Throughout recent times of visitng forums etc I have heard of smart pricing - this is where all of a sudden your value per click seems to go down - It didn’t really worry me as I was getting some decent values for clicks - sometimes $2 for a single click - and the average day left me with $5 or so in general. I always knew I was getting sometimes a minimal amount per click but this was balanced with occasional nicer valued click - I always assumed this was simply down to the keywords used on that page the ad was clicked + the ad the clicker chose to click on.

This particular site that earned a reasonable amount was pretty much the only site I had Adsense on. Around Christmas last year I had Adsense on one of my larger shopping sites - this gave a good amount of earnings though low CTR - but as it was Christmas there were a lot of visitors shopping so it didn’t matter - my best day was $60 across a couple of sites - averaging around $40 per day over the run up until Christmas.

After Christmas there was a huge drop which is what I anticipated - back down to $5 or so per day across the sites. I felt that Google Adsense was potentially jeopardising the integrity of my store - after all it doesn’t look too professional to have adverts on a store you intend to sell products from. With the benefits being so minimal I decided to remove the Adsense from the site all together and just leave it on the one site that seemed to do OK.

I didn’t give it much thought at the time but my advertising revenue actually increased - I put this down to me adding additional pages etc to the site with the Adsense still remaining.

Now bearing in mind I now have only Adsense on one site  with visitors only reaching around 30 a day -

Now I have another two sites that have around 600 visitors each per day. I’m thinking well why not stick some Adsense onto these - could generate some revenue.

I added some additional ad units to the other sites and optimised them as I saw fit.

2 days later my ad revenue has dropped by 50%  - yes I am still getting clicks from the newly added Adsense units but the CTR is much much lower. I am still getting the same number of clicks from the original site but they all now seem to be worth 10%  the value they used to be worth.

Could this be smart pricing? The general theory of smart pricing is that if you have two identical adverts on two different sites one with high CTR and one with a very low CTR - the lower CTR could be payed less as it is considered lesser performing. Is this being applied to my whole account due to low CTR on the high traffic sites?

When learning about optimising Google Adsense,  most say to use the full quantity of adverts allowed - this is 3 x content units and a link unit. but having these units will lower your overall CTR as each visitor will only have the potential of clicking one advert.

Google makes out on it’s blog that click through ratio (CTR) does not cause an effect to advertisers - does this mean publishers as well? but if so, how can this be the case.

Something very fishy is going on here and I feel it must be smart pricing.

So I am now considering removing all adverts from non performing site - Mainly the high traffic ones. Sites such as this very blog will naturally have low CTR as people are not looking to buy items they are looking for information - if my theory here is correct by having a site capable of decent CTR and putting Adsense on a site that has very low CTR I am making a substantial loss.

What do you think?

Firstly I run a couple of online businesses. These are sites that people can buy goods from us using a credit or debit card online via the site.

We all hear how credit card fraud is growing in the UK and US - This is where people either steal your card or clone your card to buy goods and services fraudulently.

Since the introduction of the chip and pin system the fraud in shops and restaurants has been greatly reduced - but us online retailers do not have these facilities to hand. And all the faraudsters who used to target our high street stores now come online as it’s easy pickings.

Just to give you an idea - some chump ordered about £4000 worth of goods on my site yesterday alone - It is down to me and our company to spot this is suspected fraud and prevent the goods from going out - if we do not we will be liable for the full amount.

So how do we protect against credit card fraud? Well we have a couple of tools. One is the AVS checks which check the address details of the card holder. This matches the numbers in the postcode and the number of the house - also the last three numbers printed on the back of the signature strip.

Ok so someone who has nicked your card has the last three numbers on the back of your card so not exactly helpful - chances are the person who nicked your card could find your address from the rest of your belogings they stole and simply loiter outside your house to collect the goods.

So we online retailers have to be so careful. but what pisses me off more than anything is the lack of support from any of the authorites.

Unless a crime has been committed - as in you send your goods out to the fraudster - the police are not interested. I have tipped them off today about this £4000 guy - I have told them the address they will be waiting at and their IP address of the transaction. being this is £4000 over a couple of addresses this could be a ring of credit card fraudsters - you would think they would have bothered to call back? Nope - no word. Why would they care?

The card owners - if fraud is reported ont heir card, the card company will amost certianly refund them immediately whilst they investigate. I was a victim of this a while back and my bank immediately reveresed the charges. Whilst the card owners are told to be vigilent - the chances are if their card is used they will get the money back straight away.

The banks - they don’t really mind - they give the customer their money and get onto the credit card company requesting a charge back - they then get their money back off the card company.

The Credit Card Company - they get contacted by the bank and immediately recall the money from the retailer - us - usually some months after the fraud has been committed - long after the fraudster has left leaving no traces so the police will will not do anything.

So no one cares as the only people to suffer are the retailers.

These credit card fraudsters may think they are hitting the big card companies for a small amount but they are taking down businesses. Let me tell you, if I lost £4000 from my company I would go bust - that is me and my family out of a home,  our staff out of jobs - all because of some F*ing shit who trys to exploit a shaky system.

The police need to act on this as soon as it is reported - not sit back and do nothing - this particular fraudster may not have gotten away with it on this occasion with my company but I’m certain, as he has not been caught, he will now move on to the next unsuspecting retailer with more stolen cards.

Bear in mind that the retailer is not the only loser here. In the long run the ease that this fraud can be committed will reverberate through to the card owner. If someone steals your card then the chances are they have stolen you wallet with photos, cash, drivers licence etc that are difficult if impossible to get back. More and more houses will be broken into to get credit cards out and more muggings and thefts will be carried out also.

To me, this problem is out of hand and something needs to be done and fast. I would guess that a minimum of 10% of all transactions are attempted fraud in my stores - this is too high.

Anyone else in a similar situation? Please share your comments.

The most popular method of making money from your blog is to input adsense into the page. When people click on an advert you get the money - this is pretty cool but the issue is, the clicks can be worth such a minimal amount - sometimes only $0.01 - When you consider that most blogs will need on average 50 vistiors per click.

This means you have to get a hell of a lot of visitors to make adsense work for you. Now there are exceptions to this - being that some keywords pay higher than others - generally these keywords are so popular though you will struggle to get your blog anywhere that people would find it to click on the advert in the first place. So you need to find a balance with the competition Vs the potential click value - this is where niche topics come into play.

A good niche is basically an area of  knowledge or information that people are interested in but is no over saturated. For example this blog is not in an ideal niche - I write it because I like to andn ot so much for money as  the competition for SEO and computers is huge - take a search on Google and you will see how many “make money online” blogs there are or how many SEO and computer blogs there are.

A niche here would be to pick one area that you can talk about and become an expert in your field - for example a niche in SEO might be link building or even anchor text - I doubt these would provide high paying keywords though!

You also have to consider the likelihood of people clicking adverts - if people are coming to look for wordpress themes for example - the chances are they are not looking to purchase anything - so they are unlikely to click an advert if it is selling something - on the other hand if you have a blog about a particular computer reviews then the chances are, if they read you review and see an advert for the said computer - they may click - this second example is more likely to become a more profitable blog.

Adsense can work for some, but in my opinion, for most, you will be lucky to ever make more than $100 per month unless you have several successful sites. Still - some of you may be happy with this kind of cash.

By far, the people who make the most money from their blogs and websites are the affiliate marketers. These are similar to adsense but generally you get paid per purchase. This can lead to a percentage of the sale commission. If you are successful in doing this your monthly income could be $xxxx ’s or more.

I will talk more about my current experiences with affiliate marketing next time but for now you may like to consider Market Leverage - this is a new program with some fantastic commission offers and referral opportunities.

Have you used Market leverage yet? And what has your experineces been do far?

Last year I enjoyed a decent amount of revenue from Adsense adverts - around Christmas time I was getting up to $50 a day in some instances which I thought was pretty cool - ok this didn’t last and I felt that the few dollars I was getting a day just wasn’t worth having the ads for.

I mean on a professional website offering goods for sale or services, people do not expect to see adsense on there. As my sites were Internet related - everyone know what adsense is. It kind of discredits the site and you never know how much business just moves onto someone else because of you wanting to earn a couple of dollars.

Then the other night I got to thinking - If I am getting hits to my sites from other countries, that my services cannot be bought or used by, then wouldn’t it be great to be able to show the adverts to them and not to my uk customers. This way if someone visits the site, sees that it does not cater for them, a nice relevant advert could well be the next logical step in their path.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of this before - I have been missing out on 8 months of ad revenue from these visitors - that were coming to my site and leaving again as it wasn’t what they were looking for.

How could i go about doing this?

Well after a little searching I found openx which is an ad management solutions. It allows you to totally manage your adverts,  who you show them to, how many times they are shown, which countries they are shown to and much more.

This is an internet based package that you install on your web server and it’s pretty easy to set up and get started. There are loads of features to really make the most out of your ad campaign - but for me, the fact I could use geotargeting was great.

No if UK visitors go to my site they see no adverts - it is an advert free site. Any other countries do get a small amount of advertising!

Let’s see how it work - Openx is really a great tool for any of you webmasters -  go check it out.

As I work a lot on websites, seeing the html that is lying behind a website can be hard - especially if the table is layed out with tables rather than CSS.

This plugin will allow you to easily see the outlines of the tables, table cells on the actual site making htese things much easier to see.

Also there are many other useful functions such as seeing CSS, validating code and resizing the display to check for differencs in resolutions.

If you manage webpages in any way then I think this toolbar really could assist you in your web development - check it out by going to tools then addons within firefox and then search on the Web developer toolbar and you should find it. It comes with good reviews.

I have since remove this option and now anyone will be nofollow although the following rules applies:

Registered users will be do follow immediately

non registered users will become dofollow after 2 days from posting

The trouble seems to be that unless you know some basics of programming then it is very difficult to get the help you need as most online tutorials, or books assume that you have a basic understanding of it.

2 years ago I started a couple of websites with no knowledge of programming.  It was PHP based and I used a package that was free to get going. All you had to do was install the script and you then had a fully functional site with no knowledge.

This script is great to modify but with no PHP knowledge it was impossible.

There seems to be thousands of people that understand PHP in the world. What do thy have that I do not - I do not consider myself to be that unintelligent - why can they learn and not me.

I believe that the hardest part of learning anything like this on your own is getting started. Sure the tutorials online do help but really only to learn how to write “Hello World” on a page - nothing useful.

Two years on and I hope that I have got over the initial hurdle. I can now write the most basic of queries within PHP and get my sites to display what I want - There is so much I do not understand and I cannot see how I will ever understand without having someone there that I can constantly ask questions.

If any readers here can help or advise how I should go about learning PHP or any other programming language that may be better then I would be most interested to hear.

Thankfully on the Internet there are a few helpful people who are willing to share their skill of PHP and MySQL.

You can use this code in phpmyadmin or any other database manager

UPDATE table name SET Table Field = replace(table field,"string to find","string to replace")

On of the things that I found really helpful was how to search for a specific string within a database and replace that string. There are hundreds of reasons that you may wish to do this but an example is this:

Say within your site you are optimising you product pages and you want to ensure you internal linking structure points your users to the correct pages. You could search for every instance of ” computer components ” and make it link to the relevant page. This is great fro SEO purposes.

Of course there are other reasons why you may use it, perhaps you want to add a style or class to every table. This is made easy with search and replace.

The computer itself worked fine - no issues other than a bit slow (most people that I tend to visit do have slow computers). The issue came about as soon as the router was turned on to get internet access. within a couple of seconds of turning the router on the computer restarted.

When I first received the call I assumed that most likely it was a power supply issue, the router was connected via USB and therefore when turned on could be putting a drain on a dodgy supply. This was not the case.

The first thing I did was to untick automatically restart box in the startup and recovery section. Turning on the router again the problem immediately occurered except for this time I got the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) with an error message pointing to the NDIS.sys file.

I then disabled all start up items from the computer and tried again, same thing - within a few seconds the computer gave the BSoD error.

I thne changed the router to use the standard ethernet cavle  - within moments the same error message. I was at this point thinking that maybe the router was at fault.

Plugged the router into my laptop and bingo - all was working fine so it was not the router.

The computer system being used was an XP machine with service pack 2. All seemed completely normal with the machine until I plugged the router in.

Narrowing the problem down, checking on forums, there was definitely some kind of network issue going on with this machine. Every time I tried a new thing, the computer would give the BSoD error and I would have to wait ages for the machine to reboot back up again. Not too impressive.

At the point of finally giving up and going for afull reformat and restore I decided to uninstall AVG insternet security. Also at the same time I noticed AVG spyware protection was there. I removed both.

This solved the issue - quite how or why the computer didn’t like AVG so much I do not know - I assume perhaps a corrumpetd update or something as resinstalling the software, the computer works great.

If you have a similar issue yourself then I would reccomend that you remove any programs that run with your computer. Bear in mind that  I disabled AVG from the startup - the error still occurred without AVG running. Only a total uninstall solved it.

I would liek to point out that I certainly have nothing against AVG whatsoever. I think its a gret piece of software and I personally use their virus protection on my home machines.

A few people have struggled to download it - I have, within the last few minutes got a copy from here:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.0/win32/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%203.0.exe

Hopefully you will have the same luck!