WordPress 3.0 has been released, and is a nice upgrade. So far I have seen that it looks better (admin page) and has a whole slew of new features. It also has retired the kubrick theme and replaced it with Twenty Ten. I really liked the presentation of the Twenty Ten theme, so I am now using it. Give me a couple of days to work out kinks, integrate adsense (I have to use ads sorry!), and add my personal touches. If you have not already upgraded to WordPress 3.0, please do so asap, all it takes it the click of one button.
Adsense
My thoughts on WP Robot
Yesterday I saw an ad on my blog for Wp Robot. I had faintly remembered comming accross it before. So without clicking on the ad, I went to the official homepage. I quickly read about it and figured out it is a plugin that auto blogs. I didn’t really know what it meant by that so I setup a test blog on my other domain. After installing it I realized that what WP Robot does is basically copy content (Yahoo answers, Clickbank, eBay, Flickr, Amazon, Youtube) from around the web and automagically (I think that word is funny) and post it on your blog. The point of it is to create a great amount of content on your page which will draw in users, earning you money, from advertising and affiliate linking. I only tried the demo and thought about buying the $140 full suite, however I think it is a terrible thing to do. The thought of the software is actually cool, however stealing content from the internet and posting it to make money is morraly wrong. I’ve seen sites that setup only to do this, and even found ones that steal my content. As a webmaster that makes me angry, so why should I do it to other people? I shouldn’t and no one else should for that matter. I would rather make less money from my blog with quality content than make lots of money with stolen content. However some people have different view points.
Ps. The reason I setup this blog was not to make money (that is only a perk), the reason was to share information and my love for the internet and seeing how websites work (frontend and backend).
Infolinks in-text advertising Review
So I have been using infolinks for one month and one day. The way I found out about this in-text advertising website was actually from my google adsense ads. I found an ad that said get paid better than adsense. So I copied the code into my address bar and figured out the website without clicking on the link (Clicking on your own ads is Against Google TOS). I signed up and was approved within a day or two. It was also easy to incorporate into my wordpress blog using HeHeHunter’s Infolinks WordPress Plugin. So far so good. For the first couple of days I made on average a little more than google adsense. However lately after my rework of my website I have found that I am making more from adsense.
I have a couple of thoughts on how infolinks could improve their ads, which in return will increase revenue for all infolinks publishers. First of all since google adsense is the most commonly known online advertising platform, it is also the most blocked ads (adblock, etc). So with that said users on my site get to see infolinks more than adsense. Which means adsense is earning me more money relatively speaking. What I believe is behind this is the generic look to their ads. Which makes me feel that it’s useless to click on these ads (see picture below). Most of the time that I have encountered infolinks ads they point to info.com which I think should be improved. Scratch that out, now its starting to be very different and various different ads are showing yay! With that said I can not complain much for a company that is paying me. I hope this review helps you if you are deciding to use infolinks in conjunction with adsense(Which is not against Google TOS), and helps infolinks figure out how to improve their ads, both to increase their own revenue as well as publishers. PS. I have not made enough money from infolinks to receive payments yet. Finally you can easily contact infolinks if you have questions or comments, as they have been prompt with me.
Google pays me…
While browsing the interwebs today, I came across this ad that said google pays me $137 an hour. That’s great I’m really happy for the guy, but on the right side it says a monthly income of $5,000 dollars? Wouldn’t you at least do the math before posting one of those get rich quick ads? Google doesn’t pay per hour and even if that is his average there is around 720 hours in a month, so basically this is a fail! The funny part is that later on, I found another ad by him that said $150 an hour. So I guess his strategy is throw out random numbers and hope it works. I found this too funny so I had to post.
