widgetbuck’s campaign.

Hence, their shocking management decision: clicks from sites other than US and Canada will no longer be paid. US and Canada, no “Philippines” included there. Tough luck, pinoy bloggers. But congratulations to those pinoys who made it past the 20k php revenue for referrals. Kudos!

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The internet is divided into business sites, fan sites, pron sites, non-profit sites and blogsites. Business sites and fan sites will want to keep their visitors to themselves, non-profit/charity sites will mainly show related links, and pron sites… well pron sites will always earn revenue due to the nature of their business.

Blogsites are really the only places in the net where it is logical to present advertisements, because people who visit these have particular interests and will always be ready customers for business sites that cater to their whims. I do hope that google, and particularly Widgetbucks, made the right decision, because a lot of bloggers are mad right now due to the decrease in their blog revenue.

But not me. How can I miss what I never had, right? LOL.

survey time:

Every website has this little orange thingie called rss. Most new bloggers (as I am) don’t really know what it does so they don’t click on this. RSS stands for “really simple syndication”, meaning, you can syndicate the content (posts) of a site by simply clicking on that yellow-orange thingie. The reader may view all the posts in just a single page via an aggregator (i use livebookmarks). It’s like a real newspaper subscription.

I’ve found a way for readers to feel more hyped, or at least more at ease with subscribing to my feeds. Read on…

The yellow-orange thinge icon corresponds to a url unique to your site. It’s usually “www.yoursite.com/feed”, but it could also be a custom one, created by feedburner and other aggregators. Why do you want people to subscribe? Simply because you want loyal readers. While these subscribers don’t need to visit your site anymore (and get deprived of viewing your cute blog accesories and ads), you are ensured that they are reading what your write, and getting addicted by the minute.

I had the idea that people will click my RSS feed icon more if it were packaged in an icon that shows off my personality. Here I go again with the personalization mantra. Lol.

You can see my personalized rss feeder live in my other blog, evilwoobie. It looks like this in my sidebar:

My photo niche has always been photobucket, and thus I use the photobucket code for this pic as my example. Below every image stored in your album are options on how you wish to embed or use that photo anywhere in the web. There’s an image code, an HTML code, a direct URL code and etc. For this purpose we need the HTML code.

This photo’s html tag in photobucket is the following:

<a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/

albums/<member number>/<albumname>/<photo name>.jpg" 

border="0" alt="Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket"></a>

You simply replace the “http://photobucket.com” at the very start of the HTML code with your rss URL, in my case “http://evilwoobie.com/feed” and you can now embed that rss-feeder.photo anywhere in your site, by editing your html/php templates.

Voila! Your personalized feeder.

Blogging is like a conversation between the writer and anyone who will listen. In fact, a lot of bloggers have taken the next step and installed podcasts on their blogs. So that their readers may not only read their posts, but listen to them as well.

Readers are the single most important factor to a blogger. Without them, you are merely writing your thoughts in your own private world, which isn’t so bad, but this is the internet, where information and ideas are meant to be shared.

When writing about a particular genre or topic, you are joining the ranks of other bloggers who write about the same things. It has always been my habit to check these sites and ask for “link love” (the coined internet term for exchanging links). However, not everyone is welcoming these link loves and would rather link up those who don’t write about the same things, so that they do not in anyway promote their readership competitor.

In my opinion, exchanging links between bloggers of the same topics is a mutually beneficial thing. They share readers, so that a reader who might have stumbled upon one site (via search engines) may also have the opportunity to visit the other. This applies to non-commercial blogs, as linking the competition is a big no-no in business blogs.

We all have our favorite blogs, and we become mainstays of one just because we prefer it to the others of the same type. But it doesn’t hurt to link others, particularly if we know that they’re linking us up too.

The main problem for new bloggers is finding the right theme for their weblogs. Identity, as with real life, is important on the net and everyone craves to create a blog that reflects their personality. While using a pre-designed theme from Wordpress is easy enough, putting in your own headers and images may be difficult for the techie-challenged.

I came across this site, called WP-theme generator.

It lets bloggers and site makers put in the exact colors and images they want for their blogs. Everything is menu-ized;

• No codes to put in, no guessing color tags.
• You can insert images on backgrounds, on your header and on the sidebar.
• You can choose to show or unshow your blog title. Unshow, if your header/background image already contains your title.
• You can choose the size of the sidebar, the number of sidebars (1 or 2)
• It’s widget-ready, so arranging and rearranging your sidebar elements is hassle-free.
• You can choose to make the sidebar and the post body
• A pretty preview element let’s you undo mistakes effortlessly, and color scheming is a breeze
• When you’re done, all the elements of your theme are packed in a handy zip file that you can save in your computer and upload to your blog.

My only major concern with using this theme generator is the lay out. The elements of the page look completely disconnected from each other. It’s as if the header, sidebar and post body have a zone of their own. This might be ok to some people, but for people like me who want continuity among the blog elements, and need a compact-look for their blogs, this is a major turn off.

I tried resizing my header to “fit” the overall widths of the sidebar and the post body, and it was fine for a while (because I used a black background that masked the size flaws), but it still did not seem right.

Nonetheless, this is excellent for creating themes for friendster blogs and myspace. The templates (header.php etc.) are all individual elements that you can choose to upload to an existing design.

Have Fun!!!