From the monthly archives:

January 2008

Design Virus?

January 30, 2008

Google thinks that searching for web pages with the word “design” in the title means you have a virus
There are some “advanced” Google searches that web developers and search engine experts often use to get a better picture of the true competition for various keywords. One of these is using intitle: to find out how [...]

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Don’t Do Lame

January 23, 2008

In a discussion about a site’s target demographic and marketing approach, someone on a webmastering forum wrote, “Sending 50 troops against an army of 5,000 is a waste of 50 troops.”
That line has stuck with me for a couple of weeks now, popping into my head at odd and random moments.
I don’t know how many [...]

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Selling Cafe Press Products

January 21, 2008

In my continuing efforts to expand the diversity of my income from various sources, I have just set up a couple of Cafe Press stores: St. Patrick’s Day t-shirts for Masons and St. Patrick’s Day t-shirts for Shriners. I’m promoting these on the Masonic Memorabilia site, which is getting a surprising amount of organic [...]

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The Fatal Flaw(s) in YPN

January 17, 2008

Yahoo’s “YPN” (for Yahoo Publisher Network) is Yahoo’s version of AdSense: Publishers sign up for the program and place special code on their website, which then serves up ads from Yahoo’s PPC advertisers who choose to participate in the “content network.” The publisher gets paid by YPN when site visitors click on the ads.
I’m not [...]

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Commission Junction’s "Program Performance"

January 16, 2008

Last month I started adding eBay listings to some of my web sites, and since then I’ve seen an increase in the number and frequency of my commissions from Commission Junction. I’m not earning very much from CJ; I still make a lot more from AdSense. But it’s nice seeing those commissions come in on [...]

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AdSense Reports Lose Links

January 16, 2008

Last month, Google made some change in its AdSense reporting interface that randomized the “top channels” listing in the main AdSense overview page, instead of listing them in order of top earning channels. They took something like a month to fix it.
But now that they’ve fixed it, they’ve broken something else. Two something elses, apparently.
First, [...]

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Amazon vs. France

January 15, 2008

Amazon.com has decided to pay fines worth $1,500 day rather than comply with a court order prohibiting the company from offering free shipping to its customers in France.
According to the article at the International Herald Tribune, the French law prohibits discounting books by more than 5 percent (and Amazon’s free shipment counts as a discount). [...]

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Time Out: It’s Not Just For Kids

January 14, 2008

Doing affiliate marketing through Commission Junction’s affiliate network has made me a little bit of money. Nothing to write home about, but enough that I can see the potential.
Commission Junction is one of the biggest and best-known (if not the biggest and best-known) of the affiliate networks out there.
So I just don’t understand why [...]

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A GPS Chartplotter For My Car

January 13, 2008

For Christmas, my in-laws gave me a automotive GPS for my car. I’ve used a number of different marine GPS chartplotters on boats — and I just love them — but I had never even thought about getting one for my car.
It turns out this was a very cool, and very thoughtful, gift. This handy [...]

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Boaters in January

January 12, 2008

My husband and I are lucky enough to live in sunny southwest Florida, where we can go out in our kayaks, our Boston Whaler, or our sailboat year-round, including January. We were just out sailing in Charlotte Harbor in the Corsair F-27 last Sunday. In shorts and shirt sleeves. It can get cold here, sometimes [...]

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